Sunday, May 8, 2011

Software to Secure Android

A new software solution for the Android platform promises to prevent malicious programs from stealing personal information from users' phones.

With built-in security levels for each program, Android will do better in protecting personal information from hackers. Android's openness and the rapidly growing popularity has attracted some unwelcome attention in the form of hackers.

In order to better secure personal data, a group of researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a software called Taming Information-Stealing Smartphone Applications--Tissa. The software provides the card user more control over what information is distributed to third parties and might, the researchers can easily be adapted as necessary. It will still have to compete with more established solutions such as F-Secure Mobile Security.

The verification that takes place both when downloading and using third-party applications are made ​​via four different levels: trusted, anonymized, bogus and empty. Ratings range from completely trusted not to disclose any information to a given program.

For the best possible dissemination thinks researchers can now contact Google with the hope that they bake into the solution directly in Android through an automatic so-called ota-update. The software is also said to be ported to other mobile operating systems such as Apple's IOS.