Mobile phone apps have been in the news a lot lately, often for the wrong reasons. With the new jailbreak tool on the iPhone and the wallpaper app that was – wrongfully – thought to send data to China without user permission, lots of people have become concerned with the state of security on their phone. When it comes down to the crunch, it is interesting to see which smartphone has the upper hand in terms of data security?
Most of the major smartphone platforms have had to face up to their share of security issues, with the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry all recently in the news for different reasons. While all of these platforms are far from perfect, a recent study by Lookout has shown that the Android platform may have the upper hand when it comes to data safety.
The Android platform is Linux based, which has a number of implications as to how individual applications are stored and read by the operating system. Each app runs in a separate ‘silo’, making it much harder for other apps to read and write data and code without user permission. Each app comes with individual identifiers and permission data that restricts potential security problems by isolating individual components.
In contrast to Android apps that can only access data with explicit user permission, iPhone apps are more easily able to access system wide resources and data without the user even realising. A recent study from Lookout has shown that apps on an Android phone are much less likely to access user data and contact lists that similar apps on an iPhone, at a ratio of almost two to one.
While the recent jailbreaking of the iPhone is far from a disaster from a user’s point of view, it does go to show how the parental attitude of the Apple corporation is no better at handling security breaches than the much more open approach at Android. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when platforms are hacked, and still get a lot of joy from running homebrew software on my Nintendo DSi.
Basically, open platforms – whether wanted or not by developers – are good for the evolution of both technology and humanity. I find it interesting how Apple, with full control over all the applications in their marketplace, have been shown as less secure than other organisations, who engineer control at a lower level and therefore do not need to impose it directly on the marketplace.
