Google Smart phones become safer thanks to the YAASE System
The innovative system is called YAASE (Yet Another Android Security Extention) and, by working at the Android operating system level, it guarantees the protection of personal contacts, messages, pictures, videos, etc. from undesirable access, without compromising performance or creating any system conflicts. Data security has become one of the major issues and requirements of new mobile phones. Thanks to Google Smartphone, users can access the Android Market and customize their phones with free third-party applications for weather, games, contact management, etc. At the same time however, people risk exposing their mobile to significant threats. Each application may include malware, or in other words, be malicious and without the mobile user’s authorization, spread on the Web private data via Google's photo, calendar and contact sharing tools. For instance, when users decide to install a weather application and a contact management application, the Android standard security system requires Internet and GPS access for the first application and the address book info access for the second one. The two applications may contain malware and start exchanging information. The weather application could, in fact, provide a backdoor (hidden door) service to allow the network access and thus the contact management application may use this service to share data on the net. All this without the Android system or user’s ability to block the communication flow. To solve this problem, two researchers, Giovanni Russello from the telecommunication research center CREATE-NET, directed by prof. Imrich Chlamtac, and Bruno Crispo, from the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science of Trento, created the YAASE system to control the correct use of data by Android applications. "YAASE - said dr. Russello - works on several levels. First, it assigns a label to every piece of data and then it associates each application with the data label which can be allowed access. Therefore, if the contact management application tries to send data trough the hidden door of the weather application, YAASE will block this interaction because the weather application was not properly associated with the label “contacts”. It took just one month to design and develop the YAASE system: “Research and innovation – continued Russello – must be concrete. They must also provide an immediate answer to new needs”. By the end of September YAASE system will be available online for anyone who wants to protect their smartphone and their data from malware. "We hope – concluded Dr. Crispo - that Google will also adopt more advanced security solutions than what is current available with the Android”.
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