Panasonic develops solution to protect personal data on Android smartphones

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Panasonic has announced the development of a new solution to protect personal data such as photos, videos, documents and emailsnstored on Android smartphones. Developed in collaboration with Massachusetts-based Red Bend Software, this solution enables to prevent leakage of personal data from lost smartphones or unintended behavior of downloaded applications.

As smartphones are increasingly used to perform many tasks, including photo and video shooting and e-mailing, a lot of personal data have come to be stored in smartphones today. Therefore, the loss of a smartphone can lead to the risk of leaking personal information.

In addition, a variety of networkable-applications are now available, and smartphone users can download them to access cloud-based services. On the other hand, these applications can present security risks, such as an unintended transfer of information and data on the smartphone via the network.

In the case of traditional phones such as feature phones, terminal manufacturers have incorporated a protection mechanism called “secret mode” or “privacy mode” in their phones by developing dedicated application software and dedicated content filenformats as a set. However, with the spread of smartphones, application software is now developed by third-parties in an open environment. This made it difficult to realize personal content protection with a set of dedicated application software andndedicated content file formats in an open environment like Android, since a variety of applications freely developed by third-parties started to be downloaded and executed.

In the new solution, a new mechanism was constructed to configure a folder to protect and store personal data. This protected area inside the smartphone is isolated from the Android platform, using a virtual machine. This enables to control access to the folder containing the personal contents via the menu on the smartphone and application software on Android. Therefore, the solution will enable to protect the personal contents by combining with personal authentication such as the use of passwords or an IC card.