With uprising Spy mercenaries and other targeted threats, technological giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft, they spent the last few years, trying to find out how to protect the digital life of their most endangered, sensitive users around the world. On mobile devices, the launch of iOS Apple lock mode in 2022 was one of the coordinated efforts to lose irrelevant functionality in favor of maximum security-compromise, which most users would not like to do, but it can be very worth for public form, activists, journalist or dissident under everyday control and threat to the attack. Over the years, Google offers a program of a similar demographic group called Advanced Protection, which focuses on adding additional layers of monitoring and security to the Google account of sensitive users, the basic element of the digital life of many people who can be destructive if they are at risk. Now Google is expanding advanced protection with a function package for Android 16.
The company announced on Tuesday Advanced protection mode For phones with the latest version of Android. At the base of the mode, it is designed around imposing mighty safety settings on all applications and services on the silo data as much as possible and reduce interactions with unsecured internet services and previously underestimated people. Advanced android protection is to be as useful and malleable as possible, based on the rapidly developing possibilities of scanning artificial intelligence on the device to ensure monitoring and alerts without having to completely eliminate the function. Despite this, the mode imposes restrictions that cannot be turned off, such as blocking phones from connecting with historical 2G data networks and turning off the JavaScript Chrome optimizer, which can change or break some network functions in some pages.
“There are two classes that we use to defend the user. One of them is, of course, the system, so you try to close things, prevent many forms of attacks,” says Dave Kleidermacher, vice president of engineering on Android’s security and privacy. “But two are that you can’t always prevent any attack. But if you can detect that you have been violated, you can take some repair. In consumer safety on a mobile phone, it was never possible to detect, so this is one of the great things we did here.”
This ability to monitor and detect, known as recording of burglary, uses the section encryption to the end to the non -defective storage of dailies from the cloud device, so that Google’s access or any page except you, but also in a form that cannot be removed or modified, even if your Google device and account are violations.
Thanks to the kindness of Google
System recording and monitoring tools are common on laptops and desktop computers – not to mention in IT Enterprise environments – but offering opportunities for consumers on mobile devices is more unusual. As in the case of any scheme that downloads data from the device and places it in the cloud, the system introduces a novel risk, but Google and Google Cloud Services are already launching many encrypted platforms for users, and Kleidermacher notes that the possibility of creating irremunable diaries that cannot be manipulated or removed by sophisticated attackers.
“The main innovation here is the mechanism of audit journal to detect a compromise, which is actually resistant to manipulation of devices,” he says. “It brings a consumer to detect burglaries. So if you suspect the problem as a consumer and you are not sure, you can pull the logs out of the cloud. You can share them with a safety expert, you can share them with a non -governmental organization, and you can use analysis tools.”
Another function that is enabled by default and cannot be turned off in advanced protection is the extension of the android memory (MTE) memory. The function that debuted in the Pixel Google line and begins to be taken in processors on other devices, is a protection of hardware security related to how the system manages its memory. If the attacker tries to apply the vulnerability, such as the so -called buffer overflow, MTE will cause a process to fail, stopping the attack on his tracks. Memory damage errors are a common tool used by hackers, so castraating the entire class of gaps in security significantly hinders the attack of the device.