Infosecurity.Com - A team of researchers at North Carolina State University have developed software that helps Android smartphone users prevent their personal information from being stolen by hackers.
Known as TISSA – short for Taming Information-Stealing Smartphone Applications – the software will be formally unveiled in June of this year.
According to Dr. Xuxian Jiang, the assistant professor of computing at NC State, and the co-author of a research paper on the software, there are a lot of concerns about potential leaks of personal information from smartphones.
"We have developed software that creates a privacy mode for Android systems, giving users flexible control over what personal information is available to various applications", he said.
Dr. Jiang added that the Android software works by creating a privacy settings manager that allows users to customized the level of information each smartphone application can access.
These settings, he explained, can be adjusted any time that the relevant applications are being run – not just when the applications are installed.
The TISSA prototype includes four possible privacy settings for each application. These settings are Trusted, Anonymized, Bogus and Empty.
If an application is listed as Trusted, TISSA does not impose additional information access restrictions. If the user selects Anonymized, the app provides the application with generalized information that allows the application to run, without providing access to detailed personal information. Read More
