Trust is essential when it comes to the relationship between a person and their smartphone. While cell phone functionality and design may enhance the user experience, protection is fundamental and foundational to our relationship with our cell phones. There are multiple ways to develop trust around the security abilities that a device provides and continue to invest in verifiable methods to do just that.

Pixel 4a ioXt certification

Today we are happy to declare that the Pixel 4/4 XL and the newly launched Cote 4a would be the first Android smartphones to undergo ioXt certification contrary to the Android os Profile.

The Internet associated with Secure Things Alliance (ioXt) manages securities compliance assessment program with regard to connected devices. ioXt offers over 200 members throughout various industries, including Search engines, Amazon, Facebook, T-Mobile, Comcast offers, Zigbee Alliance, Z-Wave Connections, Legrand, Resideo, Schneider Electrical, and many others. With so many companies included, ioXt covers a wide range of system types, including smart illumination, smart speakers, webcams, in addition to Android smartphones.

The core concentrate of the ioXt is “to arranged security standards that provide security, upgradability and transparency to the market and straight into the hands of consumers. ” This is accomplished by assessing products against a baseline set of needs and depending on publicly available evidence. The aim of ioXt’s approach is to allow users, enterprises, regulators, along with other stakeholders to understand the security within connected products to drive much better awareness towards how these items are protecting the security and even privacy of users.

ioXt’s primary security requirements are customized for product classes, as well as the ioXt Android Profile enables smartphone manufacturers in order to differentiate security capabilities, which includes biometric authentication strength, safety update frequency, length of safety measures support lifetime commitment, vulnerability disclosure program quality, and preloaded app risk minimization.

We believe that using a widely known industry consortium standard for Nullement certification provides increased rely upon the security claims we create to our users. NCC Group has published a good audit report that can be down loaded right here . The report files the evaluation of Pixel four / 4 XL and Pixel 4a against the ioXt Android User profile.

Security by Default is one of the most important criteria utilized in the ioXt Android user profile. Security by Default rates gadgets by cumulatively scoring the danger for all preloads on a specific device. For this particular dimension, we worked with a group of university experts from your University of Cambridge, College of Strathclyde, and Johannes Kepler University in Linz, who created a formula that will considers the risk of platform authorized apps, pregranted permissions upon preloaded apps, and applications communicating using cleartext visitors.

Screenshot of the presentation of the Android Device Security Data source at the Android Protection Symposium 2020

In partnership with those teams, Yahoo created Uraniborg , an open resource tool that collects required attributes from the device and operates it through this method to come up with a raw rating. NCC Group leveraged Uraniborg to conduct the evaluation for the ioXt Security automatically category.

As part of our ongoing accreditation efforts, we look forward to posting future Pixel smartphones with the ioXt standard, and we motivate the Android device environment to participate in similar openness efforts for their devices.

Acknowledgements: This post leveraged efforts from Sudhi Herle, Billy Lau and Sam Schumacher

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