Samsung, Sectra team up to create secure smartphones for governments

PanARMENIAN.Net - Sectra Communications is working with Samsung Electronics to create smartphones secure enough to carry government secrets, PCWorld reports.

Another company, Secusmart, has won over several government organizations in recent years with a BlackBerry smartphone equipped with a microSD encryption module. The combination, costing around €2,000 (US$2,250), is approved by the German government to carry Restricted-level voice and data traffic. Restricted is one of the lowest ratings for government secrets.

Sectra and Secusmart both use additional hardware in the form of a microSD card to assist in the encryption process and to protect encryption keys. While Secusmart's system will encrypt calls and data stored on the phone, Sectra's encrypts only voice traffic and text messages, PCWorld says.

There are other government-approved secure phones, such as the Teorem from Thales or one from Sectra itself rated to carry calls up to the "Secret" level, but these are dumb feature phones that can only make calls. The difficulty in obtaining government security approval for smartphones is that encrypting traffic is only part of the problem: The phones also need to prevent eavesdropping on that traffic before it is encrypted.

That's why Sectra is working with Samsung on Tiger/R: It builds on the phone maker's Knox mobile management system for Android phones, which allows systems administrators to block the installation of untrustworthy or outright malicious apps that might compromise a device's security.