Finnish companies join forces to build secure OS for smartphones and tablets

Finnish companies Jolla and SSH Communications Security are counting on their European origins to help sell a secure mobile operating system they are co-developing.

The need for more secure mobile communications has been apparent ever since former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden made his revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) snooping.

SSH is best known for the Secure Shell encrypted communications protocol invented by the company’s founder Tatu Ylönen. Jolla, founded in 2011 by a group of former Nokia employees, sells a smartphone running its open Sailfish OS, and will start shipping its first tablet running the OS next quarter.

Their secure OS will be based on a hardened version of Sailfish, and use SSH’s encryption and key management platform, the companies announced at Mobile World Congress on Monday. They offered few details of the OS’s functionality and development schedule, but expect development work to be made much easier by Sailfish’s Linux roots, according to Mika Lauhde, vice president of government relations and business development at SSH.

The resulting products will be aimed at government officials and corporations that need secure mobile devices and communication. But the goal is also to make the products affordable enough for consumers, the companies said.

An important part of Jolla’s pitch is that it isn’t a big U.S. vendor building an ecosystem to lock users in. The company has also taken a pro-privacy stance, and said that it isn’t selling its customer data to third parties.

Jolla and SSH weren’t the only two European companies talking about secure smartphones at Mobile World Congress. Swiss company Silent Circle, which makes theBlackPhone, plans to launch a new smartphone and tablet along with enterprise messaging software later this year, it announced. The company’s devices run PrivatOS, which is based on a hardened version of Android.

Silent Circle cited a string of high-profile attacks, including last year’s hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment, as reason why companies should start using its products and services.

Comments

Qualcomm teases Snapdragon 820 while launching Sense ID fingerprint scanner

Qualcomm has announced a new fingerprint scanner destined for smartphones, called Sense ID , which uses ultrasonic sound waves to map the surface of your finger. Previous methods of fingerprint recognition used high-resolution capacitive sensors, but switching to ultrasonic sensors has a number of benefits. Firstly, these types of sensors are more accurate than their capacitive counterparts, as they're able to recognize the pores and ridges on your finger for increased security. They're also not as susceptible to moisture as previous sensors, and can work through glass, sapphire, plastic and even metal. Sense ID sensors will be compatible initially with Snapdragon 810 and 425 SoCs, although you'll eventually see them supported across the entire range of Snapdragon 400, 600 and 800 series SoCs. As well as launching Sense ID, Qualcomm has teased their upcoming flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 820 . Qualcomm has designed their own 64-bit capable ARMv8 cores for this SoC...

First Take: Back to the future — Nasdaq 5000 circa 2015

The once-deflated Nasdaq has fully reflated. For the past 15 years, chatter about Nasdaq 5000 was mainly in the past tense, a historical remnant of the dot-com stock bubble era. But today, for the first time since March 2000, the Nasdaq composite — powered by Apple, the world's most valuable company and maker of the iPhone, and a fresh wave of innovation in social media, digital technology and biotech — is back above 5000 and very much alive in the current events debate. Way back when, on March 9, 2000, when the Internet was in diapers and investors were betting that the World Wide Web would be a moneymaking investment of epic proportions, the Nasdaq and its army of newly minted dot-com stocks skyrocketed to its first close above 5000, up an eye-popping 111% from a year earlier. At the time, "Nasdaq 5000" elicited a 1969 "man on the moon"-type awe from investors ranging from Wall Street titans to taxi drivers and hairdressers who viewed "Net stocks...

GOOGLE IS PLANNING TO OFFER ITS OWN CELLULAR DATA NETWORK

BY DANIELLE HOWE Move on over, traditional phone plans. Following weeks of rumors that it would introduce its own cell-data network, Google confirmed reports that it will be indeed taking on the endeavor. The search-engine giant made the announcement at the wireless show in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday that it will sell data plans for smartphones and tablets in the next coming months. It hasn’t been revealed which wireless carrier would be hosting the Google service, but various reports suggest that Sprint and T-Mobile are the frontrunners. The move comes as a game changer for the wireless network market, though Google insists that its plan is not to become a huge competitor in that field. “We don’t intend to be a network operator at scale,” said Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of products. “Our goal here is to drive a set of innovations which we think the ecosystem should evolve and hopefully will get traction.” The decision co...

News420

Search This Blog