Google now contents that Android is as secure as Apple’s iOS which powers iPhones and iPads. Android’s head of security Adrian Ludwig touted Android’s secure nature at the O’Reilly security conference in New York City on where he spoke at great length about the security that the new Google Pixel smartphone provided.
“For almost all threat models…they are nearly identical in terms of their platform-level capabilities,” he said. “In the long term, the open ecosystem of Android is going to put it in a much better place,” claimed Ludwig.
Ludwig also touted Google’s Safety Net which scans through 400 million devices every day and 6 billion apps per day. According to Ludwig this means that less than 1 percent Android devices have malware on them.
“At this point we still don’t have any confirmed instances of exploitation in the wild,” he said talking about the StageFright malware issue, which he believed was blown out of proportion.
Ludwig believed there was room for improvement especially when it comes down to Android updates. He believes Google and its carrier and smartphone OEM partners can better collaborate to provide timely updates especially when they are related to security patches.
As in the US, updates are also vetted by the carriers and deployed by them, often phones don’t get updated for months after.
Ludwig also believed that Android is so secure as a platform that it doesn’t suffer any of the afflictions that have plagued dominant operating systems like Windows.
“Mass exploitation is something that I’m not expecting that we’re going to see at any point in the ecosystem.
