New app developed to prevent data abuse on web-enabled mobile phones, tablets

Washington, July 6 (ANI): Researchers have developed a new application that will prevent mobile applications on web-enabled mobile phones and tablet computers to forward personal data to a third party.

Computer scientists from Saarbrucken, Germany, have developed a new app called 'SRT AppGuard'.

The new app is focused on Android. It is the most common operating system for smartphones and tablet computers.

Developed by the Google software group, the application freely available operating system is used by several mobile phone manufacturers, and since November 2011 is activated daily on more than 700,000 devices.

The app is able to block suspicious requests or change them so they cannot do any harm.

"Thus, we can also prevent the use of known security vulnerabilities of the respective apps or Android operating system," adds Professor Michael Backes, who manages the Center for IT-Security, Privacy and Accountability at Saarland University, said.

"This possibility is very important if the manufacturer cannot provide security fixes in time," the professor said.

The app "SRT AppGuard" based on their approach determines, for every application installed on a smartphone, what it accesses, and shows this information to the user.

The researchers have already published the app on the platform "Google Play".

For their approach, the Saarbrucken researchers use the fact that the Android apps work in a so-called virtual machine, which is written in the computer language Java.

Therefore the apps are saved on the smartphone as executable "bytecode" after installation. (ANI)