Samsung’s head of security team explains how the company keeps Galaxy devices safe

You may have caught news of the Pegasus spyware infecting the phones of politicians, journalists and activists. Mobile security is more important than ever, but it’s a tall order. Dr. Seungwon Shin, vice president and head of the security team, Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics, wrote an editorial in which he goes into detail on how Samsung Galaxy devices are protected from new threats.

Dr. Shin led security innovations in the Galaxy ecosystem, including secure AP development and Samsung Knox Vault. He is a member of the INTERPOL DarkNet working group and president of the FIDO Korea working group.

Dr. Seungwon Shin is the vice president and head of the security team, MX Business at Samsung Electronics

“By now you are probably thinking that you are fine, because you are sensible. But there are many common misconceptions about security “, writes Dr. Shin. One example it gives is not opening suspicious email attachments – that’s not enough as there are so-called “zero click” attacks.

This is how Pegasus worked by exploiting a weakness in a popular messaging system. “Zero-click” means that simply receiving the malicious message is enough to compromise the security of the phone.

Dr. Shin promotes the open source nature of Android as an advantage: it allows everyone to inspect the code and discover vulnerabilities. Samsung operates the Mobile Security Rewards program, which has awarded prizes worth more than $ 3.5 million to academics and white hat hackers who have helped improve Android security.

The company also runs an incident response and management team, which monitors emerging threats and uses machine learning to predict future threats.

The software isn’t enough, though, so Samsung integrates security into the hardware of Galaxy devices as well. The most recent development on this front is the Knox Vault, which combines a Secure Processor with a Secure Memory Chip, which keeps sensitive information separate from the rest of the device.

This allows Samsung Knox to block services like Samsung Pay and Samsung Pass as soon as it detects a serious security risk. The Secure Memory Chip contains PINs, passwords, biometric data, digital certificates, cryptographic keys, and so on.