14 DAY TRIAL // BlackBerry published a few articles in the past that explain its PRIV security and privacy features, but the Canadian company wants to make sure that customers looking for such features won't have any regrets when buying its first Android smartphone.
Since the smartphone has just been made available on the market, we can't tell whether or not this is the most secure Android smartphone, but assume BlackBerry did a good job patching up some of the biggest holes in Android's security.
More importantly, BlackBerry will continue to improve Android with monthly security updates that will contain fixes for issues found by Google, as well as additional features and enhancements.
Although the PRIV comes with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop operating system right out of the box, BlackBerry confirmed the smartphone would receive an Android 6.0 Marshmallow update next year.
Multiple additional improvements will be included in Marshmallow
According to BlackBerry, even though Marshmallow brings a large amount of security enhancements, the Canadian company plans to include numerous additional improvements independent of the Android version number.
For tech-savvies, here are some examples of additional improvements that might be included in next updates for BlackBerry PRIV:
- Supply chain security for hardware root of trust. That means we “sign” all of our hardware with digital keys at the manufacturing level to ensure device integrity; - Improvements to the Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) security technique that are not in Android L or M and make it far more difficult for malware – even something like Stagefright; - to exploit Android software bugs; - Improvements to the SELinux mandatory access control policy system not in L or M; - The Pathtrust utility, which goes above L or M in ensuring that untrusted code cannot be introduced into the system dynamically via malware.”
Business users will be getting even more security and privacy features in the next major updates for BlackBerry PRIV. So there you have it, folks, if you're still undecided due to security concerns, BlackBerry's latest statement should convince your that PRIV is clearly a solid device.