Trustonic is not a name that most smartphone users will have heard before but the company now provides the security platform for nine of the top ten Android handset manufacturers. That’s following announcements from last week which showed that the company has now struck deals with both OPPO and Vivo on February 22 and February 23, respectively. The new partnership builds on an already staggering network of 1.5 billion devices protected under the company’s Trustonic Secure Platform (TSP), according to Trustonic. Meanwhile, OPPO and Vivo are both massively successful OEMs. In fact, OPPO is considered the world’s fourth-largest mobile manufacturer. So the addition of these two companies is going to add substantially to Trustonic adoption overall.
With regard to the platform itself, TSP is comprised of several parts but the simplest explanation is that it provides protection to key aspects of the software environment by placing them on a separate, highly-secured partition away from the rest of the operating system. That includes a Trusted Execution Environment. Primarily, and more specifically, the overall platform prevents fraudulent use or cloning of the device’s trusted identity in order to prevent software-based threats to advanced device security measures. That includes device encryption, biometrics authentication, and other security measures such as the PIN entry required in addition to biometrics when a device is booted up. The measures are built into the trusted execution environment alongside a hardware-based Root of Trust in order to achieve that. A similar standard is also applicable to mobile payment methods and other apps available to smartphone users and is included the company’s TSP offering.
That doesn’t necessarily mean 100-percent security and it is ultimately up to the OEM to use the platform appropriately – as plenty of vulnerabilities and other bugs have proven over the past year. However, it does make compromising the underlying security of a device a lot more difficult to accomplish, which is a big bolster to keeping privacy at the forefront. Beyond that, taking advantage of partnerships to implement that type of security takes quite a bit of strain off of the OEMs themselves, allowing them to focus on making great smartphone experiences.