Companies show initiative when it comes to Android

Product

March 29, 2011

You can't go anywhere these days without seeing someone whip out their smartphone to look up a restaurant, or to Google the answer to some question that arose during dinner with friends. And the military might not be far behind in adopting smartphones or tablets featuring Android.

You can’t go anywhere these days without seeing someone whip out their smartphone to look up a restaurant, or to Google the answer to some question that arose during dinner with friends. And the military might not be far behind in adopting smartphones or tablets featuring Android and other open mobile OSs – thanks to OK Labs and Fixmo Inc.’s new “joint initiative to create and commercialize a highly secure COTS mobile platform.” The platform will target civilian, federal government, and military needs, and will culminate in a “reference solution” – for tablet and smartphone OEMS – that melds system software, firmware, and mobile virtualization for information assurance. The primary goal is to isolate the organization’s apps and data from the operator’s personal user stuff … thus reinforcing the mantra: It’s all about the security.

In engineering speak, this means: 1) The new initiative’s progeny platform will include Fixmo’s Sentinel security monitoring software running on an OKL4 Microvisor-based independent virtual machine to, once again, keep secure things separate on a single mobile device; and 2) The joint platform solution offers image profiling and tracking by checksums and size, in addition to handy-dandy activity auditing. And OK Labs and Fixmo aren’t planning on resting on their laurels: They are also targeting the financial services and healthcare industries. But if we’ve whet your appetite, you’ll still have to wait a few months: The platform isn’t slated for market delivery until Q3 2011.