By Khaw Chia Hui

It is long known that the smartphone segment is growing exponentially and will continue to do so in the coming years. According to Gartner (Dec 2008) smartphone shipments will exceed 600 million by 2012 and 76 million are made up of Android phones.

Smartphones in the coming years are becoming smarter and the explosion of apps is believed to introduce new security challenges for telcos. To address some of these challenges, Symantec shared with Mobile World about its Project BBQ.

Project BBQ or also known as Symantec Mobile Reputation Security is to protect wireless networks against unknown malware and blacklisted applications. Similar to what they used in their consumer anti virus, Norton 2010, it assigns reputation scores to each app by taking a “fingerprint” of that app and run it through their algorithms and reputation servers.

It will then generate a whitelist and allow the telcos to confine its customers within a certain reputation score. The telco can decide to stop, uninstall or block blacklisted apps that has already been installed.

According to Mark Bregman, Symantec’s CTO, the adoption of open operating systems such as Android creates doors for malware and badly written apps that might cripple wireless networks. To illustrate his point, he gave an example whereby a badly written app for Android smartphones was able to shut down a cell tower each time it was launched, causing the telco financial damage.

He also iterates that Symantec’s reputation servers can’t read exactly what’s inside any file. It only takes a file hash and run it through its servers to deliver a score and it’s up to the telcos take set up their own policies regarding low reputation apps.

Currently, the technology is in pilot programmes with several carriers.