New smart chip to nail errant apps

New York: With so many studies out about creepy apps, you are not sure which app to download and which to avoid? That dilemma would be gone soon thanks to a new chip. Tech firm Qualcomm has made a Snapdragon 820 processing chip that, once installed in a smartphone, would track your apps and tell you when they are acting strange, CNET.com reported.

The company calls it Smart Protect. The processor will let phone makers and antivirus apps tell you when apps are acting shady. Many security apps already monitor other apps for bad behaviour. However, Qualcomm's experts said smart hackers could dupe most security apps, but it's much harder to fool something that's running deep in the phone's processor.

"Apps have a limited ability to see what's going on. Qualcomm sees all of this," Asaf Ashkenazi from Qualcomm was quoted as saying. Take flashlight apps, which security researchers have long looked suspiciously at for the excessive access they demand to mobile users' information.

For instance, Android flashlight apps have the ability to take videos and photographs with user's phone camera. Now, if you were using flashlight app, and then closed it, a phone with Qualcomm's Smart Protect could watch to see what happens next. If the app started sending out your location and silently taking photos, an alert would flash across your screen.

The phone could also alert you that installing an app would trigger something really bad, like ransomware. Even a perfectly respectful app that would not dream of violating your privacy could become compromised by hackers. The new processor could catch that, too.