Researchers Find ‘Serious Vulnerability’ In Samsung Knox Security Suite

Samsung has evidently pushed into the business market this year, trying to rope in more enterprise customers, who have traditionally opted for BlackBerry smartphones. The trend in shifting though as major companies opt for BYOD environments, which is why Apple and Samsung have been trying hard to capture what ground BlackBerry has lost. The Korean company launched its Knox security suite earlier this year which basically creates a “container” that runs a separate execution environment for apps and data on top of Android. Therefore any apps run outside of the container can’t access their data. A team of researchers at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel claim that they have found a “serious vulnerability” in Samsung Knox.

To put it in a nutshell, the newly discovered vulnerability would allow a hacker to access data in the container, which basically eliminates the entire premise that Knox is built upon. Apparently the vulnerability can be used to track emails, as well as monitor communications and steal saved data. The threat is said to exist on all smartphones based on the Knox architecture. Samsung has commented on the report, saying that it is looking into the claims made by the researchers. The company says it has found out through initial investigation that this vulnerability isn’t as severe as the researchers claim it to be.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Knox, Samsung