“Defend yourself,” was a cry heard in the old days when adversaries confronted each other. A cloud mobile security provider says it has taken up the cause by giving mobile applications the ability to defend themselves when under attack.
Blueblox Security said Thursday that the Summer 2014 release of its service allows any app to detect threats to Android or Apple iOS operating systems such as jailbreaking and rooting of the device tampering with apps and immediately respond. Defences include preventing access to corporate data or to the device itself.
It has also added two other capabilities:
- Dynamic policy updates. This ensures that application-specific security policies are deployed in real time without requiring IT to push new versions of the applications or requiring users to restart the applications or device, the company says. Security professionals are now able to tune mobile security policies at an application-level, such as the restrictions of data sharing between personal and corporate applications, or the usage of application-level VPN;
- Support for SAML 2.0, and integration with OneLogin and Okta Inc’s single sign-on solutions. Customers can now enroll and de-provision employees using any SAML 2.0 compliant identity management vendor. In addition, the integration with OneLogIn and Okta allows customers to enforce strong authentication for users enrolling to Bluebox or for administrators authenticating to the Bluebox administrative portal. It also enables Bluebox to dynamically de-provision applications and data from mobile devices.
The Bluebox solution uses an agent that can be downloaded from the Apple App Store and Google Play. Once enrolled, apps are pre-loaded on a device, can be chosen from a list of IT recommended apps, or any free app can be chosen by the user. Bluebox delivers a secure version of the app. Corporate and person data is separated; corporate remote wipe and lock apply only on the corporate side. A policy dashboard shows staff what IT is tracking.
