Qualcomm plans to incorporate new anti-malware technology into upcoming chips, starting with the Snapdragon 820 processor.

The company’s new “Snapdragon Smart Protect” technology uses on-device machine learning to detect zero-day malware threats on mobile devices.

smart protect

While most current anti-malware solutions work by downloading information about existing threats from an online database and then scanning your system to see if those threats are present. But Qualcomm says its Smart Protect solution can identify new threats even before their signatures are downloaded from a database.

That’s because it uses machine-learning to detect activity from apps that looks like it could be malicious. For example, it can alert you when an app that shouldn’t need access to camera or SMS functionality is taking a picture or sending a message.

The technology could also monitor to see what happens after you close an app, to see if it’s using suspicious features while continuing to run in the background, detect if an otherwise harmless app may have been infected with malware, and more.

Snapdragon Smart Protect is the first product built on Qualcomm’s Zeroth platform for machine learning, which was announced earlier this year. The company says since the technology runs at the chip level, it will be harder for malicious apps to trick Smart Protect into thinking they’re safe than it would be for a normal security app.

While Qualcomm is building support for Smart Protect into the Snapdragon 820 processor, the company won’t necessarily be providing an app directly to users. Instead, Qualcomm providing Smart Protect APIs to device makers and anti-malware software companies, so Smart Protect technology could be built into a variety of different anti-malware solutions for upcoming smartphones, tablets, and other devices.

Smart Protect should be available in early 2016, when the Snapdragon 820 processor is expected to hit the streets.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

6 replies on “Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 to feature “Smart Protect” real-time threat detection”

  1. Geez, I read the title as, “…Heat Conditioned”. Guess I’m “Web Conditioned” when it comes to the SD 810.

  2. I hope Qualcomm will forgive cynicism about security features baked into hardware, since Intel’s ridiculous scheme baked into their CPUs amounts to an omnipotent hardware backdoor.

  3. If the 620 and 618 are much cheaper than the 820, I would be fine with those. I hope to see a72 tablets before the end of the year.

    1. Also looking forward to those chipsets, and in seeing how the Adreno 510 compares to the 420 and 430. Snapdragon 810 issues aside, it’s almost like Qualcomm has several high ends coming now rather than one super high end and many mid-range chips. The 618 and 620 don’t seem like the traditional mid-range, especially given that they’re both going to use A72 cores for the big part of the CPU side.

      1. I am looking forward to the 820 – not for the security but for the efficiency. I’d like a 4k video capable phone that doesn’t have to shut down the camera after <5 minutes and can still be used to iron your shirt even after merely shooting some 1080p video.

Comments are closed.