Android May Not Need Antivirus Software, Researcher Says
Antivirus developer SMobile released software this week to protect users of the G1 Android phone, although one security analyst wondered if people really need it.
Even though Android, the software developed by Google and running on just one phone sold by T-Mobile, is open source, it is unlikely to be more susceptible to malware than other, proprietary mobile operating systems, said Charlie Miller, principal analyst at Independent Security Evaluators and the researcher who found the first Android vulnerability.
While a developer could write a harmful application and distribute it via the Android Market, Google has put up some roadblocks that would make it hard for malware to cause much harm, Miller said. "If you want to do anything dangerous like access personal contacts, you have to specifically say to the virtual machine 'these are things I'm going to have to do,' and the virtual machine will ask the user if that's OK," he said. Android applications run in a Java virtual machine on the phone.
