The Snapdragon 820 will have integrated Smart Protect technology

Software-based malware protection clearly isn’t as effective as it needs to be, as evidenced by the ever-growing number of mobile devices becoming infected with malware. This is due in large part to the fact that it can take a dangerously long time for security patches to reach the devices that need them, which is why Qualcomm has decided to integrate malware protection directly into its hardware. Known as Smart Protect, this new technology will come with the next-generation Snapdragon 820 processor from Qualcomm, and will use the processor’s cognitive learning capabilities to protect the devices that use it. 

End users and enterprises, along with their devices and data, are under increasing attack from mobile malware. Thousands of unknown (“zero-day”) and transformed mobile malware apps are generated each day. And traditional, signature-based anti-virus (AV) solutions alone aren’t able to detect and stop them all. Most AV solutions rely only on checking the signature files of downloaded apps against a relatively static database of signature files from known malware apps. This approach to detecting and stopping malware is limited, especially against the daily onslaught of new mobile malware. To make matters worse, even known malware apps can be “transformed” simply by changing the binary code of the apps, rendering them essentially invisible to signature-based AV apps. We at Qualcomm Technologies designed our recently announced Qualcomm Snapdragon Smart Protect technology to detect zero-day and transformed malware, providing more comprehensive protection of privacy and device data. We’ve done this by creating application programming interfaces (APIs) for use by phone manufacturers (OEMs) and antivirus app vendors (ISVs) to complement their security solutions with real-time machine learning-based behavioral analysis.