At Google IO this year, the Android security team outlined a new safe browsing service that would be coming to Android. Today the team has released the updated tools to developers. The Android system will now maintain a single central on-device Safe Browsing index that will allow all apps trying to access the Web to check if their target destination has been classified by Google to be a known threat.
What makes a website a known threat? According to Google’s documentation examples of unsafe web resources are social engineering sites (phishing and deceptive sites) and sites that host malware or unwanted software. Using the API developers can:
- Check pages against our Safe Browsing lists based on platform and threat types.
- Warn users before they click links in your site that may lead to infected pages.
- Prevent users from posting links to known infected pages from your site.
By providing an on-device system for safe browsing Google has made it simple for developers to implement safe browsing checks as well as reducing the network and battery required to maintain and check URLs. If you want to watch the snippet from Google IO check it out below:
With Android’s security team working to both centralise security and move it to individually updated packages they are hoping to improve Android security for everyone, regardless of which device they have.
See this is why we love Google.