The good news is that the company – which has reknowned security researcher Moxie Marlinspike at the helm – is developing versions of Whispercore for other Android devices.
Some of the central features of Whispercore include a range of security enhancements such as full disk encryption, a firewall, encrypted backups and selective permissions.
The selective permissions feature is arguably one of its more important aspects Infosecurity notes.
Whilst the default setting on Android 3.x (Honeycomb) is to prevents apps from being downloaded from anywhere other than the official Android Market, selective permissions is billed as offering fine-grained control over what data your apps actually have access to.
According to Whisper Systems, since Android was not originally designed to support selective permissions, apps are not generally implemented with the expectation that they could be denied access to a resource they have requested.
As a result, says the firm, selective permission solutions from distributions like CyanogenMod – which simply revoke access to resources – almost always result in the app crashing.
This, unfortunately, takes users back full-circle to an all-or-nothing decision, explains the company.
Whispercore 0.5 (the latest beta test edition) takes the approach of creating a private resource for each app. This means that, as the app requests access to a phone/tablet feature, it is granted access, but only for that specific version of the app.
If the app is subsequently compromised, its footprint will change and Whispercore will not allow direct access to the phone or tablet's features – unless the user allows the app, Infosecurity notes.
Whisper Systems says that, as an example, apps with revoked location permissions that request location information will get a spoofed set of co-ordinates.
By spoofing, rather than disallowing access to a phone or tablet's features, the firm says that Whispercore prevents app crashes, which have been a criticism of other custom ROMs for Android devices.
One of the other features of selective permissions is a historical log of what permissions your apps are requesting, giving users an insight into what their apps are doing and how often they are requesting access.