In the last two years we have witnessed a notable proliferation in the concern of the South Korean Samsung for the intelligent functions applied to mobiles and tablets. The Samsung Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4, Note 2 and Note 3 have been the main standards of a philosophy that goes through making the technical muscle of the devices justified in what can be done with it. In this context, the company presented Samsung Knox at the beginning of the year, a solution with which to emphasize the corporate facet of its most prominent terminals.
Samsung Knox is, more than an application, a security environment that is already available on some of the company's computers. Specifically, in those Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Samsung Galaxy Note 2, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Samsung Galaxy S3 that have successfully passed the system update process to Android 4.3 Jelly Bean version. If this is our case, we will be able to access its functions, understood in a way as a layer that overlaps the layer with which we normally use Android.
With this layer, Samsung Knox shields all the contents that are worked on it, so that they would be inaccessible outside the Knox environment. And we talk about the environment because this function works as a secondary desktop "" or rather, parallel "" to the one we would normally use on our smartphone. For example, if we are using Samsung Knox and we take a photograph, the image file could only be consulted from that environment. Those who try to find it using the usual Android menus could not find it, being hidden and encrypted under the domains of Samsung Knox.
In this sense, the options of Samsung Knox as a security tool are especially oriented to the business market. With an open session in Knox we could make calls, send emails or visit web pages without leaving a trace on the device. Only by opening that session in Samsung Knox would it be possible to take a look at the user's activity, but for this it would have to have the necessary security permissions, which turn out to be especially protected thanks to the resources of this function.
The same would happen with the applications. If we download additional utilities for our mobile equipped with Samsung Knox in an open session in this environment, the installed programs would only be available within it. Again, trying to find the applications in the standard Android layer on the phone "" we refer to the TouchWiz interface, common in Samsung mobiles "" would be useless, since these apps would be housed in a utility container intended for this purpose.
Thus, in practice, Samsung Knox works as a dual desktop, where one of them is designed to block all the content and the activity that takes place on it, both in data output and input. It is a system that other manufacturers, such as BlackBerry, have already explored. However, in the case of the South Korean proposal, the idea can be extrapolated to a type of public that is not necessarily corporate.
