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Showing posts from December, 2014

Dissecting Lollipop's Smart Lock

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Android 5.0 (Lollipop) has been out for a while now, and most of its new features have been introduced, benchmarked, or complained about extensively. The new release also includes a number of of security enhancements , of which disk encryption has gotten probably the most media attention. Smart Lock (originally announced at Google I/O 2014), which allows bypassing the device lockscreen when certain environmental conditions are met, is probably the most user-visible new security feature. As such, it has also been discussed and blogged about extensively. However, because Smart Lock is a proprietary feature incorporated in Google Play Services, not many details about its implementation or security level are available. This post will look into the Android framework extensions that Smart Lock is build upon, show how to use them to create your own unlock method, and finally briefly discuss its Play Services implementation. Trust agents Smart Lock is build upon a new Lollipop feature cal