How can Snapdragon 845 guard your smartphone data like a vault?

64 percent of Americans have personally experienced a major data breach, according to a 2016 cybersecurity report by the Pew Research Center. So, offering enhanced security technology to our customers was a top priority for us when we built our premium-tier Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform.

The Snapdragon 845 features a new architecture that is engineered to help secure the valuable data and credentials that users store on their mobile devices like a vault. A new layer of hardware security — the Secure Processing Unit (SPU) — is added to the Snapdragon 845 mobile platform which is designed to guard data just like you physically protect your own personal valuable items.

Building on our history of device security across Snapdragon mobile platforms, the additional security functionality of our SPU was developed to support enhanced, security-focused experiences like mobile payments, engineered to give you an additional level of comfort to accomplish more on your mobile device.

Protecting your data in a self-contained, vault-like environment

Security attacks change and grow in their sophistication, and will continue to do so. Because of this, we will continue to change and grow our security solutions within our mobile processors.

The SPU was designed to be segregated from your CPU and all parts of your device and is totally self-contained within the Snapdragon mobile processor. One of its main roles is to generate and utilize unique cryptographic digital keys that aim to help protect your data by encrypting the files you create, optimized for a superior level of protection. So even if malware penetrates your device to a point where it can access the keys processed by the main CPU, access to any of the keys now stored and managed by the SPU can be prevented.

The SPU resides on its own power grid and boots by itself. It has its own, separate, dedicated CPU and its own RAM to run code in. It also has its own crypto-engines and key management facility, designed to allow it to efficiently encrypt and decrypt whatever packets of information are needed.

What does the SPU mean for device makers in the future?

For device makers, it’ll be an opportunity to bring together what were traditionally different components – like secure chips in SIMs or banking cards – into the Secure Processing Unit. Devices can be smaller and more integrated due to the reduction in number of components, while meeting the requirements of security-critical applications.

All of us are targets of hacking. Many security experts suggest that it’s not a question of if, but when, someone will attempt to steal our personal data for nefarious purposes. The SPU dramatically raises the bar on your device’s security, as it is optimized to support the vault-like environment containing your critical digital assets.

Qualcomm Snapdragon is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.