Android 4.2 app verification service detects only 15.32 percent of known malware

Among other things updated in the latest Android version, 4.2 Jelly Bean, was a new app verification service. According to The Next Web, researchers had put the verification to test and the results show the service to be lacking. According to the researchers, the service was only able to detect 15.32 percent of known malware.

The data came from a study performed by Xuxia Jiang, an associate computer science professor at NC State University. The experiment used 1,260 samples that have been widely shared with the researching community as well as Google.

While running the test on a Nexus 10 tablet running Android 4.2, just 193 out of the 1,260 samples were successfuly detected by the operating system as malware.

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Not as good at malware detection as third party apps

For the sake of comparison, researchers had also picked up a sample from each malware family and tested it with other anti-virus engines, including Avast, AVG, TrendMicro, Symantec, BitDefender, ClamAV, F-Secure, Fortinet, Kaspersky and Kingsoft. These anti-virus engines detected from 50 to 100 percent of the malware.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that users had been facing problems running Android 4.2 on a tablet. Users had expressed that there is an issue while using a secondary account—the wallpaper and icons bleed through a running application, thereby giving it a strange transparent appearance.

Commenting on the issue, a user of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean who spotted this glitch stated that in many applications, the desktop wallpaper and icons bleed through. He stated that this abnormaility is witnessed in 50 percent of his games and is seen in apps such as Flick Golf, Osmos HD, Sword & Sorcery, Eufloria HD, among others. He states that it could be because he was the secondary user of the device and not the owner.

Android 4.2 brings multi-user support for the first time to smartphones and tablets, with which users can create multiple user accounts and use the device as independent users with different IDs. But it seems even this feature is buggy. It appears the OS only allows users defined as the ‘Owner’ of the device to use Google Talk, whereas other users get an error message stating, “This version of Talk can be used only by the owner of the device.” This may be due to the current Google Talk app not being compatible with multiple users. Google is yet to comment or acknowledge this issue.

These are not the first bugs to be found on Android 4.2. Recently, a glitch was reported that Google had forgotten to include December in the People/Contacts app, which comes as a stock application in Android. Google has only added 11 months in the calendar year. After November 2012, comes January 2013.

However, Google quickly acknowledged the bug and is in the process of releasing a fix for it by dishing out a minor update in the form of Android 4.2.1 to certain Nexus devices to fix this bug. “We discovered a bug in the Android 4.2 update, which makes it impossible to enter December events in optional fields of the People app (this bug did not affect Calendar). Rest assured, this will be fixed soon so that those of you with December birthdays and anniversaries won’t be forgotten by your friends and family,” the company wrote in a post.