Android's Jelly Bean aims to be hard to hack

(Credit: CNET)

New features on Google's latest Android mobile OS -- Jelly Bean 4.1 -- beef up the system's security over all other past OS iterations. With Jelly Bean's design, Google has aimed to defend against hacks that install viruses and other malware on mobile devices using the system.

"Android has stepped its game up mitigation-wise in the new Jelly Bean release," security researcher Jon Oberheide wrote in an analysis published this week.

Oberheide notes that the central difference between Jelly Bean and other Android systems is that it incorporates Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), which randomizes locations in the devices' memory, along with another security feature called data execution prevention (DEP).

This is crucial because one way hackers tend to break into handsets is via memory corruption bugs, according to Ars Technica, which first reported this news. When ASLR is combined with DEP, these types of attacks can be defeated because hackers cannot locate the malicious code... [Read more]