Exploring Android insecurities

Researchers Daniel R Thomas, Alastair R Beresford and Andrew Rice of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge have published a paper called 'Security Metrics for the Android Ecosystem' (also available on the Android Vulnerabilities site), claiming that 87.7 percent of Android devices have been exposed to at least one out of eleven critical vulnerabilities. To put this into some perspective, the data was collected from a corpus of 20,400 devices in total. Bear in mind that last year alone there were more than 1 billion Android devices shipped globally, so just how representative the numbers from this study are must be left for you to decide. However, there can be no doubt about the fragmentation of the Android market, with so many different versions on so many different devices and so little information passed on from device manufacturers or carriers to end users regarding when (or if) security updates will be pushed to them.