Agents of shield: What it takes to protect your smartphone

By now, our smartphones know us better than most of the people in our lives ever will.

- Vishal Mathur

Which means, of course, there are secrets at stake in our phones, as well as information: passcodes, bank balances, location and spending histories; images and videos that could be morphed; voice notes that could be altered or played back in attempts at blackmail or fraud.

Enter the guardians of our galaxies. Phone protection systems are stepping into the future, with quantum encryption, behavioural analysis, machine-learning.

At the forefront of this fight are smartphone operating systems themselves.

‘Apple's iOS and Google's Android have evolved into watchful gatekeepers that track app behaviour and usage trends as part of an effort to prevent unauthorised access.

Behavioural analysis programs, for instance, use information they have gathered on location and usage patterns to flag possible “dark patterns” that might indicate an attempt to infiltrate a device. If such an attempt is detected, the operating system can lock out a suspected app and warn the user about a possible malware attack.