And it will refuse to boot if your phone is malware infested.
Android Nougat will check for malware when it boots up on a device. If it finds malware, the OS won’t boot up. The malware check during boot was part of Marshmallow as well, but the phone would still boot if a malware was found, notifying the user that their phone has malware. It seems Google is really focusing on the security element of the Android OS. As reported earlier, Android N is also going to stop ransomware from changing device passwords.
The announcement was made on the Android Developer’s blog, where Google explained the boot check mechanism used in Android Nougat. A malware infested phone will either not boot or boot in something like safe mode, in order to limit the malware’s activity. “Starting with devices first shipping with Android 7.0, we require verified boot to be strictly enforced. This means that a device with a corrupt boot image or verified partition will not boot or will boot in a limited capacity with user consent,” said the post.
However, the new methods may also mean that non-malicious corruption will also stop your device from booting, which is presumably why booting is allowed with user consent. “Strictly enforced verified boot improves security, but can also reduce reliability by increasing the impact of disk corruption that may occur on devices due to software bugs or hardware issues,” wrote Google.
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