Samsung has announced the deployment of a “maintenance mode” to further secure the data contained on the smartphones produced by the South Korean firm.
The goal of this new feature is to protect Samsung users’ information at a time when it may be particularly vulnerable: when they hand in their phone to a technician for repair. Already available in some Asian countries, this feature should gradually roll out around the world during 2023.
What will maintenance mode be used for?
Seungwon Shin, the South Korean manufacturer’s security manager, recalled in his announcement that more and more personal information was stored in smartphones, ranging from private photos to banking information. And this sensitive data is particularly exposed when the smartphone in question is entrusted to someone you do not know, especially in the case of repair or debugging.
To protect this extremely sensitive data at a time when it is very vulnerable, the objective of the maintenance mode is therefore to restrict to a minimum the information accessible by a third party who would have access to the telephone. This mode, which already exists in South Korea and China, will only be accessible to Samsung Galaxy S22 running Android 13 and One UI 5.0, the most up-to-date settings possible.
Restricted access for the technician
Concretely, the maintenance mode creates a separate user account, a bit like what has been possible for a long time on a computer. This new account only has restricted access to the content of the phone, except of course the essential information to be able to repair or unlock it. In addition, this new user has the possibility of downloading applications which may be useful to him in his task, but these will be automatically deleted at the end of his session, which ends with a restart of the telephone.
To activate this mode, simply go to the phone’s battery settings, then click on the button concerned. In addition, to prevent a failure of this feature from having too many consequences, Samsung specifies that it is possible to save all the data on your smartphone to a third-party medium, which you then simply need to redownload once the phone has been recovered, if data was lost in the operation.
Sources: BleepingComputer, Digital
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