Samsung Galaxy Range Devices Receive NSA Approval For US Government Use

Samsung Electronics said Tuesday that the U.S. National Security Agency, or NSA, has approved some of its devices from the Galaxy range, to hold classified information. The move comes as a boost to the South Korean company’s mobile phones and tablets business, which has struggled to gain government approval for this purpose.

Corporate clients too have trusted Samsung’s rivals like BlackBerry Ltd. to hold information secure, and have been hesitant in the past to make the move toward phones made by Samsung, which uses the mobile security platform Knox. In June, five of the company’s phones and tablets, which ran on Knox, were approved by the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency for storing sensitive but unclassified information. The latest approval from NSA makes Samsung the only company to be on both lists.

Samsung's mobile security systems are also to be implemented in the next version of Google Inc’s Android operating system in an effort to increase their appeal among businesses and governments, for whom security is a decisive factor.

According to a company statement, the NSA has added Samsung’s Galaxy S4, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition), Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy Alpha, Galaxy Tab S 8.4, Galaxy Tab S 10.5 and the Galaxy IPSEC Virtual Private Network Client to its list of Commercial Solutions for Classified Program Component.