Think Your iPhone Is Secure? Find Out With ViaProtect

Although iOS is one of the safer mobile operating systems out there, there are inevitable ways in which your data can be compromised. Furthermore, as you already may have heard, ViaProtect (Free) by ViaForensics is a mobile security app developed to surface any potential security threats or vulnerabilities present on your iPhone. Given that iOS' closed nature also does not allow apps to have much access to what is going on outside of them, it is reasonable to wonder whether such an app could be useful or effective, and for this reason, I decided to start using ViaProtect to see what it's all about.

The main area in the app, known as the Dashboard, will deliver all of the information that ViaProtect provides to your fingertips. Here, the app breaks it down into three types of personal reports: Organization, Country, and Encrypted traffic. The Organization report will tell you which organizations access your data, and the country report will deliver the same info, but based on country instead of organization.

Finally, the Encrypted traffic report will tell you how much of your data is encrypted. All of this information can be viewed on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. The app will run in the background on your phone, updating every day, although you can refresh ViaProtect at any time you'd like.

Also in the dashboard, one can view a colored level indicating how at-risk they are by security flaws on their iPhone. While mine stayed in the green “low” region, thankfully, this can be a good indicator to whether or not you need to lockdown your iPhone a little more tightly. For example, if you are jailbroken, it will display that you are at a higher risk (which is true), and it will also identify if the version of iOS you're running is up-to-date and secure.

Other than this, ViaProtect doesn't do much. It does what it does reasonably well, but given that the app has five tabs at the bottom of the screen, I expected a lot more. For example, let's consider the questionable Sensors tab, which checks things like your network connections, battery status, device location, running processes, and much more. I'm not sure why the app collects this information since I can't seem to view any information after a whole day of use, but perhaps these processes work to power the rest of the app's features instead.

If you are looking to diagnose the security of your iPhone, ViaProtect would be the way to go. It can give you some insight about where your data is sent to or coming from, and it can also give you an interesting breakdown of who is accessing it. However, given iOS' limitations, there's not much it can find or tell you.

If you are concerned about your iPhone's potential vulnerabilities, check out ViaProtect in the App Store for free.