LG’s G3 gets NIAP certification for classified use from NSA

Close on the heels of its competitor, Samsung, LG today was granted validation for its G3 flagship smartphone from the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) under the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US for the first time. Rival Samsung got a similar certification for all its Knox feature enable smartphones in the last week of October under NIAP by NSA.

NIAP vide its Validation Report No. CCEVS-VR-VID10593-2014, has granted its classified use certification for following carrier versions of LG G3 smartphones that contains 32GB of internal Flash storage and 3GB of memory.

LG G3 D850 (AT&T)

LG G3 VS985 (Verizon)

LG G3 LS990 (Sprint)

LG G3 D851 (T-Mobile)

The Security software version is MDF v1.1 Release 1.

Importance of the NIAP certification

NSA statute provides that smartphones being used by the US personnel, especially those employed in the national security sector should use only the NIAP approved devices for their official as well as personal correspondence. It also expressly says that only NIAP approved devices can handle classified documents.

This means that what is good for NSA’s classified use, is good for us, mortal beings, unless off course, NSA has left any on the devices. Using NIAP as a benchmark for certification we can rest assured that the data stored in G3 wont be leaked due to backdoors or zero-days.

LG G3 has quite good security features like Knock Code and Kill Switch however it still lacks a Samsung Knox like secure container which cant be access by any third party. That is the prime reason that only one of LG flagship gained this certification unlike across the board approval for all Samsung smartphones using Knox feature.

You can check up the NIAP website for the various approvals validations approved for LG’s G3 smartphone here.