Keeping your Android device safe from text message fraud (Google Online Security Blog)

Actualités, Sécurité
Posted by Nataliya Stanetsky and Roger Piqueras Jover, Android Security & Privacy Team Cell-site simulators, also known as False Base Stations (FBS) or Stingrays, are radio devices that mimic real cell sites in order to lure mobile devices to connect to them. These devices are commonly used for security and privacy attacks, such as surveillance and interception of communications. In recent years, carriers have started reporting new types of abuse perpetrated with FBSs for the purposes of financial fraud. In particular, there is increasingly more evidence of the exploitation of weaknesses in cellular communication standards leveraging cell-site simulators to inject SMS phishing messages directly into smartphones. This method to inject messages entirely bypasses the carrier network, thus bypassing all the sophisticated network-based anti-spam and anti-fraud filters. Instances of this new…
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Improving the security of Chrome cookies on Windows (Google Online Security Blog)

Actualités, Sécurité
Posted by Will Harris, Chrome Security Team Cybercriminals using cookie theft infostealer malware continue to pose a risk to the safety and security of our users. We already have a number of initiatives in this area including Chrome’s download protection using Safe Browsing, Device Bound Session Credentials, and Google’s account-based threat detection to flag the use of stolen cookies. Today, we’re announcing another layer of protection to make Windows users safer from this type of malware. Like other software that needs to store secrets, Chrome currently secures sensitive data like cookies and passwords using the strongest techniques the OS makes available to us - on macOS this is the Keychain services, and on Linux we use a system provided wallet such as kwallet or gnome-libsecret. On Windows, Chrome uses the…
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Pixel’s Proactive Approach to Security: Addressing Vulnerabilities in Cellular Modems (Google Online Security Blog)

Actualités, Sécurité
Posted by Sherk Chung, Stephan Chen, Pixel team, and Roger Piqueras Jover, Ivan Lozano, Android team Pixel phones have earned a well-deserved reputation for being security-conscious. In this blog, we'll take a peek under the hood to see how Pixel mitigates common exploits on cellular basebands. Smartphones have become an integral part of our lives, but few of us think about the complex software that powers them, especially the cellular baseband – the processor on the device responsible for handling all cellular communication (such as LTE, 4G, and 5G). Most smartphones use cellular baseband processors with tight performance constraints, making security hardening difficult. Security researchers have increasingly exploited this attack vector and routinely demonstrated the possibility of exploiting basebands used in popular smartphones. The good news is that Pixel has…
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Evaluating Mitigations & Vulnerabilities in Chrome (Google Online Security Blog)

Actualités, Sécurité
Posted by Alex Gough, Chrome Security Team The Chrome Security Team is constantly striving to make it safer to browse the web. We invest in mechanisms to make classes of security bugs impossible, mitigations that make it more difficult to exploit a security bug, and sandboxing to reduce the capability exposed by an isolated security issue. When choosing where to invest it is helpful to consider how bad actors find and exploit vulnerabilities. In this post we discuss several axes along which to evaluate the potential harm to users from exploits, and how they apply to the Chrome browser. Historically the Chrome Security Team has made major investments and driven the web to be safer. We pioneered browser sandboxing, site isolation and the migration to an encrypted web. Today we’re…
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Eliminating Memory Safety Vulnerabilities at the Source (Google Online Security Blog)

Actualités, Sécurité
Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep - Android team, and Alex Rebert - Security Foundations Memory safety vulnerabilities remain a pervasive threat to software security. At Google, we believe the path to eliminating this class of vulnerabilities at scale and building high-assurance software lies in Safe Coding, a secure-by-design approach that prioritizes transitioning to memory-safe languages. This post demonstrates why focusing on Safe Coding for new code quickly and counterintuitively reduces the overall security risk of a codebase, finally breaking through the stubbornly high plateau of memory safety vulnerabilities and starting an exponential decline, all while being scalable and cost-effective. We’ll also share updated data on how the percentage of memory safety vulnerabilities in Android dropped from 76% to 24% over 6 years as development shifted to memory safe languages. Counterintuitive…
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