TLDR:
This study mainly targets Pinyin input, the most popular Chinese input method (hence 1bn potentially affected).
Vulnerabilities were due to the keyboards’ use of the cloud for dictionaries used in IMEs (essentially a conversion engine). Such IMEs are must-haves for certain languages and converts A-Zs to other scripts. Lack of E2EE resulted in exposed keystrokes.
Personally I would recommend switching to something which uses a local dictionary. RIME is a good FOSS alternative and can be configured to work on Android via fcitx.
While the study doesn’t cover English keyboards, this is as good a reminder as any not to use in-built dictionaries in general unless you have to.
Thanks for the tl;dr and suggestions.
If you are in China you also have to be very worried about the Chinese government. This is just one out of hundreds of other tools they have to detect disloyalty
Thank you :)
A billion vulnerable users is wild. I’m sure there are government entities taking advantage of this already
Oh yes, one example is Naomi Wu.
Damn, I didn’t know what had happened to her. I really liked her content.
Yeah and didn’t she work with Citizen Lab in the past about this? I’m wondering what’s new here.
What’s new is that apparently “We reported these vulnerabilities to all nine vendors. Most vendors responded, took the issue seriously, and fixed the reported vulnerabilities, although some keyboard apps remain vulnerable.”
I usually recommend FOSS keyboards, seems to be the safer bet
And with a firewall that blocks them from internet access
They shouldn’t need internet access
This report is not about how operators of cloud-based IMEs read users’ keystrokes, which is a phenomenon that has already been extensively studied and documented. This report is primarily concerned with the issue of protecting this sensitive data from network eavesdroppers.
So basically, even after these vulns are fixed, the attacker can just NSL the cloud providers and, boom, surveillance slurping continues.
Swype is not listed in this document.
I didn’t read far enough to see if it only affected pinyin (Chinese) cloud features or all languages.
