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Google just announced its plan to introduce a new anti-spoofing feature for its Android operating system that makes its biometric authentication mechanisms more secure than ever. Biometric authentications, like the fingerprint, IRIS, or face recognition technologies, smoothen the process of unlocking devices and applications by making it notably faster and secure. Although biometric systems also have some pitfalls that are not hidden from anyone, as it has been proven multiple times in the past that most biometric scanners are vulnerable to spoofing attacks, and in most cases fooling them is quite easy. Google announced today a better model to improve biometric security, which will be available from Android P, allowing mobile app developers to integrate an enhanced mechanism within their apps to keep users' data safe. New Biometric Metrics to Identify Spoofing and Imposter Attacks Currently, the Android biometric authentication system uses two metrics—False Accept Rate (FA...

Mobile security researchers have discovered unprotected Firebase databases of thousands of iOS and Android mobile applications that are exposing over 100 million data records, including plain text passwords, user IDs, location, and in some cases, financial records such as banking and cryptocurrency transactions. Google's Firebase service is one of the most popular back-end development platforms for mobile and web applications that offers developers a cloud-based database, which stores data in JSON format and synced it in the real-time with all connected clients. Researchers from mobile security firm Appthority discovered that many app developers' fail to properly secure their back-end Firebase endpoints with firewalls and authentication, leaving hundreds of gigabytes of sensitive data of their customers publicly accessible to anyone. Since Firebase offers app developers an API server, as shown below, to access their databases hosted with the service, attackers can gain acce...

If you are wondering how to receive latest updates for an Android app—installed via a 3rd party source or peer-to-peer app sharing—directly from Google Play Store. For security reasons, until now apps installed from third-party sources cannot be updated automatically over-the-air, as Google does not recognize them as Play Store apps and they do not show up in your Google account app list as well. Late last year, Google announced its plan to set up an automated mechanism to verify the authenticity of an app by adding a small amount of security metadata on top of each Android application package (in the APK Signing Block) distributed by its Play Store. This metadata is like a digital signature that would help your Android device to verify if the origin of an app you have installed from a third-party source is a Play Store app and have not been tempered, for example, a virus is not attached to it. From early 2018, Google has already started implementing this mechanism, which doesn...

Google researcher has discovered a severe vulnerability in modern web browsers that could have allowed websites you visit to steal the sensitive content of your online accounts from other websites that you have logged-in the same browser. Discovered by Jake Archibald, developer advocate for Google Chrome, the vulnerability resides in the way browsers handle cross-origin requests to video and audio files, which if exploited, could allow remote attackers to even read the content of your Gmail or private Facebook messages. For security reasons, modern web browsers don't allow websites to make cross-origin requests to a different domain unless any domain explicitly allows it. That means, if you visit a website on your browser, it can only request data from the same origin the site was loaded from, preventing it from making any unauthorized request on your behalf in an attempt to steal your data from other sites. However, web browsers do not respond in the same way while fetc...

One of the world's most popular flight tracking services Flightradar24 , which shows real-time aircraft flight information on a map, has suffered a massive data breach that may have compromised email addresses and hashed passwords for more than 230,000 customers. Without revealing any information about the breach publically via their blog or social media accounts, Flightradar24 started sending out emails earlier this week with a password reset link, asking them to change their passwords. The incomplete reference to suddenly announced data breach incident via emails and providing a unique password reset link to each user caused some customers to suspect that they have been a target of a phishing attack. However, later the company confirmed the breach while responding to its customers' queries on the official forum and Twitter , saying that the breach notifications they have received via emails are legitimate and that neither payment nor personal information has been compr...

Security-oriented BSD operating system OpenBSD has decided to disable support for Intel's hyper-threading performance-boosting feature, citing security concerns over Spectre-style timing attacks . Introduced in 2002, Hyper-threading is Intel's implementation of Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) that allows the operating system to use a virtual core for each physical core present in processors in order to improve performance. The Hyper-threading feature comes enabled on computers by default for performance boosting, but in a detailed post published Tuesday, OpenBSD maintainer Mark Kettenis said such processor implementations could lead to Spectre-style timing attacks. "SMT (Simultaneous multithreading) implementations typically share TLBs and L1 caches between threads," Kettenis wrote. "This can make cache timing attacks a lot easier, and we strongly suspect that this will make several Spectre-class bugs exploitable." In cryptography, side-channe...