Security

Recently, I came across Nillion’s whitepaper. Nillion at its core is trying to be a new decentralized encrypted data-processing layer. Here’s how it works.

WebView debugging can be enabled via “WebView.setWebContentsDebuggingEnabled(true)”. Leaving WebView debugging enabled in production Android apps is a bad idea. Anyone who gets hold of the unlocked phone can access the app’s data forever.

Background A security company reverse engineered Snapchat’s android client and found all the api endpoints ( source). Bigger issue: The published proof of concept of using “find friends” feature to find whether a phone number is registered on Snapchat or not, and if it is, then its associated username and location of the user. Their claim was that despite informing Snapchat about the hole, Snapchat did nothing about it. As expected, someone published data of 4.6M registered users ( source) using the proof of concept provided. Snapchat responded saying that soon users will be able to opt-out of find friends feature.

A lot of work is happening in academia and industry on tools to perform dynamic analysis, static analysis, and reverse engineering of android apps. An updated list of the tools can be seen at https://github.com/ashishb/android-security-awesome.

Came across a few interesting posts like this on my wall today.

As the world moves towards cloud-based storage and computing, the task of storing our data on a PC hard disk is being replaced with cloud-based storage providers. This includes our emails, social data, professional data, and financial data. Accessing this data requires authentication, despite its various limitations, username and password are still the standard way of authentication [though OpenID is slowly becoming popular]. One thing which is crucial in this case is how web services store user’s password.

If you have been already a victim of this, then change your password and unlike the page as soon as possible. A malicious app called “aprilfoolsprank” which likes a page on a user’s behalf and tries to phish a user into disclosing his/her Facebook login and password is taking its toll on Facebook users.

If you are looking for how to avoid or recover: read this one instead. In the past few weeks, a lot of Facebook users have received the following (or similar) messages posted by their friends Hi Friends see Face-book images rotate 360* see here » http://SHADYCLOUDS.TK/ Really cool Facebook revolving images. MUST SEE http://rotatingimage2.tk/. Following are observations and analysis of the same.

The post is written in honor of Sh. Hari Prasad, the winner of EFF Pioneer Award 2010

CERT-In is a low-profile (Indian) government organization. The Government of India established the Computer Emergency Response Team (“CERT-IN”) to ensure Internet security. Many institutions, including the Ministry of Home Affairs, courts, the intelligence services, the police, and the National Human Rights Commission, may call on it for specialist expertise. CERT-IN’s stated mission is “to enhance the security of India’s Communications and Information Infrastructure through proactive action and effective collaboration” [ Source] I had a chance to visit CERT-In last week. The experience was overall good, unlike the typical dirty government office with laid-back employees, I saw employees enthusiastic about their work (and a colorful office).