Privacy

31273 readers

1022 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

128

The not-so-silent type: Vulnerabilities across keyboard apps reveal keystrokes to network eavesdroppers - The Citizen Lab (citizenlab.ca)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Thanks for the tl;dr and suggestions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Thank you :)