Biometric information is about as personal as data gets. But Google’s Android partners are still failing to protect it, as researchers will discuss this week at RSA, pointing to failures in the Samsung Galaxy S5 and other unnamed Android devices.
Though the affected phone makers have tried to separate and encrypt the information in a separate secure zone, it’s possible to grab the biometric data before it reaches that protected area and create copies of people’s fingerprints for further attacks. The issue appears startlingly straightforward: an attacker could focus on collecting data coming from the Android devices’ fingerprint sensors rather than trying to break into the trusted zone. Any hacker who can acquire user-level access can easily collect fingerprint information from the affected Android phones.
Read moreAt the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this month, Android smartphone giant, Samsung, released its mobile payments platform.
Samsung Pay has something that Apple Pay does not: Magnetic Secure Transmission that was actually developed by a company called LoopPay. While use of Apple Pay is limited to those merchants who deploy near-field-communication enabled point-of-sale terminals, the inclusion of MST means that Samsung Pay has the capacity to interface with existing mag-stripe reading point-of-sale systems. Magnetic stripe readers, of course, constitute the vast majority of payment terminals.
Read moreWhy worry about Big Brother? It's your big Samsung TV that's watching you. Oh, and listening to you. It concerns the voice-recognition feature, vital for everyone who finds pressing a few buttons on their remote far too tiresome.
The company may "capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features." This is almost understandable. It's a little like every single customer service call, supposedly recorded to make your next customer service call far, far more enjoyable. Clearly, this isn't the only option for those intent on a SmartTV. But what might be authorized and by whom?
Read moreAndroid is well known for its seemingly never-ending customization options and its permissive rooting credentials among other things. Distributions that cannot be modified to enable elevated permissions are quite rare, as enthusiasts seek to have virtually every possible feature available at their disposal.
But should you pursue that path? Does root provide what you need, or what you think you need? There are a couple of good reasons why you probably should root Android, but root is not for everyone, as the risks can far outweigh the benefits and you are likely to regret your decision once things get messy. So here is why you should not do it.
Read moreThe National Institute of Standards and Technology is warning users of a newly discovered Zero-Day flaw in the Samsung Find My Mobile service, which fails to validate the sender of a lock-code data received over a network.
The Find My Mobile feature implemented by Samsung in their devices is a mobile web-service that provides samsung users a bunch of features to locate their lost device, to play an alert on a remote device and to lock remotely the mobile phone so that no one else can get the access to the lost device. The flaw allows an attacker to remotely lock or unlock the device and even make the device rings too.
Read moreImagine being able to download a full HD movie in less than three second, or back your entire computer up in less than a minute without the need for any cables. Samsung has announced that it has made a breakthrough in Wi-Fi technology which will allow a 1GB file to be downloaded in less than three seconds.
Samsung claims it is able to eliminate a problem where too many signals from different smartphones, tablets or computers cause interference, which hampers speed. It’s worth noting though, that this new breakthrough doesn’t suddenly mean you will have faster internet, your internet service provider controls that. This simply means faster connections in your internal network between devices.
Read moreMat Honan in a humorous manner created an everyday life picture in a "smart" house which (according to analysts) each consumer will have in 5-10 years.
I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows. The lights are flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don’t know. I never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my house has a virus again. Technically it’s malware. But there’s no patch yet, and pretty much everyone’s got it. Homes up and down the block are lit up, even at this early hour. Thankfully this one is fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to Facebook.
Read moreGoogle is planning to launch a new health service called Google Fit to collect and aggregate data from popular fitness trackers and health-related apps at the Google I/O conference.
Such a service would mark a direct challenge to Apple’s HealthKit framework, launched last week and rolling out with its new mobile platform iOS 8 this fall to aggregate data from wearable devices and apps. Last month Samsung also unveiled similar device, called SAMI. Google Fit will aggregate data through open APIs, Google will also announce partnerships with wearable device makers at its I/O conference.
Read moreSamsung Electronics is working to use biometric sensors in its mobile security system which the company expects to be available even for low-end smartphone models, an executive said Monday.
“We’re looking at various types of biometric [mechanisms] and one of things that everybody is looking at is iris detection,” Samsung’s senior vice president Rhee In-jong told analysts and investors at a forum in Hong Kong. Rhee spearheads the development of Samsung’s mobile enterprise software called Knox. Biometric authentication in mobile devices today consists mainly of using a user’s fingerprint as a scanner. Samsung first adopted fingerprint scanning into its smartphones with the Galaxy S5 launched in April, about seven months after Apple’s iPhone 5S.
Read moreThe fingerprint sensor on Samsung's Galaxy S5 handset has been hacked less than a week after the device went on sale.
Berlin-based Security Research Labs fooled the equipment using a mould it had previously created to spoof the sensor on Apple's iPhone 5S.
The researchers said they were concerned that thieves could exploit the flaw in Samsung's device to trigger money transfers via PayPal. The payments firm played down the risk. "While we take the findings from Security Research Labs [SRL] very seriously, we are still confident that fingerprint authentication offers an easier and more secure way to pay on mobile devices than passwords or credit cards," it said.
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