Facebook privacy settings: Protect your data with these tips

As Facebook turns 16, we look at how to keep your personal information safe from prying eyes

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Would you get hooked by a phishing scam? Test yourself

As the tide of phishing attacks rises, improving your scam-spotting skills is never a bad idea

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Week in security with Tony Anscombe

ESET research into a campaign of the Winnti Group – The FBI warns of a job scam – What IoT legislation means for device makers and users

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Week in security with Tony Anscombe

ESET research into a campaign of the Winnti Group – The FBI warns of a job scam – What IoT legislation means for device makers and users

The post Week in security with Tony Anscombe appeared first on WeLiveSecurity

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Don’t get sacked! Scams to look out for this Super Bowl

As the teams prepare to battle it out on the gridiron, fraudsters are waiting to intercept your funds

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Winnti Group targeting universities in Hong Kong

ESET researchers uncover a new campaign of the Winnti Group targeting universities and using ShadowPad and Winnti malware

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Winnti Group targeting universities in Hong Kong

ESET researchers uncover a new campaign of the Winnti Group targeting universities and using ShadowPad and Winnti malware

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Say hello to OpenSK: a fully open-source security key implementation

Posted by Elie Bursztein, Security & Anti-abuse Research Lead, and Jean-Michel Picod, Software Engineer, Google 

Today, FIDO security keys are reshaping the way online accounts are protected by providing an easy, phishing-resistant form of two-factor authentication (2FA) that is trusted by a growing number of websites, including Google, social networks, cloud providers, and many others. To help advance and improve access to FIDO authenticator implementations, we are excited, following other open-source projects like Solo and Somu, to announce the release of OpenSK, an open-source implementation for security keys written in Rust that supports both FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards.

Photo of OpenSK developer edition: a Nordic Dongle running the OpenSK firmware on DIY case

By opening up OpenSK as a research platform, our hope is that it will be used by researchers, security key manufacturers, and enthusiasts to help develop innovative features and accelerate security key adoption.

With this early release of OpenSK, you can make your own developer key by flashing the OpenSK firmware on a Nordic chip dongle. In addition to being affordable, we chose Nordic as initial reference hardware because it supports all major transport protocols mentioned by FIDO2: NFC, Bluetooth Low Energy, USB, and a dedicated hardware crypto core. To protect and carry your key, we are also providing a custom, 3D-printable case that works on a variety of printers.

“We’re excited to collaborate with Google and the open source community on the new OpenSK research platform,” said Kjetil Holstad, Director of Product Management at Nordic Semiconductor. “We hope that our industry leading nRF52840’s native support for secure cryptographic acceleration combined with new features and testing in OpenSK will help the industry gain mainstream adoption of security keys.”

While you can make your own fully functional FIDO authenticator today, as showcased in the video above, this release should be considered as an experimental research project to be used for testing and research purposes.

Under the hood, OpenSK is written in Rust and runs on TockOS to provide better isolation and cleaner OS abstractions in support of security. Rust’s strong memory safety and zero-cost abstractions makes the code less vulnerable to logical attacks. TockOS, with its sandboxed architecture, offers the isolation between the security key applet, the drivers, and kernel that is needed to build defense-in-depth. Our TockOS contributions, including our flash-friendly storage system and patches, have all been upstreamed to the TockOS repository. We’ve done this to encourage everyone to build upon the work.

How to get involved and contribute to OpenSK 

To learn more about OpenSK and how to experiment with making your own security key, you can check out our GitHub repository today. With the help of the research and developer communities, we hope OpenSK over time will bring innovative features, stronger embedded crypto, and encourage widespread adoption of trusted phishing-resistant tokens and a passwordless web.

Acknowledgements

We also want to thank our OpenSK collaborators: Adam Langley, Alexei Czeskis, Arnar Birgisson, Borbala Benko, Christiaan Brand, Dirk Balfanz, Dominic Rizzo, Fabian Kaczmarczyck, Guillaume Endignoux, Jeff Hodges, Julien Cretin, Mark Risher, Oxana Comanescu, Tadek Pietraszek

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IoT laws are coming: What to expect

No more default logins on new IoT devices if UK legislators get their way

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Vulnerability Reward Program: 2019 Year in Review

Posted by Natasha Pabrai, Jan Keller, Jessica Lin, Anna Hupa, and Adam Bacchus, Vulnerability Reward Programs at Google

Our Vulnerability Reward Programs were created to reward researchers for protecting users by telling us about the security bugs they find. Their discoveries help keep our users, and the internet at large, safe. We look forward to even more collaboration in 2020 and beyond.

2019 has been another record-breaking year for us, thanks to our researchers! We paid out over $6.5 million in rewards, doubling what we’ve ever paid in a single year. At the same time our researchers decided to donate an all-time-high of $500,000 to charity this year. That’s 5x the amount we have ever previously donated in a single year. Thanks so much for your hard work and generous giving!

Since 2010, we have expanded our VRPs to cover additional Google product areas, including Chrome, Android, and most recently Abuse. We’ve also expanded to cover popular third party apps on Google Play, helping identify and disclose vulnerabilities to impacted app developers. Since then we have paid out more than $21 million in rewards*. As we have done in years past, we are sharing our 2019 Year in Review across these programs.

What’s changed in the past year?

  • Chrome’s VRP increased its reward payouts by tripling the maximum baseline reward amount from $5,000 to $15,000 and doubling the maximum reward amount for high quality reports from $15,000 to $30,000. The additional bonus given to bugs found by fuzzers running under the Chrome Fuzzer Program is also doubling to $1,000. More details can be found in their program rules page.
  • Android Security Rewards expanded its program with new exploit categories and higher rewards. The top prize is now $1 million for a full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence which compromises the Titan M secure element on Pixel devices. And if you achieve that exploit on specific developer preview versions of Android, we’re adding in a 50% bonus, making the top prize $1.5 million. See our program rules page for more details around our new exploit categories and rewards.
  • Abuse VRP engaged in outreach and education to increase researchers awareness about the program, presenting an overview of our Abuse program in Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam, the UK and US.
  • The Google Play Security Reward Program expanded scope to any app with over 100 million installs, resulting in over $650,000 in rewards in the second half of 2019.
  • The Developer Data Protection Reward Program was launched in 2019 to identify and mitigate data abuse issues in Android apps, OAuth projects, and Chrome extensions.
We also had the goal of increasing engagement with our security researchers over the last year at events such as BountyCon in Singapore and ESCAL8 in London. These events not only allow us to get to know each of our bug hunters but also provide a space for bug hunters to meet one another and hopefully work together on future exploits.
A hearty thank you to everyone that contributed to the VRPs in 2019. We are looking forward to increasing engagement even more in 2020 as both Google and Chrome VRPs will turn 10. Stay tuned for celebrations. Follow us on @GoogleVRP

*The total amount was updated on January 28; it previously said we paid out more than $15 million in rewards.

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