In this report, we examine cloud-based pinyin keyboard apps from nine vendors (Baidu, Honor, Huawei, iFlyTek, OPPO, Samsung, Tencent, Vivo, and Xiaomi) for vulnerabilities in how the apps transmit user keystrokes. Our analysis found that eight of the nine apps identified contained vulnerabilities that could be exploited to completely reveal the contents of users’ keystrokes in transit. We estimate that up to one billion users could be vulnerable to having all of their keystrokes intercepted, constituting a tremendous risk to user security.
So does this affect English/European keyboards or just Asian keyboards?
It seems like the mechanism is exploiting an insecure connection (or rather a connection using predictable encryption where the same input results in the same packets) to the cloud for translating keystrokes into logographic characters?
Did I understand correctly? I definitely didn’t do a thorough read.
I also think it’s kind of interesting Gboard wasn’t included (?)
It’s about using a cloud-based model to better predict the next keystroke.
Think of the next-word-prediction of the likes of GBoard or SwiftKey, but for just strokes/characters. There’s a local model, but it’s limited in depth and complexity, and then a cloud based one, that can do more but as shown here has security flaws.