9个中国的Pinyin键盘中的8个 让窃听者读到近十亿人的字

The keyboard on a phone sold in China is not a piece of glass with letters on it. It is a cloud service. On April 23, 2024, Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto published Report No. 175, “The not-so-silent type,” by Jeffrey Knockel, Mona Wang, and Zoë Reichert. They had pulled cloud-based pinyin keyboards from nine vendors between August and November 2023: Baidu, Honor, Huawei, iFlytek, OPPO, Samsung, Tencent, Vivo, and Xiaomi. Eight of the nine had at least one app in which a passive eavesdropper on the network could recover everything a person typed. Huawei was the exception in the versions they tested. Combined with the lab’s August 2023 findings on Tencent’s Sogou Input Method, the researchers estimated that up to a billion users sat inside the blast radius. That figure is an estimate of exposure, not a head count of people whose chats were confirmed stolen.

Chinese has tens of thousands of characters. Most people type pinyin, Latin letters for Mandarin sounds, and an input method editor guesses the characters. The guess is better if a server sees what you have typed so far, so the big keyboards ship keystrokes to a cloud. That hop is the entire attack. Citizen Lab’s 报告 and the plain-language FAQ that came with it said an internet provider, a VPN operator, or another user on the same Wi-Fi could read the traffic without installing anything on the phone and without sending a packet back. Knockel told MIT Technology Review the lab went looking because Sogou had been so easy. “Because we had so much luck looking at this one, we figured maybe this generalizes to the others, and they suffer from the same kinds of problems for the same reason that the one did,” he said, “and as it turns out, we were unfortunately right.”

每个卖家实际运出的东西

失败不是一个错误复制了九次 。 他们是一个有不良习惯的家庭。

• 腾讯QQ平宁. Android 8.6.3 and Windows 6.6.6304.400 talked to cloud servers in the same family as Sogou and inherited the same CBC padding-oracle flaw. A padding oracle lets an attacker turn a “decrypt this” error into the original text. Tencent told researchers it aimed to move EncryptWall requests to HTTPS by the end of the first quarter of 2024, except for end-of-life products. Sogou was updated. QQ Pinyin, which had not received an update since 2020 and was still offered for download, was not.
• (原始内容存档于2017-10-21). Baidu IME. The Windows app used a homemade protocol, BAIDUv3.1, that Citizen Lab could decrypt. The design generated an “AES” key in a way that amounted to a hardcoded secret, then sometimes ran a modified AES with extra permutations or a missing round. Security through obscurity, written down. Android and iOS builds had their own broken variants. Baidu’s cloud hosts in the report included UDP endpoints at baidu.com.
• iFlytek on Android. 加密太弱, 无法隐藏输入的东西 。 iFlytek后来修复了实验室报告的问题.
• 三星键盘在机器人上。 在被测试的构建中,键打数据完全没有加密. 三星后来自修了键盘. Samsung设备上的Bundled Baidu软件是另一个问题。
• 小美,行动,活,还有荣誉 工厂键盘以索古(Sogou),拜都(Baidu)或iFlytek(iFlytek)为原料所建,所以这个洞被运入了盒子. 荣誉的缺省是一座拜都建筑. Honor告诉公民实验室向Baidu披露,实验室已经这样做了.

Jedidiah Crandall, a computer scientist at Arizona State University who was not an author of the report, put the consequence in one line for IEEE Spectrum: “Whatever Chinese-language users of your app might have typed into it has been exposed for years.” Passwords, chat, search boxes, payment fields. The keyboard does not know which of those is a secret. It only knows characters.

不是后门 a 2000年代的密码。

Citizen Lab did not call these deliberate government backdoors. Beijing has other ways to collect this data, and Chinese regulators have spent years telling vendors to harden software. The duller explanation is the one that should worry anyone who types on a phone. Many of these input methods were written before TLS was the default. Some developers still refuse widely used Western cryptographic standards because of a real history of standards that were poisoned. Dual_EC_DRBG, the random-number generator later shown to contain a backdoor, is the example the researchers cite. The substitute was worse: a homemade cipher that falls over in a student lab. The Five Eyes intelligence alliance has previously exploited similar holes in Chinese apps. Citizen Lab said it was possible the same class of bug had already been used for mass collection of keystrokes. That is a possibility the report states, not a claim that a named agency was sitting on these particular servers.

The disclosure scorecard, measured again as of April 1, 2024, and restated when the work was published at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in October 2024, is more precise than “the companies patched it.” iFlytek, OPPO, and Samsung moved vulnerable paths toward TLS and fixed what the lab could exploit. Vivo, Xiaomi, and Baidu did not answer the disclosure emails, but later testing showed Vivo and Xiaomi had updated. Baidu fixed the worst of the Windows flaw and then switched to a different proprietary protocol instead of TLS. Citizen Lab said it no longer had a full working decrypt against those updated Baidu apps, and it also said the remaining cryptography was still weak enough that people should not trust it. The two products the lab could still exploit on that date were Honor’s preinstalled Baidu keyboard and Tencent’s QQ Pinyin.

Baidu later told some reporters that the Honor-customized build had been fixed in September 2023 and pushed out with operating-system updates. Citizen Lab’s April 1, 2024, retest still had a working exploit against Honor’s default keyboard. Both statements can be printed. They cannot both describe the same phone if that phone never received the update. Geoblocked app stores are how that happens. A security fix that is withheld from the country where the keyboard is the default is not a fix. It is a press release. Citizen Lab asked stores to stop geoblocking security updates. The lab has not published a 2025 or 2026 retest of these nine vendors, so the April 2024 scorecard is the last laboratory snapshot, not a certificate that every phone in a drawer has been patched.

Knockel and Wang walked through the same attacks on the DEF CON 32 stage in Las Vegas on August 11, 2024, in a talk whose title dropped the politeness: breaking network crypto in almost every popular Chinese keyboard app. The recording is the version of the paper a person can watch. It does not change the April 1 scorecard. It does make the attack less abstract. A padding oracle and a hardcoded key are not theoretical once someone decrypts a sentence live.

The practical advice from the FAQ is short. QQ Pinyin users should switch keyboards. Honor owners should turn off the preinstalled Baidu input method and use something else. Anyone still on a Sogou, Baidu, or iFlytek keyboard, including the copy that came with the phone, should update the app and the operating system and then assume the old traffic is already gone. Cloud prediction is a product feature. It is also a decision to put every sentence on a wire. The same week Citizen Lab published, The AEGIS Alliance covered the United Kingdom’s 《产品安全和电信基础设施法》禁止对廉价连接设备设定可猜到的默认密码。法规可以禁止默认密码。 它不能改装一个从没有过TLS的密码. 关于这个旁边的监控文件,见AEGIS联盟的 黑客新闻 书桌, 维基解密间谍文件,以及后来的报告 Google 摧毁一个一直使用手机互联网连接的影子网络.