In the United States and other countries a Driver's License is not only used to convey driving privileges, it is also commonly used to prove identity or personal details.
Presenting a Driving License is simple, right? You hand over the card to the individual wishing to confirm your identity (the so-called “Relying Party” or “Verifier”); they check the security features of the plastic card (hologram, micro-printing, etc.) to ensure it’s not counterfeit; they check that it’s really your license, making sure you look like the portrait image printed on the card; and they read the data they’re interested in, typically your age, legal name, address etc. Finally, the verifier needs to hand back the plastic card.
Most people are so familiar with this process that they don’t think twice about it, or consider the privacy implications. In the following we’ll discuss how the new and soon-to-be-released ISO 18013-5 standard will improve on nearly every aspect of the process, and what it has to do with Android.
The ISO 18013-5 “Mobile driving licence (mDL) application” standard has been written by a diverse group of people representing driving license issuers (e.g. state governments in the US), relying parties (federal and state governments, including law enforcement), academia, industry (including Google), and many others. This ISO standard allows for construction of Mobile Driving License (mDL) applications which users can carry in their phone and can use instead of the plastic card.
Instead of handing over your plastic card, you open the mDL application on your phone and press a button to share your mDL. The Verifier (aka “Relying Party”) has their own device with an mDL reader application and they either scan a QR code shown in your mDL app or do an NFC tap. The QR code (or NFC tap) conveys an ephemeral cryptographic public key and hardware address the mDL reader can connect to.
Once the mDL reader obtains the cryptographic key it creates its own ephemeral keypair and establishes an encrypted and authenticated, secure wireless channel (BLE, Wifi Aware or NFC)). The mDL reader uses this secure channel to request data, such as the portrait image or what kinds of vehicles you're allowed to drive, and can also be used to ask more abstract questions such as “is the holder older than 18?”
Crucially, the mDL application can ask the user to approve which data to release and may require the user to authenticate with fingerprint or face — none of which a passive plastic card could ever do.
With this explanation in mind, let’s see how presenting an mDL application compares with presenting a plastic-card driving license:
These are some of the reasons why we think mDL is a big win for end users in terms of privacy.
One commonality between plastic-card driving licences and the mDL is how the relying party verifies that the person presenting the license is the authorized holder. In both cases, the verifier manually compares the appearance of the individual against a portrait photo, either printed on the plastic or transmitted electronically and research has shown that it’s hard for individuals to match strangers to portrait images.
The initial version of ISO 18013-5 won’t improve on this but the ISO committee working on the standard is already investigating ways to utilize on-device biometrics sensors to perform this match in a secure and privacy-protecting way. The hope is that improved fidelity in the process helps reduce unauthorized use of identity documents.
Through facilities such as hardware-based Keystore, Android already offers excellent support for security and privacy-sensitive applications and in fact it’s already possible to implement the ISO 18013-5 standard on Android without further platform changes. Many organizations participating in the ISO committee have already implemented 18013-5 Android apps.
That said, with purpose-built support in the operating system it is possible to provide better security and privacy properties. Android 11 includes the Identity Credential APIs at the Framework level along with a Hardware Abstraction Layer interface which can be implemented by Android OEMs to enable identity credential support in Secure Hardware. Using the Identity Credential API, the Trusted Computing Base of mDL applications does not include the application or even Android itself. This will be particularly important for future versions where the verifier must trust the device to identify and authenticate the user, for example through fingerprint or face matching on the holder's own device. It’s likely such a solution will require certified hardware and/or software and certification is not practical if the TCB includes the hundreds of millions of lines of code in Android and the Linux kernel.
One advantage of plastic cards is that they don't require power or network communication to be useful. Putting all your licenses on your phone could seem inconvenient in cases where your device is low on battery, or does not have enough battery life to start. The Android Identity Credential HAL therefore provides support for a mode called Direct Access, where the license is still available through an NFC tap even when the phone's battery is too low to boot it up. Device makers can implement this mode, but it will require hardware support that will take several years to roll out.
For devices without the Identity Credential HAL, we have an Android Jetpack which implements the same API and works on nearly every Android device in the world (API level 24 or later). If the device has hardware-backed Identity Credential support then this Jetpack simply forwards calls to the platform API. Otherwise, an Android Keystore-backed implementation will be used. While the Android Keystore-backed implementation does not provide the same level of security and privacy, it is perfectly adequate for both holders and issuers in cases where all data is issuer-signed. Because of this, the Jetpack is the preferred way to use the Identity Credential APIs. We also made available sample open-source mDL and mDL Reader applications using the Identity Credential APIs.
Android now includes APIs for managing and presenting with identity documents in a more secure and privacy-focused way than was previously possible. These can be used to implement ISO 18013-5 mDLs but the APIs are generic enough to be usable for other kinds of electronic documents, from school ID or bonus program club cards to passports.
Additionally, the Android Security and Privacy team actively participates in the ISO committees where these standards are written and also works with civil liberties groups to ensure it has a positive impact on our end users.
Open source software is the foundation of many modern software products. Over the years, developers increasingly have relied on reusable open source components for their applications. It is paramount that these open source components are secure and reliable, as weaknesses impact those that build upon it.
Google cares deeply about the security of the open source ecosystem and recently launched the Open Source Security Foundation with other industry partners. Fuzzing is an automated testing technique to find bugs by feeding unexpected inputs to a target program. At Google, we leverage fuzzing at scale to find tens of thousands of security vulnerabilities and stability bugs. This summer, as part of Google’s OSS internship initiative, we hosted 50 interns to improve the state of fuzz testing in the open source ecosystem.
The fuzzing interns worked towards integrating new projects and improving existing ones in OSS-Fuzz, our continuous fuzzing service for the open source community (which has 350+ projects, 22,700 bugs, 89% fixed). Several widely used open source libraries including but not limited to nginx, postgresql, usrsctp, and openexr, now have continuous fuzzing coverage as a result of these efforts.
Another group of interns focused on improving the security of the Linux kernel. syzkaller, a kernel fuzzing tool from Google, has been instrumental in finding kernel vulnerabilities in various operating systems. The interns were tasked with improving the fuzzing coverage by adding new descriptions to syzkaller like ip tunnels, io_uring, and bpf_lsm for example, refining the interface description language, and advancing kernel fault injection capabilities.
Some interns chose to write fuzzers for Android and Chrome, which are open source projects that billions of internet users rely on. For Android, the interns contributed several new fuzzers for uncovered areas - network protocols such as pppd and dns, audio codecs like monoblend, g722, and android framework. On the Chrome side, interns improved existing blackbox fuzzers, particularly in the areas: DOM, IPC, media, extensions, and added new libprotobuf-based fuzzers for Mojo.
Our last set of interns researched quite a few under-explored areas of fuzzing, some of which were fuzzer benchmarking, ML based fuzzing, differential fuzzing, bazel rules for build simplification and made useful contributions.
Over the course of the internship, our interns have reported over 150 security vulnerabilities and 750 functional bugs. Given the overall success of these efforts, we plan to continue hosting fuzzing internships every year to help secure the open source ecosystem and teach incoming open source contributors about the importance of fuzzing. For more information on the Google internship program and other student opportunities, check out careers.google.com/students. We encourage you to apply.
Google Keyboard (a.k.a Gboard) has a critical mission to provide frictionless input on Android to empower users to communicate accurately and express themselves effortlessly. In order to accomplish this mission, Gboard must also protect users' private and sensitive data. Nothing users type is sent to Google servers. We recently launched privacy-preserving input by further advancing the latest federated technologies. In Android 11, Gboard also launched the contextual input suggestion experience by integrating on-device smarts into the user's daily communication in a privacy-preserving way.
Before Android 11, input suggestions were surfaced to users in several different places. In Android 11, Gboard launched a consistent and coordinated approach to access contextual input suggestions. For the first time, we've brought Smart Replies to the keyboard suggestions - powered by system intelligence running entirely on device. The smart input suggestions are rendered with a transparent layer on top of Gboard’s suggestion strip. This structure maintains the trust boundaries between the Android platform and Gboard, meaning sensitive personal content cannot be not accessed by Gboard. The suggestions are only sent to the app after the user taps to accept them.
For instance, when a user receives the message “Have a virtual coffee at 5pm?” in Whatsapp, on-device system intelligence predicts smart text and emoji replies “Sounds great!” and “👍”. Android system intelligence can see the incoming message but Gboard cannot. In Android 11, these Smart Replies are rendered by the Android platform on Gboard’s suggestion strip as a transparent layer. The suggested reply is generated by the system intelligence. When the user taps the suggestion, Android platform sends it to the input field directly. If the user doesn't tap the suggestion, gBoard and the app cannot see it. In this way, Android and Gboard surface the best of Google smarts whilst keeping users' data private: none of their data goes to any app, including the keyboard, unless they've tapped a suggestion.
Additionally, federated learning has enabled Gboard to train intelligent input models across many devices while keeping everything individual users type on their device. Today, the emoji is as common as punctuation - and have become the way for our users to express themselves in messaging. Our users want a way to have fresh and diversified emojis to better express their thoughts in messaging apps. Recently, we launched new on-device transformer models that are fine-tuned with federated learning in Gboard, to produce more contextual emoji predictions for English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Furthermore, following the success of privacy-preserving machine learning techniques, Gboard continues to leverage federated analytics to understand how Gboard is used from decentralized data. What we've learned from privacy-preserving analysis has let us make better decisions in our product.
When a user shares an emoji in a conversation, their phone keeps an ongoing count of which emojis are used. Later, when the phone is idle, plugged in, and connected to WiFi, Google’s federated analytics server invites the device to join a “round” of federated analytics data computation with hundreds of other participating phones. Every device involved in one round will compute the emoji share frequency, encrypt the result and send it a federated analytics server. Although the server can’t decrypt the data individually, the final tally of total emoji counts can be decrypted when combining encrypted data across devices. The aggregated data shows that the most popular emoji is 😂 in Whatsapp, 😭 in Roblox(gaming), and ✔ in Google Docs. Emoji 😷 moved up from 119th to 42nd in terms of frequency during COVID-19.
Gboard always has a strong commitment to Google’s Privacy Principles. Gboard strives to build privacy-preserving effortless input products for users to freely express their thoughts in 900+ languages while safeguarding user data. We will keep pushing the state of the art in smart input technologies on Android while safeguarding user data. Stay tuned!
To check whether you have any compromised passwords, Chrome sends a copy of your usernames and passwords to Google using a special form of encryption. This lets Google check them against lists of credentials known to be compromised, but Google cannot derive your username or password from this encrypted copy.
We notify you when you have compromised passwords on websites, but it can be time-consuming to go find the relevant form to change your password. To help, we’re adding support for ".well-known/change-password" URLs that let Chrome take users directly to the right “change password” form after they’ve been alerted that their password has been compromised.
Along with these improvements, Chrome is also bringing Safety Check to mobile. In our next release, we will launch Safety Check on iOS and Android, which includes checking for compromised passwords, telling you if Safe Browsing is enabled, and whether the version of Chrome you are running is updated with the latest security protections. You will also be able to use Chrome on iOS to autofill saved login details into other apps or browsers.
In Chrome 86 we’ll also be launching a number of additional features to improve user security, including:
Enhanced Safe Browsing for Android
Earlier this year, we launched Enhanced Safe Browsing for desktop, which gives Chrome users the option of more advanced security protections.
When you turn on Enhanced Safe Browsing, Chrome can proactively protect you against phishing, malware, and other dangerous sites by sharing real-time data with Google’s Safe Browsing service. Among our users who have enabled checking websites and downloads in real time, our predictive phishing protections see a roughly 20% drop in users typing their passwords into phishing sites.
Improvements to password filling on iOS
We recently launched Touch-to-fill for passwords on Android to prevent phishing attacks. To improve security on iOS too, we’re introducing a biometric authentication step before autofilling passwords. On iOS, you’ll now be able to authenticate using Face ID, Touch ID, or your phone passcode. Additionally, Chrome Password Manager allows you to autofill saved passwords into iOS apps or browsers if you enable Chrome autofill in Settings.
Update (10/07/2020): Mixed form warnings were originally scheduled for Chrome 86, but will be delayed until Chrome 87
Secure HTTPS pages may sometimes still have non-secure features. Earlier this year, Chrome began securing and blocking what’s known as “mixed content”, when secure pages incorporate insecure content. But there are still other ways that HTTPS pages can create security risks for users, such as offering downloads over non-secure links, or using forms that don’t submit data securely.
To better protect users from these threats, Chrome 86 is introducing mixed form warnings on desktop and Android to alert and warn users before submitting a non-secure form that’s embedded in an HTTPS page.
Additionally, Chrome 86 will block or warn on some insecure downloads initiated by secure pages. Currently, this change affects commonly abused file types, but eventually secure pages will only be able to initiate secure downloads of any type. For more details, see Chrome’s plan to gradually block mixed downloads altogether
We encourage developers to update their forms and downloads to use secure connections for the safety and privacy of their users.
Google’s Android Security & Privacy team has launched the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative (APVI) to manage security issues specific to Android OEMs. The APVI is designed to drive remediation and provide transparency to users about issues we have discovered at Google that affect device models shipped by Android partners.
Android incorporates industry-leading security features and every day we work with developers and device implementers to keep the Android platform and ecosystem safe. As part of that effort, we have a range of existing programs to enable security researchers to report security issues they have found. For example, you can report vulnerabilities in Android code via the Android Security Rewards Program (ASR), and vulnerabilities in popular third-party Android apps through the Google Play Security Rewards Program. Google releases ASR reports in Android Open Source Project (AOSP) based code through the Android Security Bulletins (ASB). These reports are issues that could impact all Android based devices. All Android partners must adopt ASB changes in order to declare the current month’s Android security patch level (SPL). But until recently, we didn’t have a clear way to process Google-discovered security issues outside of AOSP code that are unique to a much smaller set of specific Android OEMs. The APVI aims to close this gap, adding another layer of security for this targeted set of Android OEMs.
The APVI covers Google-discovered issues that could potentially affect the security posture of an Android device or its user and is aligned to ISO/IEC 29147:2018 Information technology -- Security techniques -- Vulnerability disclosure recommendations. The initiative covers a wide range of issues impacting device code that is not serviced or maintained by Google (these are handled by the Android Security Bulletins).
The APVI has already processed a number of security issues, improving user protection against permissions bypasses, execution of code in the kernel, credential leaks and generation of unencrypted backups. Below are a few examples of what we’ve found, the impact and OEM remediation efforts.
In some versions of a third-party pre-installed over-the-air (OTA) update solution, a custom system service in the Android framework exposed privileged APIs directly to the OTA app. The service ran as the system user and did not require any permissions to access, instead checking for knowledge of a hardcoded password. The operations available varied across versions, but always allowed access to sensitive APIs, such as silently installing/uninstalling APKs, enabling/disabling apps and granting app permissions. This service appeared in the code base for many device builds across many OEMs, however it wasn’t always registered or exposed to apps. We’ve worked with impacted OEMs to make them aware of this security issue and provided guidance on how to remove or disable the affected code.
A popular web browser pre-installed on many devices included a built-in password manager for sites visited by the user. The interface for this feature was exposed to WebView through JavaScript loaded in the context of each web page. A malicious site could have accessed the full contents of the user’s credential store. The credentials are encrypted at rest, but used a weak algorithm (DES) and a known, hardcoded key. This issue was reported to the developer and updates for the app were issued to users.
The checkUidPermission method in the PackageManagerService class was modified in the framework code for some devices to allow special permissions access to some apps. In one version, the method granted apps with the shared user ID com.google.uid.shared any permission they requested and apps signed with the same key as the com.google.android.gsf package any permission in their manifest. Another version of the modification allowed apps matching a list of package names and signatures to pass runtime permission checks even if the permission was not in their manifest. These issues have been fixed by the OEMs.
checkUidPermission
PackageManagerService
com.google.uid.shared
com.google.android.gsf
Keep an eye out at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/apvi/ for future disclosures of Google-discovered security issues under this program, or find more information there on issues that have already been disclosed.
Acknowledgements: Scott Roberts, Shailesh Saini and Łukasz Siewierski, Android Security and Privacy Team
Follow