5 ms·

It's not about consistently being bugged though--I see two troubling implications to this; a) Government A decides target B has valuable communications, and us

by j42 11y ago

It's not about consistently being bugged though--I see two troubling implications to this; a) Government A decides target B has valuable communications, and uses this audio capture functionality as an attack vector (ie, a MiTM server modifies the chrome binary blob request slightly to a version where chunked audio is sent back to a control server). b) (more likely) This binary blob contains a voice recognition algorithm, which can of course detect the phrase "ok, google." Imagine they wanted to detect other phrases, like "drugs" or "travel." Small modifications could easily allow an arbitrary list of "hot" terms to be targeted. Then no audio is even sent back from the user's computer--a small flag in your google account is simply set attaching your profile to "high risk" terms overheard, and databased, where it could later be queried by law enforcement. It's troubling because there's no transparency, and if you spend a little time brainstorming about the ways this could be used maliciously (most likely by a nation-state) there are many possibilities...

lern_too_spel 11y ago
This is true of any auto-updating software, including your operating system and all evergreen browsers. The problem with this blog post is that the author gets in a tizzy about what could happen, not what is actually happening. What could happen has not been affected by the recent Chromium screw-up, nor is it specific to Chromium.
- fixermark 11y ago
  That's not really a problem; it's a feature. The author is pointing out the significance of defense-in-depth to protect against the scenarios that can happen in light of what has happened.
- j42 11y ago
  Except Chromium as a framework is in an interesting position... and I think the threat is not even in how this could be used with malicious intent, but rather how easy it allows for indiscriminate passive logging on a grand scale. Chrome is a very widely-distributed piece of trusted, self-updating software. It's also (for most users) directly connected to your google account--which is in many ways an intimate mirror to your identity. You're absolutely right that this issue is not unique to Chrome, and can (and does) arise in any piece of software from native OSes & apps to 3rd party binaries. I also think Chrome specifically warrants added concern for its ubiquity and de-facto link to your identity. Anyone can use these techniques to target an individual, network, or system, but Chrome is one of the most widely distributed pieces of software designed with analytics in mind, from a company known for designing algorithms to improve contextual awareness. What that means is, it's uniquely trivial to add in a few vectors of phonemes to recognize certain words/phrases, flip on an analytics pixel, and instantly have 100's of millions of devices running chrome associate their linked google accounts with this word/phrase.
valas 11y ago
What sort of transparency would satisfy you in this case?
- j42 11y ago
  In this case, either the speech-recognition feature being included in the chromium source (and not as a raw network-reconciled binary), or else have the feature be opt-in, not enabled by default.
mindslight 11y ago
c) (even more likely) The algorithm released in the blob is much simpler than the one locked in their servers, and it has many false positives. The audio from false positives is archived to help improve the simplistic algorithm.

by j42 11y ago

lern_too_spel 11y ago

This is true of any auto-updating software, including your operating system and all evergreen browsers. The problem with this blog post is that the author gets in a tizzy about what could happen, not what is actually happening. What could happen has not been affected by the recent Chromium screw-up, nor is it specific to Chromium.

fixermark 11y ago
That's not really a problem; it's a feature. The author is pointing out the significance of defense-in-depth to protect against the scenarios that can happen in light of what has happened.
j42 11y ago
Except Chromium as a framework is in an interesting position... and I think the threat is not even in how this could be used with malicious intent, but rather how easy it allows for indiscriminate passive logging on a grand scale. Chrome is a very widely-distributed piece of trusted, self-updating software. It's also (for most users) directly connected to your google account--which is in many ways an intimate mirror to your identity. You're absolutely right that this issue is not unique to Chrome, and can (and does) arise in any piece of software from native OSes & apps to 3rd party binaries. I also think Chrome specifically warrants added concern for its ubiquity and de-facto link to your identity. Anyone can use these techniques to target an individual, network, or system, but Chrome is one of the most widely distributed pieces of software designed with analytics in mind, from a company known for designing algorithms to improve contextual awareness. What that means is, it's uniquely trivial to add in a few vectors of phonemes to recognize certain words/phrases, flip on an analytics pixel, and instantly have 100's of millions of devices running chrome associate their linked google accounts with this word/phrase.

valas 11y ago

What sort of transparency would satisfy you in this case?

j42 11y ago
In this case, either the speech-recognition feature being included in the chromium source (and not as a raw network-reconciled binary), or else have the feature be opt-in, not enabled by default.

mindslight 11y ago

c) (even more likely) The algorithm released in the blob is much simpler than the one locked in their servers, and it has many false positives. The audio from false positives is archived to help improve the simplistic algorithm.