Smartphone keyboard apps are used by billions and some of the popular phone brands face massive security risk because of these apps. We are talking about brands like Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo among others whose keyboard apps can be exploited to reveal the details about your keystrokes on the phones.
For instance, we use phones to book cabs and use online banking which requires passwords and PIN details. When you use these keyboard apps, the keystrokes are registered but not stored anywhere. These apps having the security issue could expose these keystrokes to bad actors.
The details of the latest security lapse comes via the Citizen Lab this week which has discovered the issues in keyboard apps that are also used by popular brands like Samsung and Huawei.
Keyboard Apps Facing Security Risk
– Tencent QQ Pinyin
– Baidu IME
– iFlytek IME
– Samsung keyboard
– Xiaomi phones with Baidu, iFlytek and Sogou keyboard
– Oppo with Baidu and Sogou
– Vivo with Sogou IME
– Honor with Baidu IME
It seems most of these affected keyboard apps are used in China on phones from the given brands but one cannot rule out the possible risks to millions of Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo consumers in the other parts of the world.
The researchers have clearly stated that the major risk posed by the keyboard apps can allow the hackers to decrypt the keystrokes without raising any alarm bells. The good news is that the security issue has been shared by the keyboard app developers given here and it seems that most of them, except for Honor and Tencent app developers have handled the issue as of April 1, 2024.
Citizen Lab strictly advises people using any of these phones to keep their keyboard apps up-to-date and more importantly, they should use keyboard apps that mostly keep your keystroke data on the device and not store on any cloud server.
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