Author: Phil Brass

Is This Thing On? Privacy and Your Smartphone Sensors

Smartphone Snooping Without Microphone Access Can your smartphone sensors still enable apps to eavesdrop on your conversations even after the app has been denied microphone access? It does seem possible. We dug into this question based on two research papers, “AccEar: Accelerometer Acoustic Eavesdropping with Unconstrained Vocabulary”, and “Side Eye: Characterizing the Limits of POV… Read more »

Assessing Memory Safety in Programming Languages Like Rust and Go

Can These Languages Eliminate Memory-Handling Vulnerabilities for Programmers? Much has been made recently of the memory safety provided by programming languages like Rust and Go. These languages have been designed to eliminate some of the language weaknesses that make it so easy for C and C++ programmers to write vulnerable software. These memory-safe languages are… Read more »