How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk

“There’s a lot more ambiguity to resolve when typing Chinese characters using a Latin alphabet,” says Mona Wang, an Open Technology Fund fellow at the Citizen Lab and another coauthor of the report. Because the same phonetic spelling can be matched to dozens or even hundreds of Chinese characters, a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inMIT Technology Review.com
Main Author Yang, Zeyi
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge Technology Review, Inc 21.08.2023
Subjects
Encryption
Keyboards
Libraries
Phonetics
Privacy
Researchers
Smartphones
Software
Software upgrading
Spelling
Third party
China
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Summary:“There’s a lot more ambiguity to resolve when typing Chinese characters using a Latin alphabet,” says Mona Wang, an Open Technology Fund fellow at the Citizen Lab and another coauthor of the report. Because the same phonetic spelling can be matched to dozens or even hundreds of Chinese characters, and these characters also can be paired in different ways to become different words, a keyboard app that has been fine-tuned to the Chinese language can perform much better than the default keyboard. [...]downloading third-party keyboard software became standard practice for everyone in China. Over the years, its market dominance has waned; as of last year, Baidu Input Method was the top keyboard app in China, with 607 million users and 46.4% of the market share. (Sogou is also used on other platforms like MacOS and Linux, but the researchers haven’t looked into them.) One critical difference between the two encryption systems, the Citizen Lab found, is that Sogou’s EncryptWall is still vulnerable to an exploit that was revealed in 2002 and can turn encrypted data back into plain text.
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