Google's New Tracking Protection in Chrome Blocks Third-Party Cookies

Google on Thursday announced that it will start testing a new feature called "Tracking Protection" starting January 4, 2024, to 1% of Chrome users as part of its efforts to deprecate third-party cookies in the web browser.

The setting is designed to limit "cross-site tracking by restricting website access to third-party cookies by default," Anthony Chavez, vice president of Privacy Sandbox at Google, said.

Google Unveils RETVec - Gmail's New Defense Against Spam and Malicious Emails

Google has revealed a new multilingual text vectorizer called RETVec (short for Resilient and Efficient Text Vectorizer) to help detect potentially harmful content such as spam and malicious emails in Gmail.

"RETVec is trained to be resilient against character-level manipulations including insertion, deletion, typos, homoglyphs, LEET substitution, and more," according to the project's description on GitHub.

Experts Uncover Passive Method to Extract Private RSA Keys from SSH Connections

A new study has demonstrated that it's possible for passive network attackers to obtain private RSA host keys from a vulnerable SSH server by observing when naturally occurring computational faults that occur while the connection is being established.

The Secure Shell (SSH) protocol is a method for securely transmitting commands and logging in to a computer over an unsecured network. Based on a client-server architecture, SSH uses cryptography to authenticate and encrypt connections between devices.

Google Chrome's New Feature Alerts Users About Auto-Removal of Malicious Extensions

Google has announced plans to add a new feature in the upcoming version of its Chrome web browser to alert users when an extension they have installed has been removed from the Chrome Web Store.

The feature, set for release alongside Chrome 117, allows users to be notified when an add-on has been unpublished by a developer, taken down for violating Chrome Web Store policy, or marked as malware.

The tech giant said it intends to highlight such extensions under a "Safety check" category in the "Privacy and security" section of the browser settings page.

Google Messages Getting Cross-Platform End-to-End Encryption with MLS Protocol

Google has announced that it intends to add support for Message Layer Security (MLS) to its Messages service for Android and open source implementation of the specification.

"Most modern consumer messaging platforms (including Google Messages) support end-to-end encryption, but users today are limited to communicating with contacts who use the same platform," Giles Hogben, privacy engineering director at Google, said. "This is why Google is strongly supportive of regulatory efforts that require interoperability for large end-to-end messaging platforms."