Posted by Rex Pan and Xueqin Cui, Google Open Source Security Team In December 2022, we released the open source OSV-Scanner tool, and earlier this year, we open sourced OSV-SCALIBR. OSV-Scanner and OSV-SCALIBR, together with OSV.dev are components of an open platform for managing vulnerability metadata and enabling simple and accurate matching and remediation of known vulnerabilities. Our goal is to simplify and streamline vulnerability management for developers and security teams alike. Today, we're thrilled to announce the launch of OSV-Scanner V2.0.0, following the announcement of the b ..read more

Posted by Dirk Göhmann In 2024, our Vulnerability Reward Program confirmed the ongoing value of engaging with the security research community to make Google and its products safer. This was evident as we awarded just shy of $12 million to over 600 researchers based in countries around the globe across all of our programs. Vulnerability Reward Program 2024 in Numbers You can learn about who’s reporting to the Vulnerability Reward Program via our Leaderboard – and find out more about our youngest security researchers who’ve recently joined the ranks of Google bug hunters. VRP ..read more

Posted by Lyubov Farafonova, Product Manager, Phone by Google; Alberto Pastor Nieto, Sr. Product Manager Google Messages and RCS Spam and Abuse Google has been at the forefront of protecting users from the ever-growing threat of scams and fraud with cutting-edge technologies and security expertise for years. In 2024, scammers used increasingly sophisticated tactics and generative AI-powered tools to steal more than $1 trillion from mobile consumers globally, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance. And with the majority of scams now delivered through phone calls and text messages, we’ve bee ..read more

Posted by Alex Rebert, Security Foundations, Ben Laurie, Research, Murali Vijayaraghavan, Research and Alex Richardson, Silicon For decades, memory safety vulnerabilities have been at the center of various security incidents across the industry, eroding trust in technology and costing billions. Traditional approaches, like code auditing, fuzzing, and exploit mitigations – while helpful – haven't been enough to stem the tide, while incurring an increasingly high cost. In this blog post, we are calling for a fundamental shift: a collective commitment to finally eliminate this class of vulne ..read more

Posted by Bethel Otuteye and Khawaja Shams (Android Security and Privacy Team), and Ron Aquino (Play Trust and Safety) Android and Google Play comprise a vibrant ecosystem with billions of users around the globe and millions of helpful apps. Keeping this ecosystem safe for users and developers remains our top priority. However, like any flourishing ecosystem, it also attracts its share of bad actors. That’s why every year, we continue to invest in more ways to protect our community and fight bad actors, so users can trust the apps they download from Google Play and developers can build thrivin ..read more

Posted by the Agentic AI Security Team Modern AI systems, like Gemini, are more capable than ever, helping retrieve data and perform actions on behalf of users. However, data from external sources present new security challenges if untrusted sources are available to execute instructions on AI systems. Attackers can take advantage of this by hiding malicious instructions in data that are likely to be retrieved by the AI system, to manipulate its behavior. This type of attack is commonly referred to as an "indirect prompt injection," a term first coined by Kai Greshake and the NVIDIA team ..read more

Posted by Jianing Sandra Guo, Product Manager, Android, Nataliya Stanetsky, Staff Program Manager, Android Today, people around the world rely on their mobile devices to help them stay connected with friends and family, manage finances, keep track of healthcare information and more – all from their fingertips. But a stolen device in the wrong hands can expose sensitive data, leaving you vulnerable to identity theft, financial fraud and privacy breaches. This is why we recently launched Android theft protection, a comprehensive suite of features designed to protect you and your data at every st ..read more

Posted by Erik Varga, Vulnerability Management, and Rex Pan, Open Source Security Team In December 2022, we announced OSV-Scanner, a tool to enable developers to easily scan for vulnerabilities in their open source dependencies. Together with the open source community, we’ve continued to build this tool, adding remediation features, as well as expanding ecosystem support to 11 programming languages and 20 package manager formats.  Today, we’re excited to release OSV-SCALIBR (Software Composition Analysis LIBRary), an extensible library for SCA and file system scanning. OSV-SCALIBR ..read more

Posted by Greg Mucci, Product Manager, Artifact Analysis, Oliver Chang, Senior Staff Engineering, OSV, and Charl de Nysschen, Product Manager OSV DevOps teams dedicated to securing their supply chain and predicting potential risks consistently face novel threats. Fortunately, they can now improve their image and container security by harnessing Google-grade vulnerability scanning, which offers expanded open-source coverage. A significant benefit of utilizing Google Cloud Platform is its integrated security tools, including Artifact Analysis. This scanning service leverages the same infrastr ..read more

Posted by Hyunwook Baek, Duy Truong, Justin Dunlap and Lauren Stan from Android Security and Privacy, and Oliver Chang from the Google Open Source Security Team Today, we are announcing the availability of Vanir, a new open-source security patch validation tool. Introduced at Android Bootcamp in April, Vanir gives Android platform developers the power to quickly and efficiently scan their custom platform code for missing security patches and identify applicable available patches. Vanir significantly accelerates patch validation by automating this process, allowing OEMs to ensure devices are ..read more