ZDNet reports that Singapore is fighting the coronavirus with a new smartphone app named "TraceTogether". The app is able to estimate the distance between TraceTogether smartphones as well as the duration of such interactions. The data then is captured, encrypted, and stored locally on the user's phone for 21 days, which spans the incubation period of the virus. When needed in contact tracing, users will have to authorise the uploading of their TraceTogether data to Singapore's Ministry of Health, which then will assess the information and retrieve the mobile numbers of close contacts within that period of time.

Developed by Government Technology Agency (GovTech), alongside the health ministry, the app was designed to help speed up the contact tracing process and stem the spread of COVID-19, the government IT office said. GovTech said the current processed depended heavily on the memory of patients, who might not be ale to remember all close contacts or have the contact details and information of these individuals. The mobile app can plug the gaps and more quickly identify potential carriers, who then can monitor their health and take the necessary action sooner...

Data logs were stored locally on the mobile phone and contained only cryptographically generated temporary IDs. The data logs would be extracted only when needed by the authorities for contact tracing, it said.

Longtime Slashdot reader dbart writes: With the near ubiquitous use of smartphones in America, it's sensible to seize upon this resource to help with the coronavirus pandemic. Here's my take on a way to use smartphones to deal with the pandemic:

America does not currently have a good coronavirus test -- but they are in development. Once a test is available there should be a smartphone app ready to deploy immediately. The app should work like this: A person would be tested for the virus at a testing station and the results of the test would be entered into the app's database. The person could then go about their business, such as going back to work. Upon arriving at the place of work, the person would bring up the app on their smartphone. The app would display some information to identify the subject that was tested along with a barcode. The employer would then scan in the barcode with the app on the employer's phone which will check with the central database and report back the results of their coronavirus test and the recency of the test. The employer would decide whether to allow the person into the workplace. This could similarly be used to safely allow entry to a restaurant, airplane, theater, sporting event, etc. -- thus getting the economy functioning again.

I've only presented a rough sketch of my idea about this above and there's many nuances to how this should work. It's obvious that everyone should be tested frequently for this to be effective. This would require testing on a massive scale, but considering the damage happening to the American economy, such massive testing could easily be justified. A capability as described above would get the American economy restarted at the soonest possible time and would allow society to function until a vaccine is available. It would also be a very valuable asset to epidemiological investigators. If an app was designed with enough forethought it could be deployed internationally. I'm hoping to get not just a Slashdot conversation but a larger conversation started about the use of technology to defeat this virus. Perhaps there's a Slashdotter with the skillsets to make this happen who would like to take this on. If anyone has a contact at the CDC please forward this post to them to insure that technological solutions such as this are being considered.

HMD Global today unveiled its latest Nokia-branded mobile phones. "The Nokia 8.3 5G is the world's first global 5G phone, which means it supports bands in every country in which 5G is currently deployed," reports Android Police. "At the same time, the Nokia 5.3, 1.3, and a new roaming data plan from HMD also made their debut." From the report: Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G mobile platform, the Nokia 8.3 5G promised a future-proofed experience as it supports more 5G bands across the entire range (NSA/SA/DSS) than any handset currently on the market. It features a 6.8-inch FHD+ (2400x1080p) display with a hole-punch cutout for the 24MP selfie camera, but it's a shame to see the Nokia logo plastered on the chin. On the rear, there are four cameras including a 64MP main sensor with Zeiss optics complemented by a 12MP ultra-wide lens, plus 2MP depth and macro sensors. The fingerprint scanner lies within the power button on the side, while a USB-C port, 3.5mm headphone jack, and dedicated Google Assistant button are all onboard. Battery capacity is rated at 4,500mAh, and NFC is also included for mobile payments. The Nokia 8.3 5G starts at just 599 euros ($640) for the 6/64GB model, with an 8/128GB variant also available for 649 euros ($649) -- it'll go on sale in the summer. [The U.S. launch hasn't been announced yet, but the 8.3 is coming to Europe in summer 2020.]

MojoKid writes: Though Ryzen 4000 Series laptop processors aren't available just yet, some of AMD's partners are going to begin taking pre-orders for notebooks soon. As such, AMD is lifting the veil on additional details and the architectural enhancements that make Ryzen 4000 Series AMD's strongest mobile processor line-up to date. AMD Ryzen 4000 series CPUs are based on the Zen 2 architecture, similar to the current Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors. AMD is touting an approximate 25% IPC increase versus Zen 1-based mobile parts, but there are additional benefits that boost performance and efficiency throughout the chips as well. These are monolithic SoCs, with up to 8-cores / 16-threads, that are manufactured on TSMC's 7nm node. AMD is claiming 20% lower SoC power, 2X the perf-per-watt, 5X faster state switching, and an approximate 3.4X improvement in relative power efficiency, in comparison to its mobile platform from 2015. AMD is claiming superior single-thread CPU performance versus current-generation Intel mobile processors and significantly better multi-threaded and graphics performance versus Intel, thanks to the increased core / thread counts and integrated Vega-based GPU of its Ryzen 4000 series. Battery life performance is claimed be strong as well, due to architectural enhancements for power optimization throughout the Ryzen 4000 design. AMD Ryzen 4000 Series laptops should be shipping in market sometime in the next month or so.

Apple's A14 processor that's expected to debut this fall in Apple's iPhone 12 models is rumored to have a frequency reaching 3.1GHz. "This would be 400MHz higher than Apple's current A13 Bionic chip with a frequency of 2.7GHz," reports MacRumors. From the report: At such a frequency, the chip's Geekbench 5 running points have surged. The report mentions that the A14's single-core performance shows a score of 1658 (up 25% from the A13), and a multi-core score of 4612 points (up 33% from the A13). The extra processing power will be helpful in running simultaneous workflows, navigating through apps, and more. Apple chipmaker TSMC is expected to ramp up production of Apple's 5nm-based A14 chipsets in as early as April of this year. Also, according to 9to5Mac, Apple is reportedly planning to launch a new 5.5-inch entry-level iPhone with a solid state home button, Touch ID, and support for Apple Pay's Express Transit feature.

The 5.5-inch iPhone is expected to be priced $100 more than the 4.7-inch model that will start at $399, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. It's slated to launch at the end of March, but it's possible the launch will be delayed due to the coronavirus.

Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat quotes CNN: Robert Ross was sitting in his San Francisco home office in October 2018 when he noticed the bars on his phone had disappeared and he had no cell coverage. A few hours later, he had lost $1 millionâ¦

"I was at home at my desk and I noticed a notification on my iPhone for a withdrawal request from one of my financial institutions, and I thought, 'That's weird. I didn't make a withdrawal request,'" Ross recalled. "Then I looked back at my phone and I saw that I had no service...."

Ross was the victim of a SIM hack, an attack that occurs when hackers take over a victim's phone number by transferring it to a SIM card they control. By taking over his cellphone number, a hacker was able to gain access to his email address and ultimately his life-savings, Ross said in an interview with CNN Business...

An arrest was made in Ross' case, and the suspect has pleaded not guilty... He is suing AT&T for what he alleges was a failure by the company to protect his "sensitive and confidential account data" that resulted in "massive violations" of his privacy and "the theft of more than $1 million," according to the lawsuit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: According to new research published today, modern RAM cards are still vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks despite extensive mitigations that have been deployed by manufacturers over the past six years. These mitigations, collectively referred to as Target Row Refresh (TRR), are a combination of software and hardware fixes that have been slowly added to the design of modern RAM cards after 2014 when academics disclosed the first-ever Rowhammer attack. But in a new research paper titled today and titled "TRRespass: Exploiting the Many Sides of Target Row Refresh," a team of academics from universities in the Netherlands and Switzerland said they developed a generic tool named TRRespass that can be used to upgrade the old Rowhammer attacks to work on the new-and-improved TRR-protected RAM cards. The new upgraded attacks work on both DIMM and LPDDR4 memory types, and can be used to retrieve encryption keys from memory, or escalate an attacker's access right to sudo/SYSTEM-level.

"Motherboard built and analyzed a database of over 500 iPhones seized by law enforcement," writes Slashdot reader em1ly. "It's a deep dive into the ongoing "Going Dark" conversation." Here's an excerpt from the report: Most of all, the records compiled by Motherboard show that the capability to unlock iPhones is a fluid issue, with an ebb and flow of law enforcement sometimes being able to access devices and others not. The data solidifies that some law enforcement officials do have trouble accessing data stored on iPhones. But ultimately, our findings lead experts to circle back to the fundamental policy question: should law enforcement have guaranteed access to iPhones, with the trade-offs in iPhone security that come with that?

Out of 516 analyzed cases, 295 were marked as executed. Officials from the FBI, DEA, DHS, Homeland Security and Investigations, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were able to extract data from iPhones in investigations ranging from arson, to child exploitation, to drug trafficking. And investigators executed warrants against modern iPhones, not just older models. In some cases, investigators obtained photos, text messages, call records, browsing data, cookies, and location data from seized iPhones. Some executed search warrants explicitly mention the type of extraction performed, such as so-called "Logical" or "Advanced Logical" extraction. The latter is a term with a meaning that varies between different phone data extraction companies, but generally it relates to creating a device backup as iTunes does normally and obtaining some more data on top of that, Vladimir Katalov, the CEO of iOS forensics firm Elcomsoft, told Motherboard. Katalov said those backups can contain the sorts of pieces of data that investigators obtained, and is available to all models of iPhone.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Remember Yahoo? It's back... in phone-plan form. The Verizon-owned company is trying to get customers excited with a new "Yahoo Mobile" service that combines Verizon's 4G LTE network with Yahoo mail, for some reason. Why even put the word "Yahoo" on a re-branded Verizon data plan? Because the service comes with Yahoo Mail Pro, the ad-free version of Yahoo Mail that normally costs $3.49 a month. Yahoo Mobile also includes "24/7 Yahoo account customer service." Verizon says Yahoo Mobile has "no hidden fees" or "clingy contracts." "We're the only plan that gives you Yahoo Mail Pro for ad-free email across ALL your devices," the Yahoo Mobile website says. (Fact check: True.)

Yahoo Mobile costs $40 a month and provides "unlimited" data, with a caveat. "In times of traffic, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic," the announcement said. With the more expensive Verizon-branded unlimited service, customers have the option of buying plans with no data slowdowns until they use 25GB, 50GB, or 75GB in a month. With Yahoo Mobile, the speed limits can be imposed any time the network is congested, regardless of how much data a customer has used. Yahoo Mobile also comes with an "unlimited mobile hotspot for use with one connected device at a time," but those hotspot speeds are capped at 5Mbps. The Yahoo plan doesn't have access to Verizon's 5G network, though that's not really a big deal yet. Aside from the Yahoo-specific aspects, Yahoo Mobile is essentially the same plan offered by Visible, a Verizon subsidiary.

According to a report from The Information, Huawei expects to see a 20% drop in sales of its Android smartphones during 2020, thanks largely to U.S. government restrictions on Huawei's access to American technology, including Google software. 9to5Google reports: "Huawei's overseas smartphone sales didn't collapse last year in part because the company could keep selling some of its old models that the Google ban didn't affect," reports The Information. "But this year, Huawei expects its shipments to fall to around 190 million to 200 million smartphones, according to these people." The 240 million figure in 2019 was thanks largely in part to the timing of the U.S. ban. Huawei's extremely popular P30 and P30 Pro smartphones still shipped with Google apps in most regions and, because they were launched before the ban took place, Huawei was able to continue updating the devices, even launching a slightly revamped variant to boost sales. This year will certainly be bleaker as Huawei won't be able to support Google apps on its P40 series, set to launch later this month. Other factors such as the coronavirus outbreak could only further have an impact on Huawei's sales this year.

In a conference yesterday, Elon Musk said SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband will have latency below 20 milliseconds -- low enough to support competitive online gaming. "Despite that, the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Latency of less than 20ms would make Starlink comparable to wired broadband service. When SpaceX first began talking about its satellite plans in late 2016, it said latency would be 25ms to 35ms. But Musk has been predicting sub-20ms latency since at least May 2019, with the potential for sub-10ms latency sometime in the future. The amount of bandwidth available will be enough to support typical Internet usage, at least in rural areas, Musk said. "The bandwidth is a very complex question. But let's just say somebody will be able to watch high-def movies, play video games, and do all the things they want to do without noticing speed," he said.

So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink. "The challenge for anything that is space-based is that the size of the cell is gigantic... it's not good for high-density situations," Musk said. "We'll have some small number of customers in LA. But we can't do a lot of customers in LA because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough." [...] On the ground, Starlink's future customers will rely on user terminals that "look like a UFO on a stick," Musk said. The devices will have actuators that let them point themselves in the right direction as long as they're pointed at the sky. "It's very important that you don't need a specialist to install it," Musk said. "The goal is that... there's just two instructions and they can be done in either order: point at sky, plug in." As for the cost, the company previously pointed out that many U.S. residents pay $80 per month for "crappy service," perhaps indicating that Starlink will cost less than that.

Musk also addressed concerns from astronomers who say Starlink's satellites will interfere with astronomical observations. "I am confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries. Zero. That's my prediction. We'll take corrective action if it's above zero," Musk said, adding that SpaceX has worked with astronomers "to minimize the potential for reflection of the satellites."

News outlet 9to5Mac, which tracks Apple news, has gotten hold of an iOS 14 build that uncovers a range of hardware details and software features that Apple intends to reveal later this year. The devices are: 1. An upcoming iPad Pro will include three cameras -- like the iPhone Pro -- plus an additional time-of-flight sensor for help with AR.
2. An iPhone with Touch ID is in the works. This is presumably the lower-end iPhone 9 or iPhone SE 2.
3. A new Apple TV box is in the works along with a new Apple TV remote.
4. AirTags, Apple's rumored Tile-like item tracker, will have user-replaceable batteries. Software features: 1. The iOS home screen will get a new list view, letting you more easily find and filter through your apps. It's not clear exactly where this screen will appear, but it'd offer a major change from the grid.
2. A new AR app will let you point your phone's camera at objects in the real world and have the phone display more information about what you're seeing. At an Apple store, for instance, it could display pricing information and product features. Apple is reportedly working with Starbucks to support the feature, too.
3. Third-party apps will be able to integrate wallpapers into the wallpapers section of the Settings app. This should make it easier to switch wallpapers and could finally open dynamic wallpapers up to outside developers.
4. HomeKit will be able to change the color temperature of lights throughout a day to match the sunlight.
5. An accessibility feature will let phones identify sounds like alarms and doorbells for people with hearing loss.

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a tale for our time: "I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime," said Zachary McCoy. Yep, that's all it took. Google's legal investigations support team emailed him to let him know that local police had demanded information related to his Google account. The man's lawyer dug around and learned that the notice had been prompted by a "geofence warrant," a police surveillance tool that casts a virtual dragnet over crime scenes, sweeping up Google location data — drawn from users' GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular connections — from everyone nearby.
NBC News reports: An avid biker, he used an exercise-tracking app, RunKeeper, to record his rides. The app relied on his phone's location services, which fed his movements to Google. He looked up his route on the day of the March 29, 2019, burglary and saw that he had passed the victim's house three times within an hour, part of his frequent loops through his neighborhood, he said. "It was a nightmare scenario," McCoy recalled. "I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime. And I was the lead suspect.
McCoy's lawyer "pointed to an Arizona case in which a man was mistakenly arrested and jailed for murder largely based on Google data received from a geofence warrant. McCoy said he may have ended up in a similar spot if his parents hadn't given him several thousand dollars to hire Kenyon."

"I didn't realize that by having location services on that Google was also keeping a log of where I was going," McCoy said. "I'm sure it's in their terms of service but I never read through those walls of text, and I don't think most people do either...."

The article also notes a Google filing last year reporting that the requests from state and federal law enforcement authorities incrased by more than 1,500 percent from 2017 to 2018, and then again by 500 percent from 2018 to 2019.

Ten years ago, David Wang pulled off a remarkable trick, installing Android on the first-generation iPhone. Now Wang and his colleagues at cybersecurity startup Corellium are doing it again with the ostentatiously titled Project Sandcastle. From a report: And Forbes got an exclusive hands-on look at their Android for iPhone product ahead of its public release scheduled for later this Wednesday. The timing is sure to have Apple fanboys rubbernecking: Corellium is in the middle of being sued by Apple. As previously reported by Forbes, in August last year, Corellium was taken to court over Apple claims the startup breached copyright laws by creating software versions of the iPhone for security and testing. The case took a surprise turn late last month when Apple subpoenaed Spanish banking giant Santander and the $50 billion U.S. military and intelligence contractor L3Harris.

But Corellium has lofty ambitions for Project Sandcastle, saying that it'll actually show how Apple's walled garden, which it has fiercely protected since launching its flagship phone in 2007, can be deconstructed and taken over by others' software. "Project Sandcastle is about having fun building something new from the sand -- from the literal silicon of the hardware," said Corellium CEO Amanda Gorton, in a statement sent to Forbes. "Apple restricts iPhone users to operate inside a sandbox, but users own that hardware, and they should be able to use that hardware the way they want. So where sandboxes create limits and boundaries on the hardware that users own, sandcastles provide an opportunity to create something new and wonderful from the limitless bounds of your imagination."

A year ago, we started to see the first wave of foldable devices and they were ... disappointing. But companies are not backing down. TCL is already looking ahead with a pair of foldable and rollable prototypes that imagines what the future of phones could look like. From a report: One is a trifold variant with two hinges, while the other is even crazier -- it is rollable! Yes, TCL has designed a phone that gets larger by utilizing a flexible display that rolls and unrolls -- it looks to be quite genius, actually. "At just 9mm in thickness, this portable concept re-imagines the standard smartphone design, with a rollable AMOLED display that uses internal motors to extend the 6.75-inch screen to a 7.8-inch display size with the press of a button. This allows for an entirely new device user experience that includes split screen and multi-tasking UI enhancements customized by TCL. Thanks to a larger axis and rolled display, the device has no wrinkles or creases which are commonly found with foldable AMOLEDs. When not in use, a motor-driven sliding panel utilizes advanced mechanics to conceal the flexible display," says TCL.

As Chinese factories hit by the coronavirus look to restart production, the pain is only beginning for carriers that rely on steady shipments of Asian smartphones. From a report: AT&T is bracing for handset shortages across the U.S. A carrier in the U.K. and one in France are already dealing with supply disruption and could run out of some popular models, people familiar with the matter said. British network operators may even resort to using stockpiles of phones they'd built up in case of a Brexit-related supply crunch, said one of the people, a company executive who asked not to be identified as the information is private. The supply chain chaos may last only a few weeks, but it's already wiping out the smartphone industry's hopes for sales growth this year. Worldwide device sales are set to fall 4.3% in 2020, with European sales tumbling 7.4%, according to industry consultancy Canalys. It was forecasting global growth of 3.6% before the virus brought much of Chinese industry to a juddering halt. "There's a huge supply-side shortage for smartphones that we are already starting to see trickle through to some markets around the world," said Ben Stanton, head of devices research for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Canalys.

The latest "feature drop" for Google's Pixel line of Android phones includes the ability to "firmly press" on the screen "to get more help from your apps more quickly." If that sounds familiar, it's because it's a lot like iPhone's 3D Touch, which Apple stopped supporting in all of its 2019 iPhones. The Verge reports: "Firmly press" sets off alarm bells because it sounds a lot like the iPhone's 3D Touch, which enables different actions depending on how hard you press on the touchscreen. It was a beloved feature for some people because it gave faster access to the cursor mode on the iPhone's keyboard (I think long-pressing the space bar works fine for that, but I get that people love it). It's also gone on the latest versions of the iPhone -- Apple has seemingly abandoned it because the hardware to support it was too expensive/thick/complex/finicky/whatever. But now, it seems that Google has done the same thing for the touchscreen that it does with the camera: use its software algorithms to make commodity parts do something special. That is a very Googley thing to do, but not quite as Googley as the fact that there was virtually no information about this feature to be found anywhere on the internet beyond a speculative note over at XDA Developers.

After a few hours of back and forth, I finally got more details from Google. Here's what this feature does, according to Google: "Long Press currently works in a select set of apps and system user interfaces such as the app Launcher, Photos, and Drive. This update accelerates the press to bring up more options faster. We also plan to expand its applications to more first party apps in the near future." Essentially, this new feature lets you press harder to bring up long-press menus faster. In fact, Google's documentation for Android's Deep Press API explicitly says it should never do a new thing, it should only be a faster way to execute a long press. The answer to why it only works in certain apps is that a lot of Android developers aren't using standard APIs for long press actions. Because Android. Okay, but how does it work? It turns out my hunch was correct: Google has figured out how to use machine learning algorithms to detect a firm press, something Apple had to use hardware for.

Apple has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle litigation accusing it of quietly slowing down older iPhones as it launched new models, to induce owners to buy replacement phones or batteries. From a report: The preliminary proposed class-action settlement was disclosed on Friday night and requires approval by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California. It calls for Apple to pay consumers $25 per iPhone, which may be adjusted up or down depending on how many iPhones are eligible, with a minimum total payout of $310 million. Apple denied wrongdoing and settled the nationwide case to avoid the burdens and costs of litigation, court papers show. Friday's settlement covers U.S. owners of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7Plus or SE that ran the iOS 10.2.1 or later operating system. It also covers U.S. owners of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus that ran iOS 11.2 or later before Dec. 21, 2017.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 5G connectivity. 8K video recording. A design that folds. These are some of the things you'll get in one of Samsung's newest phones -- but the privilege will cost you at least $1,000 for the most affordable device of the lot. If you want these next-gen features but aren't feeling the four-figure price tags, you could try LG's new phone: the V60 ThinQ. It supports the new mobile network, packs a camera sensor with 64 megapixels for 8K recording, and comes bundled (depending on where you buy it) with the Dual Screen attachment -- a case that adds a second screen to the phone, exactly like last year's G8X ThinQ. You get all of this and a headphone jack, something missing from all of Samsung's flagship phones, for a few hundred dollars less. (LG hasn't announced pricing yet, but the company says it will be priced in the ballpark of previous devices, so around $700 or $800.) "I only spent a few minutes with the phone, and while it's a compelling offer on paper, I'm not convinced the company has improved the areas where the V60's predecessors fell short," writes Wired's Julian Chokkattu. "The cameras are usually decent, but not as nice as what you get from Samsung, Google, and Apple; more megapixels doesn't guarantee better photos. The software still looks dated, and there's no sign of the phone receiving Android updates faster. There's no folding screen here, and while the second screen does turn the V60 ThinQ into a foldable phone of sorts, it comes at the cost of being bulky, heavy, and cumbersome -- and frankly a little ugly too."

Chokkattu also mentions the phone is massive, thanks to the "abnormally large 6.8-inch screen." Paired with the Dual Screen attachment and its 6.8-inch screen, you end up with a phone that's not very enjoyable to lug around. "It's great that the accessory is bundled with the phone, and that it gives you more visual real estate, but the experience still feels clunky," he writes.

Billions of devices -- many of them already patched -- are affected by a Wi-Fi vulnerability that allows nearby attackers to decrypt sensitive data sent over the air, researchers said on Wednesday at the RSA security conference. From a report: The vulnerability exists in Wi-Fi chips made by Cypress Semiconductor and Broadcom, the latter a chipmaker Cypress acquired in 2016. The affected devices include iPhones, iPads, Macs, Amazon Echos and Kindles, Android devices, Raspberry Pi 3's, and Wi-Fi routers from Asus and Huawei. Eset, the security company that discovered the vulnerability, said the flaw primarily affects Cyperess' and Broadcom's FullMAC WLAN chips, which are used in billions of devices. Eset has named the vulnerability Kr00k, and it is tracked as CVE-2019-15126.

Manufacturers have made patches available for most or all of the affected devices, but it's not clear how many devices have installed the patches. Of greatest concern are vulnerable wireless routers, which often go unpatched indefinitely. "This results in scenarios where client devices that are unaffected (either patched or using different Wi-Fi chips not vulnerable to Kr00k) can be connected to an access point (often times beyond an individual's control) that is vulnerable," Eset researchers wrote in a research paper published on Wednesday. "The attack surface is greatly increased, since an adversary can decrypt data that was transmitted by a vulnerable access point to a specific client (which may or may not be vulnerable itself)."