France to Implement Own Messaging App, Chinese Police Using Large-scale Facial Recognition
Infosec News
INFORMATION SECURITY NEWS
For The Week of 4/10-4/17 2018
The Information Security News Service is a project of LARS (Laboratory for Advanced Research in Systems) in the CS Department at the University of Minnesota Duluth. We send out top stories in information security every Tuesday (except during some academic breaks). If you have stories you’d like to see featured, please email them to infosec...@d.umn.edu.
CURRENT NEWS
France Building its own Encrypted Messaging App
Concerned that there are no encrypted messaging apps based in France, the French government is implementing their own such app. A group of 20 government workers are testing the new app, and the French government plans to mandate the app’s use by summer. According to a government spokesperson, they “need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia”. While they say the app is based on open source standards (probably based on Signal), they are not releasing any specifics about the app, including the name.
Chinese Police Using Facial Recognition
China has recently been using facial recognition to assist police in catching criminals. The system recently identified a suspect out of 60,000 people at a concert, leading to his arrest. Police were not aware that the man would be present at the event, and were alerted by the software. The Chinese government has also been equipping police with facial recognition sunglasses. These glasses were deployed at train stations in Zhengzhou, where they were used to scan people travelling for the Lunar New Year. The sunglasses identified seven people wanted in major cases, and twenty-six people who were travelling with false identities.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16990030/china-facial-recognition-sunglasses-surveillance
https://www.yahoo.com/news/facial-recognition-used-catch-fugitive-094342186.html