How many of you use CyanogenMod on at least one of your Android devices? Wow, that’s a lot of hands! Roughly 2.5 Million is the number of the people that have installed CyanogenMod onto their devices. It’s the most popular after-market version of Android there is and has amassed an enthusiastic and powerful community behind it. I’m sure many of you have come in contact with the “CyanogenMod Statistics” that pop up asking permission for your device to be entered into the team’s statistics. It’s never anything to be worried about however, there’s been some news that the team has been logging some interesting information.
It’s been revealed by Gabriel Castro that a new line of code has been added to the ROM that allows it to log the gestures used to unlock an Android device. The line was added back in August when the ability to change lockscreen targets was introduced. Castro remarked that he was “really surprised nobody caught this” alongside his accompanying fix. This isn’t exactly a major breach or anything but it is a little strange to see them logging such a thing however, I’m sure they’re only trying to see how they can make unlocking even easier for us Android users.
The biggest thing surrounding this is the fact that it was undocumented and people didn’t know it was happening but, it’s not that big a thing to log. There’s also little to no security risk here either because for someone to perform an attack they’d have to have physical access to your phone or a backup of the log file stored somewhere on the phone. It’s strange to see something like this happen but in the grand scheme of things, our own carriers have done worse, right? The latest nightly has this logging removed and it’s sure to trickle down to next month’s “M3” release as well.