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The best of what we saw from Mobile World Congress 2015

As we wrap up another MWC, it’s time to talk about the shining gems that we’ve seen this year. Android had a huge presence this year, with several huge announcements along the way. There were things announced here that could easily be the start of major shifts in the mobile market we play in today, as well as incremental but no less exciting improvements to the technology we rely on every day. We’ve seen a ton of new things on the show floor this year, but as is often the case there are a few things that stood out in the crowd, and that’s what we’re going to talk about now.

Here’s a look at what we thing was the best of Mobile World Congress 2015. It’s an exciting list, but perhaps even more exciting is the knowledge that we’re only just now entering the third month of the year. With an opening like this, it’s clear there are going to be fun times ahead.

The popular and critically acclaimed puzzle game won the “Grand Prix” prize for best mobile game of 2014 on Tuesday night as part of the 11th annual International Mobile Gaming Awards.

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The popular and critically acclaimed puzzle game won the “Grand Prix” prize for best mobile game of 2014 on Tuesday night as part of the 11th annual International Mobile Gaming Awards.

Monument Valley, from the London-based team ustwo, won the prize during a ceremony held as part of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Over 1,000 games were submitted for consideration in the various categories. With the exception of the People’s Choice Award, the winners are selected by a group of judges that come from both the game development and journalism industries.

Here are the other winners in the 11th annual International Mobile Gaming Awards:

• Excellence in Innovation — Bounden
• Best Quickplay Game — Crossy Road
• Guilty Pleasure — 2048
• Best Meaningful Play — Papers, Please
• Excellence in Storytelling — 80 Days
• Excellence in Gameplay — Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
• Best Technical Achievement — Vainglory
• Excellence in Audio Visual Art & Design — Tengami
• Best Multiplayer Game — Soccer Physics
• Best Upcoming Game — Prune
• Honorable Mention — Threes!
• People’s Choice — Vainglory

Source: IMGA

“FREAK Attack” is an SSL/TLS vulnerability disclosed by researchers on March 3, 2015 that can be exploited to force browsers into a weaker encryption state.

Attackers can theoretically use FREAK Attack to intercept what should be a secure HTTPS connection — the one with the lock icon in the address bar — and downgrade the encryption to “export-grade”, which is much easier to crack. Safari, both on OS X and iOS, among other browsers, can be susceptible to FREAK Attacks, but Apple is aware of the exploit and moving swiftly to patch it:

“We have a fix in iOS and OS X,” an Apple spokesperson told iMore, “that will be available in software updates next week.”

FREAK Attack stands for “Factoring attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys”. The vulnerability has apparently existed for a decade but was only recently discovered and disclosed by researchers. According to the FREAKAttack.com:

A connection is vulnerable if the server accepts RSA_EXPORT cipher suites and the client either offers an RSA_EXPORT suite or is using a version of OpenSSL that is vulnerable to CVE-2015-0204. Vulnerable clients include many Google and Apple devices (which use unpatched OpenSSL), a large number of embedded systems, and many other software products that use TLS behind the scenes without disabling the vulnerable cryptographic suites.

Here’s what website administrators should do:

If you run a web server, you should disable support for any export suites. However, instead of simply excluding RSA export cipher suites, we encourage administrators to disable support for all known insecure ciphers (e.g., there are export cipher suites protocols other than RSA) and enable forward secrecy.

They also include a list of websites, some of the internet’s largest, known to be vulnerable at the time of the reporting.

The weaker, 512-bit encryption, is called “export-grade” due to a U.S. policy, which ended in the 1990s, that once prohibited the export of strong encryption. It highlights the inherent problem with government demands for lower levels of security and “back doors”: Security is only ever as strong as its weakest point. The Wachington Post:

The [FREAK Attack] problem illuminates the danger of unintended security consequences at a time when top U.S. officials, frustrated by increasingly strong forms of encryption on smartphones, have called for technology companies to provide “doors” into systems to protect the ability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance.

Matthew D. Green, a Johns Hopkins cryptographer who helped investigate the encryption flaw, said any requirement to weaken security adds complexity that hackers can exploit. “You’re going to add gasoline onto a fire,” said Green. “When we say this is going to make things weaker, we’re saying this for a reason.”

In other words, doors open. It’s what they’re designed to do.

We’ll let everyone know as soon as the iOS and OS X patches are live.