Posted by Wei Liu, Product Manager, reCAPTCHA
When we launched reCAPTCHA ten years ago, we had a simple goal: enable users to visit the sites they love without worrying about spam and abuse. Over the years, reCAPTCHA has changed quite a bit. It evolved from the distorted text to street numbers and names, then No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA in 2014 and Invisible reCAPTCHA in March this year.
By now, more than a billion users have benefited from reCAPTCHA and we continue to work to refine our protections.

reCAPTCHA protects users wherever they may be online. As the use of mobile devices has grown rapidly, it’s important to keep the mobile applications and data safe. Today, on reCAPTCHA’s tenth birthday, we’re glad to announce the first reCAPTCHA Android API as part of Google Play Services.

With this API, reCAPTCHA can better tell human and bots apart to provide a streamlined user experience on mobile. It will use our newest Invisible reCAPTCHA technology, which runs risk analysis behind the scene and has enabled millions of human users to pass through with zero click everyday. Now mobile users can enjoy their apps without being interrupted, while still staying away from spam and abuse.
reCAPTCHA Android API is included with Google SafetyNet, which provides services like device attestation and safe browsing to protect mobile apps. Mobile developers can do both the device and user attestations in the same API to mitigate security risks of their apps more efficiently. This adds to the diversity of security protections on Android: Google Play Protect to monitor for potentially harmful applications, device encryption, and regular security updates. Please visit our site to learn more about how to integrate with the reCAPTCHA Android API, and keep an eye out for our iOS library.

The journey of reCAPTCHA continues: we’ll make the Internet safer and easier to use for everyone (except bots).

Posted by Josh Armour Security Program Manager

On 00:00:01 UTC of June 17th and 18th, 2017 we’ll be hosting the online qualification round of our second annual Capture The Flag (CTF) competition. In a ‘Capture the Flag’ competition we create security challenges and puzzles in which contestants can earn points for solving them. We will be inviting the top 10 finalist teams to a secret undisclosed location (spoiler alert: it’s Google) to compete onsite for a prize pool of over USD$31,337 and we’ll help subsidize travel to the venue for the finals to four participants for each of the ten finalist teams. In addition to grand prizes given at the finals, we’ll be rewarding some of the best and creative write-ups that we receive during the qualifying round. We want to give you an opportunity to share with the world the clever way you solve challenges.

Why do we host these competitions?

There are three main reasons why we host these competitions.

First, as we've seen with our Vulnerability Reward Program, the security community’s efforts help us better protect Google users, and the web as a whole. We’d like to give the people who solve a single challenge or two in a very clever way a chance to teach us and the security community, even if they don’t qualify for the finals. We also think that these challenges allows us to share with the world the types of problems our security team works on every day.

Second, we want to engage the broader security community and reach out to as many people involved as possible. At the Google CTF last year the winning team, ‘Pasten’ from Israel, earned over 4,700 points competing against 2,400 teams out of which 900 were able to solve at least one of our challenges. Thanks to the community's feedback, we used what we learned last year to make our CTF even better this time.
Lastly, we also want to grow the security community. Upon observing how last year's competition engaged new players from all over the world, we want to continue to create a safe space for people to come and learn while trying to solve challenges and having fun. Our internal security team employs several people who actively compete in CTF competitions in their spare time, so we value this activity and want to give back to and help grow our community.

We hope to virtually see you at the 2nd annual Google CTF on June 17th at 00:00:01 UTC. Check this site (g.co/ctf) for more details, as they become available.

The Big Picture

At Google, we aim to reward the hard work of hackers and security researchers. One such avenue is our Google Vulnerability Rewards Programs. Many of the best bug hunters enjoy participating in ‘Capture The Flag’ contests, and great vulnerabilities have been discovered and disclosed at them. During last year's Google CTF we also received some security bug reports in our scoreboard, for which we gave out rewards under the VRP. Another way we reward this community is with our Vulnerability Research Grants Program and our Patch Rewards Program. We look forward to the best contestants taking some time to explore our other programs for opportunities to make some money and help improve the security of the internet.

Posted by Mayank Jain and Scott Roberts, Android Security team

[Cross-posted from the Android Developers Blog]

Two years ago, we launched the Android Security Rewards program. In its second year, we've seen great progress. We received over 450 qualifying vulnerability reports from researchers and the average pay per researcher jumped by 52.3%. On top of that, the total Android Security Rewards payout doubled to $1.1 million dollars. Since it launched, we've rewarded researchers over $1.5 million dollars.

Here are some of the highlights from the Android Security Rewards program's second year:

• There were no payouts for the top reward for a complete remote exploit chain leading to TrustZone or Verified Boot compromise, our highest award amount possible.
• We paid 115 individuals with an average of $2,150 per reward and $10,209 per researcher.
• We paid our top research team, C0RE Team, over $300,000 for 118 vulnerability reports.
• We paid 31 researchers $10,000 or more.

Thank you to all the amazing researchers who submitted complete vulnerability reports to us last year.

Improvements to Android Security Rewards program

We’re constantly working to improve the Android Security Rewards program and today we’re making a few changes to all vulnerability reports filed after June 1, 2017.

Because every Android release includes more security protections and no researcher has claimed the top reward for an exploit chains in 2 years, we’re excited to increase our top-line payouts for these exploits.

• Rewards for a remote exploit chain or exploit leading to TrustZone or Verified Boot compromise increase from $50,000 to $200,000.
• Rewards for a remote kernel exploit increase from $30,000 to $150,000.

In addition to rewarding for vulnerabilities, we continue to work with the broad and diverse Android ecosystem to protect users from issues reported through our program. We collaborate with manufacturers to ensure that these issues are fixed on their devices through monthly security updates. Over 100 device models have a majority of their deployed devices running a security update from the last 90 days. This table shows the models with a majority of deployed devices running a security update from the last two months:

Source: Google, May 29, 2017

Thank you to everyone who helped make Android safer and stronger in the past year. Together, we made a huge investment in security research that helps Android users everywhere. If you want to get involved to make next year even better, check out our detailed Program Rules. For tips on how to submit complete reports, see Bug Hunter University.