A two-finger gesture let anyone holding a locked Android phone send SMS through Gemini, no PIN needed
A multi-touch gesture on Android 16's lock screen let anyone with physical access to a phone bypass the PIN prompt Gemini shows before sending SMS or WhatsApp messages, reported since May 2026 and scheduled for a fix the week it went public.
The Register reported on July 17, 2026 that Android 16's lock screen carried a gesture-based authentication bypass affecting Gemini's messaging integration. When a device owner has disabled Gemini's access to messaging apps, the assistant normally prompts for the device PIN before sending an SMS from the lock screen. Pressing "Continue" at that PIN prompt simultaneously with Gemini's "Add attachment" button skips the check entirely, letting an unauthenticated person holding the phone send an SMS with no PIN at all, and from there type "@WhatsApp" to extend the same bypass to WhatsApp messaging. Google had been receiving reports of the issue since May 2026, with a similar class of lock-screen assistant bypass previously surfacing as early as September 2025. A fix was scheduled for the week of the report.
Why it matters
A lock screen's entire job is refusing action without authentication, so a bug that lets a two-button gesture substitute for a PIN isn't a minor inconvenience, it's the control failing at its one purpose. Voice and chat assistants layered onto a lock screen for convenience keep reopening this exact category of bug, because each new assistant feature is a new code path that has to independently re-implement "don't do this without authentication first" correctly.
If a device you manage or use runs Gemini with lock-screen messaging access enabled, confirm the July fix has landed rather than assuming a routine security patch cycle already covered it, given reports stretched back two months before the public writeup.
Source: The Register
Related on Start with Identity
- BlogA loose PHP comparison let attackers sign in as WordPress admin through SAML
Two unauthenticated bypasses in the miniOrange SAML 2.0 Single Sign On plugin, CVE-2026-61979 and CVE-2026-15981, treat OpenSSL's error return as a valid signat
- BlogA CVSS 10.0 bug let one user's Terraform token serve another user's request
HashiCorp's Terraform MCP Server failed to assign unique session identifiers in stateless HTTP mode, so a token supplied by one user could be reused for later r
- BlogA CVSS 10.0 Metabase zero-day handed admin access through the password reset endpoint
CVE-2026-72898 lets an unauthenticated attacker inject SQL through Metabase's password reset endpoint and take administrative control. It was exploited as a zer
- ArticleB2B SaaS Security Tools: The Stack That Gets You Through Enterprise Procurement
The security tooling a B2B SaaS product actually needs to close enterprise deals in 2026, from enterprise SSO and SCIM to audit logs, secrets scanning, and acce
- VendorLet's Encrypt
established
- TechniqueScope escalation through delegation
A chain of services each meant to narrow a token's authority instead widens it, because one hop in the delegation path trusts the scope a caller claims rather t