Google has quietly introduced what it says is the biggest security upgrade for Gmail users in years. The AI-powered updates include:
A resilient and efficient text vectorizer might not sound very appealing, even considering that it leverages machine learning. But Google says RETVec is one of the “biggest defensive upgrades in recent years” as far as Gmail is concerned, which is good news for the planet’s largest email app’s 1.8 billion users.
What is RETVec?
In a post to Google Security BlogElie Bursztein, Director of Cybersecurity and AI Research at Google, joins software engineer Marina Zhang to explain more about how RETVec works and how it affects Gmail users.
Gmail relies on text classification models to identify emails that deliver harmful content and flag them as dangerous spam. From a security expert’s perspective, filtering phishing emails that contain malicious links is one of the best defenses the average email user has. Bursztein and Zhang write, “These types of text are more difficult to classify with machine learning models because malicious parties rely on adversarial text manipulation to actively manipulate classifiers. “Because they try to avoid it,” he wrote. One of the ways they do this is by using “isomorphic characters, invisible characters, and keyword stuffing to evade defenses.”
AI saves
This is where RETVec comes into play. This multilingual text vectorizer assists these machine learning models and guides them toward complete classification while reducing the computational cost of the process. The actual numbers are impressive. Using RETVec to replace the old Gmail text vectorizer improved spam detection by 38% and reduced false positive rates by 19.4%. Similarly surprising numbers emerge when it comes to computational costs. For Tensor Processing Units, custom integrated circuits that Google uses to accelerate machine learning workloads, usage was reduced by 83%.
When will I receive RETVec Gmail security updates?
The best news, though, is that if you’re a Gmail user, you’ll be able to see the benefits of RETVec right away. I believe Google has been testing this feature well into 2023 and rolled it out to all his Gmail users as a quiet but major security upgrade.
Google’s security update post states, “Last year, Google conducted extensive battle testing of RETVec internally to evaluate its usefulness and found it to be highly effective for security and anti-fraud applications. “This makes RETVec one of the largest deployments ever.” Improvement in defense power in recent years. ”
Personally, I have seen false positive rates increase. However, this could be because my emails tend to have a lot of security-related content, which legitimately raises red flags. If you’ve noticed an improvement in Gmail’s spam detection in recent weeks, let us know in the comments.
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