No abstract
Certificate verification is a crucial stage in the establishment of a TLS connection. A common security flaw in TLS implementations is the lack of certificate hostname verification but, in general, this is easy to detect. In security-sensitive applications, the usage of certificate pinning is on the rise. This paper shows that certificate pinning can (and often does) hide the lack of proper hostname verification, enabling MITM attacks. Dynamic (black-box) detection of this vulnerability would typically require the tester to own a high security certificate from the same issuer (and often same intermediate CA) as the one used by the app. We present Spinner, a new tool for black-box testing for this vulnerability at scale that does not require purchasing any certificates. By redirecting traffic to websites which use the relevant certificates and then analysing the (encrypted) network traffic we are able to determine whether the hostname check is correctly done, even in the presence of certificate pinning. We use Spinner to analyse 400 security-sensitive Android and iPhone apps. We found that 9 apps had this flaw, including two of the largest banks in the world: Bank of America and HSBC. We also found that TunnelBear, one of the most popular VPN apps was also vulnerable. These apps have a joint user base of tens of millions of users.
In this paper, we propose a new approach to infer state machine models from protocol implementations. Our method, STATEINSPECTOR, learns protocol states by using novel program analyses to combine observations of run-time memory and I/O. It requires no access to source code and only lightweight execution monitoring of the implementation under test. We demonstrate and evaluate STATEINSPECTOR's effectiveness on numerous TLS and WPA/2 implementations. In the process, we show STATEINSPECTOR enables deeper state discovery, increased learning efficiency, and more insightful post-mortem analyses than existing approaches. Further to improved learning, our method led us to discover several concerning deviations from the standards and a high impact vulnerability in a prominent Wi-Fi implementation.
File-based encryption (FBE) schemes have been developed by software vendors to address security concerns related to data storage. While methods of encrypting data-at-rest may seem relatively straightforward, the main proponents of these technologies in mobile devices have nonetheless created seemingly different FBE solutions. As most of the underlying design decisions are described either at a high-level in whitepapers, or are accessible at a low-level by examining the corresponding source code (Android) or through reverse-engineering (iOS), comparisons between schemes and discussions on their relative strengths are scarce. In this paper, we propose a formal framework for the study of file-based encryption systems, focusing on two prominent implementations: the FBE scheme used in Android and Linux operating systems, as well as the FBE scheme used in iOS. Our proposed formal model and our detailed description of the existing algorithms are based on documentation of diverse nature, such as whitepapers, technical reports, presentations and blog posts, among others. Using our framework we validate the security of the existing key derivation chains, as well as the security of the overall designs, under widely-known security assumptions for symmetric ciphers, such as IND-CPA or INT-CTXT security, in the random-oracle model.
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