Security through Obscurity, powered by HTTPS

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Presented at Troopers 2014 by

Applications on modern smartphone operating systems are protected against analysis and modification through a wide range of security measures such as code signing, encryption, and sandboxing. However, for network-enabled applications effective attack vectors can be found in their communication protocols. Most applications developers hide the implementation details of their protocols inside an HTTPS connection. While HTTPS is able to protect data leakage during transmission, it is an inadequate protection against protocol analysis. The concept of SSL interception applied to smartphone applications allows analysis and modification of transport protocols with endless possibilities: getting paid extras for free, cheating in games, finding design flaws in protocols, etc. In this talk, we demonstrate, based on several live demos, how application developers sometimes try to protect insecure protocols by wrapping them inside an HTTPS connection and show that known countermeasures are rarely used in practice.