Certificate Pinning

Two weeks ago I presented (once more) on the topic of pinning, this time focusing on bugs seen in real-world Android applications implementing pinning. The presentation also covered CVE-2016-2402 in some detail, Android’s Network Security Configuration and a few other relevant topics. The conference was Android Security Symposium - a great security event, hosted in an awesome venue within Vienna University of Technology. So, here are the slides and here is the video. »

As you might have guessed from previous posts on the topic, I’ve been researching certificate pinning implementations in mobile apps for the last couple of years. Two months ago I presented a talk on certificate pinning at OWASP AppSecEU16 conference in Rome, Italy. The conference was pretty fun, met so many interesting people. So, here are the slides and the video. The official abstract: Pinning Certificates (“Cert Pinning”) trends perennially, coming to the fore with each new SSL hack. »

Two weeks ago I published details of an attack method that can be used to bypass various implementations of certificate pinning in Android or generally Java applications. Several applications and frameworks are still vulnerable to the attack, among them every Java or Android application using a version of the popular OkHttp networking library before versions 3.1.2 and 2.7.4. [The OkHttp issue is tracked as CVE-2016-2402] Brief overview Certificate pinning is a control used to mitigate Man-In-The-Middle attacks by privileged attackers. »

android.security.net.config Capabilities Permit clear-text traffic HSTS enforcement Certificate Pinning Custom Trust Anchors Android engineers have recently been busy building out AndroidNSSP (Android Network Security Provider): a system that application developers will be able to use in order control aspects of the network security policy of their application. It’s been long overdue, and there are various bits and pieces still missing; however important parts were merged to AOSP master about a month ago. »