6 ms·

Sit on an open wi-fi network that you're connected to and intercept Play Store traffic and spoof an app update, like Gmail, inject my malicious app download URL

• anigbrowl 13y ago
  Also, never ever ever EVER connect to open wi-fi. Pfff. I could get mugged walking down the street too, but I still carry my wallet and keys around. And yes, I have been the target of some robbery attempts in the past.
  • donutdan4114 13y ago
    I don't know about you, but I have a lot more sensitive information on the interwebs than what I carry on my person. Protip: I've had my paypal account hijacked before, that isn't very fun to deal with
    • bigiain 13y ago
      I own a lot more valuable possessions than I'd walk through a sketchy area of a city late at night carrying - but that doesn't mean I wont carry my wallet/phone with me all the time. I'm happy enough using open wifi to read the news or check train times. I kinda rely on gmail "getting SSL right" so that if my mail checks while I'm doing that I'm still OK. I wouldn't log in to my internet banking or PayPal on open wifi. I know I'm leaving myself open to "forgetting" and accidentally using and open wifi connection for a sensitive transaction/login, but for me the probability of me forgetting multiplied by the probability of any particular open wifi being malicious is "low enough" that I'm happy to accept the consequences. Be aware the open wifi has risks. Take suitable precautions. Use them if it's useful - but modify your behaviour to minimise the risks. But if you just want to check the news or the weather or the bus schedule, someone saying "never connect to open wifi" is probably not giving or taking into account appropriate context.
    • ordinary 13y ago
      My person is sensitive.
  • tripzilch 13y ago
    difference is, you know if you got mugged.
    • anigbrowl 13y ago
      Maybe a better comparison would be with having my pocket picked. And yes, I do know if the digital equivalent takes place, unless the attacker has been so thorough as to also subvert my router and modem admin consoles, in which case they probably didn't need to wait for me to wander through an open wi-fi network.
• atesti 13y ago
  Why wouldn't the traffic of the Play Store not be going over SSL? I never looked myself, but I'd expect it to be encrypted.
  • jcl 13y ago
    FWIW, the Play Store web site forces you to https. I'd expect the app would as well.
    • donutdan4114 13y ago
      I'd be curious to see what information is transferred by Android phones that is not through SSL. Given all the apps out there that have access to your personal data and could be transmitting whoknowswhat through non-ssl requests, probably enough ways to mess with someone.
      • Everlag 13y ago
        Imagine using a pineapple http://wifipineapple.com/ http://wifipineapple.com/ and sitting in a coffee shop with your laptop out messing with people's insecure traffic! The ramifications of such could be quite potent given any chance that an insecure app could allow insertion of basically any content into a http request. This is why you secure your damn wifi. Even if the password and user are on the wall, the traffic is still encrypted!
        • antocv 13y ago
          If you are in a coffeshop you too will likely have the passphrase to the WiFi, then you can still intercept traffic of your unsuspecting users, ARP poisoning and whatnot. So just because its WPA2 doesnt make it magically safe from tampering. And usually a coffeshop that has WPA2 will still have admin/admin as their router credentials, if you are lucky they have Linux and from there you have # and can use iptables to divert traffic to your device as you wish.
          • 13y ago
• winter_blue 13y ago
  > Also, never ever ever EVER connect to open wi-fi. I'm kind-of forced to use a WEP connection right now, which is pretty much equivalent to open wi-fi since is can be cracked in a matter of minutes. However I use HTTPS-Everywhere, and GMail & other websites run on https by default. So my question is: is HTTPS over open wi-fi trustworthy?
  • coderzach 13y ago
    HTTPS over open wi-fi is trustworthy.
    • thirsteh 13y ago
      Well, only to the extent that the PKI model is trustworthy. If somebody can perform a MITM attack against you, you are wholly reliant on them not being able to generate a certificate for the domain you're looking at. It's better, but there are 650+ different companies who can sign certificates for all domains worldwide.
      • tonfa 13y ago
        If someone is able to do a MitM attack with a valid cert, I'd guess they have the capabilities of doing the attack upstream of the wifi. So having the wifi open or not won't matter much.
        • thirsteh 13y ago
          I think that's an unreasonable assumption. It's far more likely that a CA is compromised than an ISP. Also, don't underestimate the power of e.g. sslstrip. Most users enter "google.com", not "https://google.com" https://google.com". If you're not careful, somebody will just remove all the SSL links on your pages, or lead you to another domain with a valid one, via DNS or HTTP redirects.
          • bigiain 13y ago
            "It's far more likely that a CA is compromised than an ISP." I wonder if that's true? At a high enough stakes game - one would have to assume that state level actors have already trivially compromised both - the NSA clearly has pretty much 100% compliance from Verizon, and I don't think its going out on a limb to assume they've got similar compliance from at least one of (and possibly all of) the US based CAs. Egypt at a state level have been seen using fraudulent SSL certs - and you'd be foolish to assume there isn't equivalent CA access available to any government who has a root CA authority under their jurisdiction. But that's kind of a moot point - if the NSA is targeting me individually, I have to assume they'll gain access to pretty much everything - even if I strongly encrypt everything (and don't ever make a mistake doing so), many of the intended recipients of my communication are in jurisdictions where they've got enough power that wouldn't be able to resist the NSA's demands to reveal the unencrypted contents. (If they can ground head-of-states private planes in various European countries, there are probably very few places they cant "lean on" someone strongly enough to make it a not-very-difficult question about whether to give up my personal data.) "Lesser" state level actors - GCHQ, or ASIO here in .au for example - might not have quite such god-like global power, but I'm under no delusion about the privacy protection I've got against the "feeble compared to the NSA" local government intelligence organisation of whatever country I happen to be in, if it takes a personal interest in me. At the attack levels lower down though - carders, identity thieves, the generic "internet fraud" level attacker - I suspect ISPs are significantly more likely to be compromised than CAs - or at least the important part of the CA infrastructure that holds the root signing keys. I'd guess typical ISP infrastructure is not as well secured as typical CA root keys - and that zerodays, unpatched known vulnerabilities, and rogue/disgruntled/underpaid sysadmins in small (and perhaps even large) ISPs represent a much higher risk than non-state-level attacks via stolen CA keys.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• SCdF 13y ago
  That implies that the play store isn't connecting over a secure connection and is actually spoofable right? Which would be a security blog post in itself.
  • bestdayever 13y ago
    I think hes trivializing an enormous task to make this seem like a bigger deal than it is.
• corresation 13y ago
  Your scenario doesn't work at all given that such traffic is encrypted -- you can't simply inject into it. If someone breaks that, we have much bigger problems. However, to your ending comment, some time back I asked whether passwords actually gave you security from other people who know the same password (e.g. a coffee shop that has a big sign telling you the WPA password). While I have zero knowledge to confirm or deny this, someone in the know claimed that no, given that the wifi password is used for the initial key exchange, it offers superficial interception/monitoring protection against someone malicious who knows the same password. Take that with a grain of salt, but I never could find other resources on that.
  • donutdan4114 13y ago
    True, 'tis only an example. Some rooted phonesmight be using 3rd party apps not on the Play Store that doesn't go through SSL. Not really sure how that works, I haven't rooted my phone. Also, I am assuming apps can make standard HTTP requests if they want to other external services, so an app that has access to your sensitive data might transmit it to home base non-securely. Hopefully this never actually happens, but given all the junior-made apps out there, some security holes like that probably exist.
  • gohrt 13y ago
    With a solution like TLS, your private keys and the server's private keys protect you. The password is your access to the network, not the encryption key for your messages.
    • corresation 13y ago
      Indeed. That was the first paragraph of my comment. The second responded to the comment about never using open wifi networks, where I took open to mean unencrypted. My comment is that open and encrypted networks are synonymous (or so I have been told) if the person who wants to capture your traffic knows the network password. Which loops back to the first point, that you should only use encrypted services on networks you don't have full faith in.
  • dsl 13y ago