Puffadust Mobile Blog (BAK)

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Recently, the theoretical and practical analysis of secure instant messenger protocols received much attention, but the focus of prior evaluations mostly lay in one-to-one communication. In this blog post we want to presents the results of our work that focuses on group chat protocols of three major instant messenger applications; namely Signal, WhatsApp, and Threema.

In this blog post, we aim to focus on the practical impact and the found weaknesses identified by our analysis. The interested reader may also look into our paper for more details.

Our Aim and What We Were Looking For

End-to-end encryption protects the confidentiality of communication that is forwarded via central servers to the designated receivers. As a consequence, neither parties on the network route of the messages, nor the provider of the central server (e.g. the WhatsApp server) should be able to read any information out of the observation of the communication. In particular, no other user of the application should have access to the communication. Further it might be desirable to require that also the messages' integrity is end-to-end protected and that a sender is informed about the delivery state of sent messages.

Delivery state information in Signal (upper screenshot) and WhatsApp (lower screenshot)

In a two party scenario, this analysis is rather fixed to two components of the protocol: the key establishment between both parties and the communication channel protection using the established key (mostly consisting of an encryption algorithm and a scheme for providing integrity like MACs or signature schemes).

Regarded attackers

In a group setting, the same attackers apply (network, provider, other users). However the requirements for secure communication differ. It is further necessary that only group members can write to and read content from the group. Additionally, only administrators of the group are able to add new members.

In addition to these standard requirements, we also evaluated the protocols' security guarantees if the client's secrets were revealed (forward secrecy and future secrecy).

Our Approach

We analyzed the mentioned protocols by reading the source code and debugging the apps. We also used alternative open source implementations of Threema and WhatsApp as a help and we traced the network traffic. When using alternative implementations, we only took incoming traffic into account, which was generated by official applications. Thereby we extracted the protocol descriptions and evaluated them regarding the defined requirements.

Our Findings

In WhatsApp and Threema, the provider was able to manipulate the set of members. Threema only allowed the provider to rewind the set of members to a previous state. As a consequence previously removed members could have been added to the group again. The WhatsApp provider is able to arbitrarily manipulate the member set. Thereby further members and administrators can be added to the group. Since the authenticity of group manipulation is not protected, the WhatsApp provider can set the real group administrator as the source of manipulation even though this administrator was not active.

Since Signal's key exchange protocol provides future secrecy, we also evaluated the protocol's ability to recover into a secure group state after a member's state was compromised. The essential weakness here is that a sender only needs to know the static group ID to send a message to the group. If a group member receives a message with the correct group ID, no verification regarding the current member set takes place but the message is directly added to the group communication. Consequently it is sufficient to retrieve the group ID in order to send messages to the group. Since Signal treats content messages the same way as messages for the manipulation of the group set, an attacker who knows the group ID can add herself to the group and thereby read the subsequent group communication.

In addition to this, in all cases the delivery state of sent messages was not securely provided. Threema's group chats do not inform the sender about the delivery state while Signal and WhatsApp do not protect the delivery information on the end-to-end layer. Therefore the central provider can forge this information and drop messages without letting the communicating parties detect this.

Also the order of messages was manipulable for the providers of the applications such that the provider is able to deliver the messages in a different order than they were sent. Threema's weakness of rewinding a group state results from missing replay attack protection.

Impact of Weaknesses

Even though end-to-end encryption is implemented in all analyzed applications, the central providers can largely manipulate the communication in groups and partially also read it.
In all applications, the provider can undetectably drop and reorder messages during the delivery and thereby manipulate the view of the communication such that further attacks can be obfuscated.
The central servers of WhatsApp can be used to add arbitrary users to groups and thereby receive their communication.
To achieve the same result for Signal, it suffices to retrieve the group ID. An earlier member who left the group once still knows this ID since it is static. However, in contrast to WhatsApp, the origin of the manipulation is correctly displayed in the Signal application (which was not the fact when we started our analysis).

As a result, the end-to-end protection of WhatsApp is not sufficient to reach confidentiality in groups. For Signal no future secrecy is reached in groups and Threema was vulnerable to replay attacks which resulted in further weaknesses.

Responsible Disclosure

We disclosed our findings to the developers and received varying response. Threema updated their protocol in version 3.14 such that our attacks are not feasible anymore. Moxie Marlinspike responded that Signal is "working on an entirely new group mechanism that we should be deploying soon". WhatsApp did not hold out the prospect of fixing the described vulnerabilities (Update 01/18: According to Facebook's Security Head, the invite links make a fix more difficult [1]; we proposed a way to solve this issue [2]).

[1] https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/951169036947107840
[2] https://web-in-security.blogspot.de/2018/01/group-instant-messaging-why-baming.htmlRelated posts

Puffadust

The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published a new report warning companies about a new in-the-wild malware that North Korean hackers are reportedly using to spy on key employees at government contracting companies. Dubbed 'BLINDINGCAN,' the advanced remote access trojan acts as a backdoor when installed on compromised computers. According to the FBI

via The Hacker News

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Puffadust

Hi everyone,

Great news! I will be mentoring SANS 575: Mobile Device Security and Ethical Hacking in Luxembourg on Thursday evenings 18:00-20:00, starting from January 15, 2015.

Mentor classes are special, 10 week-format SANS classroom sessions that give the students time to absorb and master the same material with the guidance of a trained security professional.

Students receive all the same course materials used at SANS conferences and study at a more leisurely pace, so students will have:

Hardcopy set of SANS course books
Mentor Program study materials
Weekly Mentor led sessions

Prior to the weekly Mentor-led classroom sessions, students study SANS course material at their own pace. Each week, students meet with other professionals in their hometown area and the SANS mentor, who leads topical discussions pointing out the most salient features of the weekly material studied, provides hands-on demonstrations, and answer questions. The Mentor's goal is to help student's grasp the more difficult material, master the exercises, demonstrate the tools and prepare for GIAC certification.

On SANS SEC575, we will learn about mobile device infrastructures, policies and management, we will see the security models of the different platforms, like the data storage and file system architecture. We will also see how to unlock, root and jailbreak mobile devices in order to prepare them for data extraction and further testing. In the second half of the course, we will learn how to perform static and dynamic mobile application analysis, the usage of automated application analysis tools and how to manipulate application behavior. Last but not least, we will see how to perform mobile penetration testing that includes fingerprinting mobile devices, wireless network probing and scanning, attacking wireless infrastructures, using network manipulation attacks and attacks against mobile applications and back-end applications.

For more info, here is the link for the class: http://www.sans.org/mentor/class/sec575-luxembourg-15jan2015-david-szili
My Mentor bio: http://www.sans.org/mentor/bios#david-szili

Information on the class, special discounts and applying for the class: szili_(dot)_david_(at)_hotmail_(dot)_com

Additional info can be also found at: https://www.sans.org/mentor

Some special price is also available for this course. A few examples: http://www.sans.org/mentor/specials

Best regards,

David

Such low price. Very SANS. Much learning. Wow!

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Puffadust Mobile Blog (BAK)

Monday, August 24, 2020

Insecurities Of WhatsApp's, Signal's, And Threema's Group Chats

Our Aim and What We Were Looking For

Our Approach

Our Findings

Impact of Weaknesses

Responsible Disclosure

Hackers Target Defence Contractors' Employees By Posing As Recruiters

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SANS SEC575 Mentor Class

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