MitM Attack

Photo by Ankush Rathi from Pexels Editor's note: This post was originally published in April  2020 and has been revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness. The latest update was in September 2020. Approov lets your mobile app prove to a backend API that it really is the official mobile app making the call, and that it is not running in an environment that may be compromised. Only requests from the apps that you specifically allow can make successful requests. Read Full Story

At a time when the world could use some good news, any good news, the central health crisis continues to get compounded by a persistent wave of cyberattacks targeted at companies and their employees. Not even healthcare institutions and agencies at the center of responding to the emergency have been spared, with the World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and even a UK-based coronavirus testing facility being targeted by cyber profiteers. Read Full Story

  As mobile apps become increasingly paramount to operating successfully in today’s markets, a big question mark over API security is raised. Gartner has previously predicted that by 2022, “API abuses will be the most-frequent attack vector resulting in data breaches for enterprise web applications.” Since every mobile app out there is powered by APIs, securing them is clearly a top priority. Read Full Story

“It's the wave of the future,” declared the US State of West Virginia's Secretary of State of following a limited deployment of a blockchain-based voting app for the state's general midterm elections. For cybersecurity and election integrity advocates, however, the move was “an example of all the things states shouldn’t do when it comes to securing their elections.” Read Full Story

In my previous article, we saw how to bypass certificate pinning within a device you control and, as promised, we will now see how you can protect yourself against such an attack. In this article you will learn how to use a mobile app attestation service to protect your API server from accepting requests that come from a mobile app where certificate pinning has been bypassed. This means that even though the attacker has bypassed the certificate pinning, he will not be able to receive successful responses from the API server. Instead, the server will always return 401 responses, thus protecting your valuable data from getting into the wrong hands. Read Full Story

In a previous article we saw how to protect the https communication channel between a mobile app and an API server with certificate pinning, and as promised at the end of that article we will now see how to bypass certificate pinning. To demonstrate how to bypass certificate pinning we will use the same Currency Converter Demo mobile app that was used in the previous article. In this article you will learn how to repackage a mobile app in order to make it trust custom ssl certificates. This will allow us to bypass certificate pinning. Read Full Story

Securely identify your API Caller Read Full Story

  In a previous article we saw how we could steal an API key by performing a man in the middle (MitM) attack to intercept the https traffic between the mobile app and the API server. In this article we will learn how to mitigate this type of attack by using a technique known as certificate pinning. In order to demonstrate how to use certificate pinning for protecting the https traffic between your mobile app and your API server, we will use the same Currency Converter Demo mobile app that I used in the previous article. In this article we will learn what certificate pinning is, when to use it, how to implement it in an Android app, and how it can prevent a MitM attack. Read Full Story