Misc

MDMs – The Mobile Device “Magic” Solutions – Expectations and Reality

When you are working in the area of mobile security, you sooner or later receive requests from clients asking you to test specific ‘Mobile Device Management’ (MDM) solutions which they (plan to) use, the corresponding mobile apps, as well as different environment setups and device policy sets.
The expectations are often high, not only for the MDM solutions ability to massively reduce the administrative workload of keeping track, updating and managing the often hundreds or thousands of devices within a company but also regarding the improvements towards the level of security that an MDM solution is regularly advertised to provide.

With this very blog post you are reading and a small series of future blog posts, I would like to provide some insight from my day-to-day practical experience with some of the most often used MDM solutions from a testers perspective.

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Events

Introduction & CCS’16 – Day 1 – 24th October 2016

 I am Andrei Costin (at http://firmware.re project), and this is the first post from a series of guest postings courtesy of ERNW.

Between 24th and 28th October, I had the pleasure and the great opportunity to attend ACM CCS 2016 in Vienna, Austria, where I also presented at the TrustED’16 workshop my paper titled “Security of CCTV and Video Surveillance Systems: Threats, Vulnerabilities, Attacks, and Mitigations”.

My attendance throughout the entire ACM CCS 2016 week and my presentation at TrustED was possible thanks to generous support from Enno Rey and ERNW, and I thank them again for this opportunity!

 In these guest postings I am going to summarize the talks I have attended, and will try to make you interested in exploring more on each of the mentioned papers. Continue reading “Introduction & CCS’16 – Day 1 – 24th October 2016”

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Breaking

3 Ways for 3-Letter-Agencies to get your Government Proof, Indecipherable Cloud Text Messages

The gritsforbreakfast blog post making the rounds on the Liberation Tech mailing list about security of Apple’s iMessaging service is gaining quite some attention. The post refers to a CNET article on how the iMessage service “stymied attempts by federal drug enforcement agents to eavesdrop” conversations due its end-to-end encryption and commends Apple for protecting the user’s privacy while pointing out that Gmail and Facebook Messaging don’t. However, I disagree on some points of the blog post and therefore want to discuss them here.

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Breaking

Corporate Espionage via Mobile Compromise: A technical deep dive

This is a guest post from David Weinstein

Mobile devices play an important role in the business world. Yet with increased emphasis on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model, defenses are not where they need to be to slow the loss of valuable intellectual property.

Corporate defenses have traditionally focused on the network, the endpoints, and not necessarily on the ecosystem of how these devices interact outside of network sockets. Smartphones bring unique network connectivity, an array of sensors, and can be overlooked by resources invested on IDS/IPS not being effectively leveraged.

Getting to the core of an exemplar attack, a Mobile Remote Administration Tool (RAT) is devastating. With access to the microphone, GPS/network location, camera, and an accelerometer, having control of a mobile device in a corporate setting is a dream for an attacker. We’ve improved an open source RAT and introduced a new feature, the ability to turn the mobile device into a virtual person sitting at the computer, able to type commands into the console.

Using a USB device to gain access to a computer is not new and the dangers of an unprotected port are extraordinary (see upcoming troopers talk, You wouldn’t share a syringe. Would you share a USB port? Bratus & Goodspeed). The takeaway from this particular talk is that the attack need not be performed from a specialized device (Teensy, Facedancer), like a thumb drive. The attack can be mounted from a common device that is routinely plugged into computers for charging or data transfer purposes… the Android mobile phone in your employee’s pocket!

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Breaking

Mobile Application Testing

Our new workshop about mobile application testing, held for the 1st time at the Troopers conference 2013, is coming closer. So I would like to take the opportunity and post an appetizer for those who are still undetermined if they should attend the workshop ;-).

While the topic of mobile application testing is a wide field that may contain reverse engineering, secure storage analysis, vulnerability research, network traffic analysis and so forth, in the end of the day you have to answer one question: Can I trust this application and run it on my enterprise devices? So first you have to define some criteria, which kind of behavior and characteristics of an application you regard as trustworthy (or not). Let us peek at malware … besides harming your devices and data, malware is typically:

  • obfuscated and/or encrypted
  • contains anti-debugging features
  • contains anti-reverse engineering features

This makes the analysis process a difficult task and comparing these characteristics especially to ordinary iOS applications from the AppStore, at least one is also true for these apps: Those are encrypted and are only decrypted at runtime on your Apple gadget ;-).

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Misc

Sell Your Own Device – A Field Study on Decommissioning of Mobile Devices

On Friday we released our latest technical newsletter with the fancy title “Sell Your Own Device – A Field Study on Decommissioning of Mobile Devices”. It is the result of a field study on decommissioned mobile business devices bought on eBay and about how stored data may be extracted in different ways.

As always we love to share plenty of practical advise: At the end of the newsletter you will find the mitigating controls to securely handle mobile devices at the end of their life cycle process.

Find the newsletter here.
And a digitally signed version here.

Special thanks go to Sergej Schmidt for performing the field study.

Talking about our great team: Meet the whole ERNW crew at TROOPERS12, or even better: Dig deeper into mobile security together with Rene Graf during the mobile security workshop. There are a few slots left.

Enjoy the newsletter & hopefully see you soon in Heidelberg!
Florian

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