Abstract
In mobile internet, the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) validation vulnerabilities of applications can be easily exploited through SSL Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks, which are difficult to defeat. In this paper, an SSL Security-Enhanced method (E-SSL) is proposed to detect and defeat SSL MITM attacks, which improves the security of internet communication under malicious attacks. SSL proxy is used to find SSL certificate validation vulnerabilities and detect SSL MITM attacks. Based on randomness and hash theory, an SSL shared service with random port mapping is implemented to bypass SSL MITM attacks, the spatio-temporal randomization will increase the difficulty of attacker’s correct guessing. We implement a prototype on Android platform, and verify its effectiveness and reliability with 650 apps under realistic SSL MITM attacks. Using the E-SSL approach, 185 apps out of 650 are detected with SSL certificate validation vulnerabilities. Furthermore, evaluation results show that the E-SSL approach enables these SSL certificate validation vulnerabilities apps to successfully bypass SSL MITM attacks, thus significantly increases the security of user data privacy in public mobile internet.
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Acknowledgement
This work has partially been sponsored by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 61572349, 61272106, 61572355), Tianjin Research Program of Application Foundation and Advanced Technology under grant No. 15JCYBJC15700, and Tianjin Key Laboratory of Advanced Networking.
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Zhao, R., Li, X., Xu, G., Feng, Z., Hao, J. (2017). E-SSL: An SSL Security-Enhanced Method for Bypassing MITM Attacks in Mobile Internet. In: Liu, S., Duan, Z., Tian, C., Nagoya, F. (eds) Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language and Method. SOFL+MSVL 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10189. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57708-1_7
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