Presented at
Black Hat USA 2019,
Aug. 7, 2019, 5:05 p.m.
(25 minutes)
As of early 2018, the Facebook-owned messaging application, WhatsApp, has over 1.5 billion users with over one billion groups and 65 billion messages sent every day. WhatsApp end-to-end encryption ensures only you and the person you're communicating with can read what's sent, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp. However, we managed to reverse engineer WhatsApp web source code and successfully decrypted WhatsApp traffic. During the process we translated all WhatsApp web functions to python and created Burpsuit extension that you can use to investigate WhatsApp traffic and extend in order to find vulnerabilities.<br><br>During the process we unveiled new vulnerabilities that could allow threat actors to intercept and manipulate messages sent in both private and group conversations, giving attackers immense power to create and spread misinformation from what appear to be trusted sources.<br><br>Our team observed three possible methods of attack exploiting this vulnerability – all of which involve social engineering tactics to fool end-users. A threat actor can:<br><ul><li>Send a private message to another group participant that is disguised as a public message for all, so when the targeted individual responds, it's visible to everyone in the conversation.</li><li>Use the 'quote' feature in a group conversation to change the identity of the sender, even if that person is not a member of the group.</li><li>Alter the text of someone else's reply, essentially putting words in their mouth.</li></ul>
Presenters:
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Oded Vanunu
- Head of Products Vulnerability Research, Check Point Software Technologies
Oded Vanunu has more than 15 years of infosec experience. He is a Security Leader and Offensive Security Expert who leads a security research domain from product design stages until post release.
Vanunu leads security ideas into products. His expertise is in building a security research team, vulnerability research, security best practice and security design. He has been issued five patents on cybersecurity defense methods and has published dozens of research papers and product CVEs.
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Roman Zaikin
- Security Researcher, Check Point Software Technologies
Roman Zaikin is a Security Expert at Check Point Security Technologies. His research has revealed significant flaws in popular services, and major vendors (Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, eBay, AliExpress, LG, DJI, Microsoft and more). He has over 10 years of experience in the field of cyber security research. He spoke at various leading conferences worldwide and taught more than 1000 students, he is also responsible for the design and the material of various cyber courses worldwide. He holds more than 15 Certifications and extensive experience with system administration, network architecture, software development, penetration testing and reverse engineering. He has outstanding self-taught skills, having the ability to develop and thinking outside the box. Love technology and want to know exactly how things work behind the scenes at lowest level of the bit and the bytes. He has an innate curiosity of how software can be broken down or bypassed so you can do things with it that weren't intended to be done
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