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Nokia Redirecting Traffic On Some of Its Phones, Including HTTPS
An anonymous reader writes "On Wednesday, security professional Gaurang Pandya outlined how Nokia is hijacking Internet browsing traffic on some of its phones. As a result, the company technically has access to all your Internet content, including sensitive data that is sent over secure connections (HTTPS), such as banking credentials and pretty much any other usernames and passwords you use to login to services on the Internet. Last month, Pandya noted his Nokia phone (an Asha 302) was forcing traffic through a proxy, instead of directly hitting the requested server. The connections are either redirected to Nokia/Ovi proxy servers if the Nokia browser is used, and to Opera proxy servers if the Opera Mini browser is used (both apps use the same User-Agent)."
Are they actively trying to kill the company? I have to ask, because it really seems as if that's their goal.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Is this different then the acceleration offered by Amazon on the Kindles or other browsers? I know that in Amazons case it can be turned off, but they use a proxy so that the can recompress images and run scripts off of the mobile device. I know of one or two third party browsers including Opera Mobile that do much the same thing.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Note before anyone says anything: this isn't related to Windows Phone or Microsoft.
well if there is an S in the end, even if they use a proxy, they are not able to read the sensitive, or any data that is. However i doubt they would be dumb enough to even want to do such a thing, it must be something more innocent ( for speeding up reasons? )
The whole point of Opera Mini is to use Opera's proxies to reduce the load on the phone so complaining about that would be stupid (their other browser, Opera Mobile, is the one that doesn't use proxies). Is Nokia's browser expected to do the same as Opera Mini? (that they use the same user agent may imply so)
It's a feature. You can enable it, or not.
Nokia also seems to have allowed MTM attacks using its own cert - the Nokia proxy is returning a nokia cert, which is trusted by the OS. Plus they're suppressing hostname checks on Nokia certs as well. You'd think they would have just sprung for a wildcard cert.
Technically all ISPs can do it. Right? Or am I wrong, and what Nokia does is far more sinister than what a plain vanilla ISP can do to home internet connection?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Asha phones are intended for developing countries where bandwidth can be limited and expensive They talk about it here http://www.developer.nokia.com/Develop/Series_40/Nokia_Browser_for_Series_40/
Proxies which handle https do not decrypt the traffic, they simple tunnel it. And proxies, even transparent ones, don't hijack anything. What if Nokia's proxy was transparent - would a "security professional" complain then? Sounds more like a case of "manic paranoiac" than "security professional".
Opera mini and similar J2ME browsers for underpowered phones have always worked like that.
And the 'cloud' browser from Amazon works like that too.
It's admittedly not great and you have to hope that the Opera, Nokia or Amazon guys know what they are doing...
But usually when you are using a computer to access your bank, you have to trust quite a number of people:
- all the Certificate Authorities in the world as any of them could issue a fake certificate that looks like your bank and you likely would not notice
- the browser developers and they are pushing updates all the time so you could get a fake update today to hack you, another one to mask the hack tomorrow.
- the OS developers
- the driver developers as most drivers have some privileged access
- the bank's IT guys
- the bank's service providers and hosting company
Finally, if you use your work computer to access your bank you have to add your IT team and they might have a proxy that opens your SSL traffic (they just need to add their CA to your browser and they can intercept everything and make it look like it's normal...)
If ever there was a case for Free Software on mobile devices, this is it. Thank God Ubuntu, Android and Tezin exist to disrupt the ole Microsoft/IBM/Apple oligarchy!
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
It seems like when using my BlackBerry connected to BIS (AT&T) it has certificates installed for my wireless provider and content is going through their servers. My understanding was that the BIS was doing some translations to make the content suitable for the BlackBerry browser, but I imagine they could intercept anything and I wouldn't have been alerted about it.
I always wondered why BlackBerry was considered so secure given this...
Yep, checking the phone now, there they are in the cert list:
us.cingular.midp20.FullTrust
us.cingular.midp20.SemiTrust
us.cingular.midp20.Trusted3rd
If I distrust them I get untrusted cert warnings trying to visit google.com using https. If I trust them again, everything works smoothly.
Doesn't this open them up to all kinds of legal problems? I mean if my bank account gets compromised after I use my nokia phone to check my balance, would I not have a pretty good cause for lawsuit?
For heavens sake - the point of these featurephone browsers (Opera Mini has been doing this since dawn of time) is that they use proxy to reduce data transferred and/or reformat the sites to better use lower resolution. Instead of a lot screenshots to prove that he is a very l33t h4x0r he could have just opened the friendly page showing how the browser works.
The only thing that rises eyebrows a little is that they indeed MITM https traffic by re-encrypting the traffic and using their own certificate (which is installed as trusted on the phone) on phoneproxy communication. But this is how SSL is supposed to work - if you want to be sure about both sides you will also need client-side certificates.
Nokia is now the devil we know. Is anyone else pulling a similar stunt?
I was under the impression that PKCS where precisely conceived such that it was possible to establish a secure connection between two parties which didn't exchange in advance any information?
How does TLS / SSL work? Isn't it a PKCS?
Lastly: what is the point of TLS / SSL if anyone can exploit the very thing TLS / SSL tries to solve!?
Anyone who didn't realize Opera Mini was rerouting data for compression on their servers just didn't look into it before downloading and using it. It's a "feature" - supposed to get you faster browsing. Worked pretty well for me when I had it on a 3G Blackberry.
Make sure that the certificate fingerprints agree with those obtained through some alternate channel (another browser on another system through a different ISP, etc.).
If they agree, this is all a non issue. Its not likely that a certificate replaced by a MITM attack would generate the same hash as the original.
Have gnu, will travel.
There's nothing here that shows a man in the middle attack. The author needs to show at least the following:
* The phone recieved a fake certificate that appears to be from google but is not. That can be done by comparing the fingerprint of the cert received by the phone with the fingerprint from a known good google certificate.
* The phone trusts the fake certificate because the fake is signed by a fake root certificate pre-installed on the phone.
All the blog post shows is the phone made an https connection to a proxy server and received a valid certificate for that proxy server (NOT a fake google certificate).
So say the Finns !!
It is well documented (e.g. http://www.developer.nokia.com/Develop/Series_40/Nokia_Browser_for_Series_40/ speaks of a client, not a browser) that the browser on those phones is basically a UI talking to a rendering engine running in the cloud. All the traces found in the article are showing the proprietary protocol spoken between the browser UI running on the phone and the rendering engine running on Nokia servers and the DNS lookup the UI does to find its server in the cloud. Actually I am positively surprised that this proprietary protocol is encrypted;-)
So _technically_ this is not a man-in-the-middle scenario at all: There is nobody between the rendering engine run by the user and the site that rendering engine connects to. Practically Nokia could log everything you do. But quite frankly anybody that controls your hardware and software can do the same.
So what is the fuss all about?
well, most folks around the courthouse steps call it a hack, but, hey, whatever.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
How can this possibly be a surprise when Nokia widely advertise their "Nokia Express Browser" as explicitly doing just this?
"Security Professional" (read: unemployed blogger) discovers that mobile browsers do what they say they do in the terms of use.
This is an age-old technology, where a proxy server is used to compresses some of the mobile web page content (such as images) to accelerate the browsing experience on slow networks. In Opera Mobile the feature is called "Turbo browsing", and can be trivially disabled from the settings menu.
News at 10 o'clock.
You don't need a license to USE software. Copyright doesn't control USE of a program.
A ToS is also irrelevant because unless you're using their service (Do they actually run their own mobile phone network?), there is no service to agree to terms with.
And if you ARE signed up for Nokia Mobile Phone, then you can leave and the ToS (and phone) are no longer controlled by those service agreements.
Really, all you're going to do is make people NOT BUY them at all.
I connect to my Bank.
HTTPS connection.
NOBDOY ELSE is supposed to be listening in.
But Nokia is sitting there, taking MY PASSWORD when they have taken from my connection to them, and used that to log in AS ME.
They are now PRETENDING to be me.
What do they call that if I were to do that to, say, the Nokia company?
Oh, that's right: hacking.
If you _re-read_ his post, he is only showing evidence, and claims that Nokia NOT OPERA is a MITM. use of the word "attack" obviously doesnt apply. But it is -extremely clear that Nokia is intercepting and repackaging https traffic. Opera is not, and their privacy policy clearly states that Opera passes HTTPS untouched and only boosts -normal HTTP traffic-
I may be left wondering why you have no concern that a secure https connection you expect to a website is infact, not to that website, but is decrypted -atleast!- once, before being reencrypted to the site you expected. If you are fine with that I wonder what kind of security professional YOU may claim to be.....
the dumber the user.
to disable this behavior and use the uncompressed browser, hold down the '0' key. the browser instance launched like this will not be compressing any data because it connects directly to websites. but its obviously quite inferior to the standard browser.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
I thought the _whole point_ of some or all of these browsers - like Opera Mini - was that they went through the browsers proxy, minimizing the traffic to the phone.
This isn't security research, it's reading the brochure of the product you are using.
(What I would like to know is why every time I set up a new phone or pad to use 3g, I get a proxy setting forced on me in the _network_ setup...)
If you sniff the phone traffic, its going to a proxy address that returns a VERISIGN issued certificate. Its NOT a Nokia issued/signed CA, bust a standard Verisign one, specific to the service - so it has all the same "protections" that a regular bank issued one does. Its also obviously encrypted when it communicates with your bank, Facebook, google, etc as well, and the service checks revoked certs as well (try accessing a revoked thawte cert from awhile back to test). Pure FUD. They probably didn't spring for a wildcard, so that they could control what hostnames are being used to control what hostnames are being used to access the service.
The Nokia Xpress browser for windows phone/Lumias do this too by the way. IE doesn't.
Even if you were to accept and trust Nokia (and Opera, etc) and the people working for them to intercept and re-encrypt your supposedly secure traffic without keeping any sensitive information, their servers become targets for anyone who might want to get such information.
The more people sending sensitive information through the servers, the more interesting the servers become to 'the bad guys'.
When they're interesting enough, they will be compromised.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Please can somebody post a list of affected phones, so I can warn my users? Thanks! :o)
I don't use any of the browsers that purportedly do this, so I do not know how well the applications indicate to the user that they are completely breaking SSL. But, this is something that should not be done without massive, explicit, and repeated warnings (FOR EACH SSL REQUEST!) to the user.
As flawed as SSL and PKI may be, users have been trained to trust them. WTF is this shit? Lunacy.
Who cares if you want to call it a MITM attack or not...
DO NOT TOUCH SSL TRAFFIC WITHOUT ENSURING THE CURRENT USER KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT IS GOING ON.