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A Measurement and Security Analysis of SSL/TLS Deployment in Mobile Applications

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Abstract

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) have been widely used to provide security in communications. With the rapid development of mobile Internet, they are progressively applied in mobile applications. It is interesting to study the security of their usage. However, most of existed researches on SSL/TLS focus on the whole ecosystem, while few of them have in-depth study on the status quo of mobile security about SSL/TLS. In this paper, we measure the network behaviors of top 50 popular applications on Android and iOS platforms to reveal the security problems of SSL/TLS deployment in mobile Internet. A system is implemented which can extract the handshake parameters and inspect SSL deployment status. We also demonstrate some typical severe problems by performing man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks against six applications. We believe our study is very consequential for SSL deployment on mobile platforms and the design of secure applications in the future.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. XDA06030200), Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Science and Technology Project (No. 201230123), and Beijing Natural Science Foundation (4164089).

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Correspondence to Zigang Cao .

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© 2018 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Guo, Y., Cao, Z., Yang, W., Xiong, G. (2018). A Measurement and Security Analysis of SSL/TLS Deployment in Mobile Applications. In: Chen, Q., Meng, W., Zhao, L. (eds) Communications and Networking. ChinaCom 2016. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 209. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66625-9_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66625-9_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-66624-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66625-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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