How to crack the challenges of DIVA

DIVA is a vulnerable Android app that is a good start to teach students how to check for vulnerabilities or design flaws in Android apps. According to the developers, “DIVA (Damn insecure and vulnerable App) is an App intentionally designed to be insecure. The aim of the App is to teach developers/QA/security professionals, flaws that are generally present in the Apps due poor or insecure coding practices.”

Within this Blogpost, I want to help you cracking the 13 challenges of DIVA.

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Defeating the Secrets of OTP Apps for Android

Despite the increasing number of cases of data theft (such as Equifax), the classic password is still in many places the sole security feature for user authentication.

However, numerous possibilities for extending this now anachronistic form of access control already exist. One such option is the use of one-time passwords (OTP). These passwords are increasingly used for additional authentication (in addition to user name and password) of the respective user to service providers on the Internet and the applications that generate these are therefore referred to as so-called two-factor authentication apps (2FA apps).

The paper of Philip Polleit and myself investigates 16 such 2FA apps for the Android operating system and focuses on the extent to which these applications can offer a similar level of protection when compared to classical hardware tokens (e.g., YubiKey, SecurID-Authenticator). The paper was presented at this years IMF conference in Hamburg.

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Neues Buch: Mobile Hacking

Mitte 2015 kam der dpunkt.verlag auf mich zu und fragte mich, ob ich nicht Lust hätte ein Buch zum Thema “hacking mobiler apps” zu schreiben. Die Idee, ein Buch über das Thema zu schreiben, mit dem ich große Teile meines täglichen Berufsleben zu tun habe, fand ich sehr interessant, gerade auch weil es dieses Mal auf Deutsch sein sollte (was, wie ich später herausfand, deutlich schwerer ist als auf Englisch).

Nach einigen Diskussionen mit dem Verlag und zahlreichen Reviewern, entstand eine recht umfangreiche Gliederung des Buches, die für alle Seiten akzeptabel war. Ein gutes Jahr – und hunderte Stunden – später (Mai 2016) ist das Buch fertig und steht nun zum Vorbestellen auf den Seiten von Amazon und dem dpunkt.verlag bereit.

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Codeinspect: The all-in-one Platform for Android App Analysis

I’ve started some months ago with a post about Androguard and how to use it for reversing of Android apps. Androguard is still one of the most common tools for malware analysis and pentesting of Android apps, but there is a new tool on the horizon that I really want to show you. This tool combines a lot of the tasks that an analyst is facing during his day-to-day work routine in just one UI. The Tool is called Codeinspect and is developed at the Fraunhofer SIT.

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