Oct. 17 – Egham, a village in the county of Surrey, England, recently hosted the European Symposium on Research in Computer Security. The event was also attended by a young professor from Padua, Mauro Conti, who presented his groundbreaking research related to smartphone security. It has been recently shown that many Android applications are vulnerable to attacks, such as the “Man in the Middle” (MITM): when the downloaded app communicates with a remote server, such as a bank, it is possible that an “attacker” interferes, intercepting and possibly modifying the message exchanged between the app and the server. This violates the privacy of the information exchanged, and the attacker can access the services provided for the real user. This happens whenever the app programmers don’t properly install SSL, a security system designed precisely to avoid these problems. In England, Professor Conti, in collaboration with his student Sebastiano Gottardo and Prof. Nicola Dragoni of the Technical University of Denmark, presented a study proposing a solution to the problem: Mithys, Mind The Hand You Shake. Mithys allows to identify the applications that don’t have the SSL correctly installed and alert the user on the risks; Mithys, if the user continues to use the app in question, can then protect against an Mitm attacks.
