chain-of-fools

This project is a set of tools that allow researchers to experiment with certificate chain validation issues, mostly centered around the idea of a web service validating a Google SafetyNet payload.

This does not demonstrate any vulnerability with SafetyNet itself, but rather a harmful design pattern that developers may accidentally implement following common advice regarding certificate chain validation.

Some scripts require dependencies which can be installed by a pip install -r requirements.txt.

jwsmodify

In mitm-tools/jwsmodify.py, you will find a set of high-level tools for modifying JWS payloads in flight by running their payloads through a mutation function, generating a new self-signed CA certificate and a leaf certificate issued by that CA, and re-bundling the JWS to contain a forged signature, the mutated payload, and the rogue CA and leaf certificates.

rogue_ca

jwsmodify uses mitm-tools/rogue_ca.py, a small set of helper tools to create self-signed CA certificates and associated leaf certificates.

mitmproxy script

In mitm-tools/jwsmodify_mitmproxy_addon.py, there is a mitmproxy addon that will intercept SafetyNet attestations sent to web services. You can run mitmproxy with the script enabled like so:

mitmproxy -s mitm-tools/jwsmodify_mitmproxy_addon.py

SafetyNet Flask example

This Flask application exposes an endpoint, /safetynet/validate, which expects a POST request with a jws parameter containing a SafetyNet JWS. The certificate chain validation algorithm incorrectly trusts intermediate certificates as though they were trusted roots.

Amassing and Analyzing APKs

As part of our research, we assembled a list of popular Android apps and downloaded them programmatically from Apkpure and apkmonk. In order to do the same, you need to follow the following steps:

1. Make a copy of safetynet-analysis/config.template.toml and rename it config.toml

2. Add the name of the S3 bucket that you'll use to store APKs and your AWS credentials

3. To get the list of Android apps run python scrape_android_rank.py

   a) This will generate a CSV file app_ids.csv.

4. To download the apps run python get_apks.py

   a) This will use app_ids.csv will attempt to download APKs first from Apkpure and then from apkmonk

   b) The results will be stored in a SQLite database named chain-of-fools.db. Specifically, they will be in the apk_downloads table.

5. Upload the downloaded apks to the S3 bucket detailed in config.toml

6. To analyze the apks, you will need to run python check_for_safetynet.py.

   a) The results will be stored in the apk_detail table.

meta

Contributing

This project is not intended as a living project, but bug requests may be accepted via PR.

License

See LICENSE.md

Issues and Questions

Issues should be filed using GitHub issues.