SafeUM
Home Blog Services Download Help About Recharge

Axarhöfði 14, 110 Reykjavik, Iceland

Iceland - 2015
SafeUM
Blog
Services
Download
Help
About
Recharge
Menu
Archive
TOP Security!
19 Aug 2014

Think crypto hides you from spooks on Facebook? THINK AGAIN

Activists just got another reason to worry about what spooks might be able to learn about them, with boffins demonstrating that a decent traffic fingerprint can tell an attacker what's going on, even if an app is defended by encryption.

The researchers from the Universities of Padua and Rome have found that for activities like posting messages on a friend's Facebook wall, browsing a profile on a social network, or sending an e-mail, there's no need to decrypt an encrypted data flow.

The researchers note that even in the hands of a knowledgeable user there are opportunities for “malicious adversaries willing to trace people … the adversary can still infer a significant amount of information from the properly encrypted traffic.”

For example, if an attacker “knows” what a Twitter post's traffic typically looks like even if encrypted, and can observe both the traffic from the phone and the timing of a post appearing on Twitter, it is possible to de-anonymise the posts and associate them with the phone (and therefore the user), they assert.

The attack scenarios tested in the paper include identifying an activist whose traffic is encrypted, by correlating the inferred activity coming from a device with the time that posts appear on social networks; identifying communications between users on a similar basis; or building a behavioural profile of a target.

Inputs to the analysis included IP addresses and ports (which aren't encrypted, even if user “content” is), along with size, direction (incoming or outgoing) and timing of the communications, along with machine learning techniques using samples of traffic from apps like Facebook, Gmail and Twitter to act as seeds for their algorithms.

Those algorithms plus the visible TCP/IP data provide a data set that allows user actions – read or send e-mail, post on Twitter, post on Facebook and so on – to be classified without looking inside the packets, they write: “Our classification method is based on the detection of the sets of flows that are distinctive of a particular user action.”

They also used different accounts to train their algorithms from the accounts used in their test set, to “assure that the results of the classification do not depend on the specific accounts that have been analysed”. The study claims the tests show a classification accuracy of different actions between 91 per cent and 100 per cent.

“A powerful attacker such as a Government, could use these insights in order to de-anonimize user actions that may be of particular interest” is the study's glum conclusion.

Note: While such work has been performed on fixed networks, the boffins note that the techniques in prior work could not easily be moved to the mobile sphere.

Tags:
Facebook surveillance hackers Twitter
Source:
The Register
1800
Other NEWS
3 Jul 2020 safeum news imgage An encrypted messaging service has been infiltrated by police
4 May 2020 safeum news imgage Two-Factor Authentication ​What Is It and Why You Should Use It
12 Dec 2019 safeum news imgage Encryption is under threat - this is how it affects you
4 Nov 2019 safeum news imgage Should Big Decisions Be Based on Data or Your Intuition?
7 Jun 2018 safeum news imgage VPNFilter malware infecting 500,000 devices is worse than we thought
4 Jun 2018 safeum news imgage Hackers target Booking.com in criminal bid to steal hundreds of thousands from customers
1 Jun 2018 safeum news imgage Operator of World's Top Internet Hub Sues German Spy Agency
30 May 2018 safeum news imgage US says North Korea behind malware attacks
29 May 2018 safeum news imgage Facebook and Google targeted as first GDPR complaints filed
25 May 2018 safeum news imgage A new reason to not buy these cheap Android devices
24 May 2018 safeum news imgage Flaws in smart pet devices, apps could come back to bite owners
23 May 2018 safeum news imgage Google sued for 'clandestine tracking' of 4.4m UK iPhone users' browsing data
21 May 2018 safeum news imgage LocationSmart reportedly leaked phone location data onto the web
18 May 2018 safeum news imgage The SEC created its own scammy ICO to teach investors a lesson
17 May 2018 safeum news imgage Thieves suck millions out of Mexican banks in transfer heist
All news
SafeUM
Confidential Terms of Use Our technologies Company
Follow us
Download
SafeUM © Safe Universal Messenger

Axarhöfði 14,
110 Reykjavik, Iceland

Iceland - 2015