At least 25,000 iOS apps available in Apple's App Store contain a critical vulnerability that may completely cripple HTTPS protections designed to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks that steal or modify sensitive data, security researchers warned.
1,500 IOS APPS HAVE HTTPS-CRIPPLING BUG. IS ONE OF THEM ON YOUR DEVICE?
Apps downloaded two million times are vulnerable to trivial man-in-the-middle attacks.
As was the case with a separate HTTPS vulnerability reported earlier this week that affected 1,500 iOS apps, the bug resides in AFNetworking, an open-source code library that allows developers to drop networking capabilities into their iOS and OS X apps. Any app that uses a version of AFNetworking prior to the just-released 2.5.3 may expose data that's trivial for hackers to monitor or modify, even when it's protected by the secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol. The vulnerability can be exploited by using any valid SSL certificate for any domain name, as long as the digital credential was issued by a browser-trusted certificate authority (CA).
CyberSecurity Researchers have uncovered around 25,000 iOS apps that use old versions of a popular networking library, leaving them open to attackers on the same network viewing encrypted traffic.
The bug affects Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) code in AFNetworking, a networking library developers can use to build components of iOS apps. The framework has been updated three times in the past six weeks, addressing numerous SSL flaws that leave apps vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.