Apple users access Gmail on mobile devices could be at risk of having their data intercepted, a mobile security company said Thursday.
The reason is Google has not yet implemented a security technology that would avoid attackers from viewing and modifying encrypted communications exchanged with the Web giant, wrote Avi Bashan, chief information security officer for Lacoon Mobile Security, based in Israel and the United States.
Websites use digital certificates to encrypt data traffic using the SSL/TLS protocols. But in some instances, those certificates can be spoofed by attackers, allowing them to observe and decrypt the traffic.
That threat can be eliminated through certificate “pinning,” which involve hard coding the details for the legitimate digital certificate into an application.
Unlike for Android, Google doesn’t do this for iOS, which means an attacker could perform a man-in-the-middle attack and read encrypted communications, Bashan wrote. Google acknowledged the problem after being notified by Lacoon on Feb. 24, but the problem has not been fixed, he wrote.
Google officials did not have an immediate comment.
It isn’t clear why certificate pinning isn’t used by Google on iOS. But three years ago, a Google security engineer that works on such security issues described a scenario where the handling of digital certificates becomes complicated.
Occasionally, proxy servers used by companies will intercept HTTPS connections using local, ephemeral certificates,
Lacoon described an attack scenario that involved tricking a user into installing an iOS device management design file that contains a malicious source digital certificate. That would validate a spoofed certificate, allowing the person to navigate to a fraudulent Gmail site.
“We were quite surprised by this finding because Google had implemented certificate pinning for their Android Gmail app,” Bashan wrote. “Clearly, not implementing this for iOS was an slip by Google.”
