Nokia Running A Man In The Middle Attack To Decrypt All Your Encrypted Traffic, But Promises Not To Peek

from the not-too-comforting dept

This is a bit crazy. After a security researcher pointed out that Nokia's Xpress Browser is basically running a giant man in the middle attack on any encrypted HTTPS data you transmit, the company played the whole situation down by saying, effectively, sure, that's what we do, but it's not like we look at anything. This is, to put it mildly, not comforting. Just the fact that they're running a man in the middle attack in the first place is immensely concerning. The reason they do it is that this is a proxy browser, similar to Opera, that tries to speed up browsing by proxying a lot of the content -- meaning that all of your surfing goes through their servers. In some cases, this can be much faster for mobile browsing. But, the right way to do such a thing is to only do the proxying on unencrypted traffic. With encrypted traffic, you're just asking for trouble.

After sensing the backlash, Nokia pushed out an update of the browser that appears to remove the man-in-the-middle attack, even as it had tried to claim there was nothing wrong in the first place. However, the original researcher who discovered this, Gaurang K Pandya, updated his post to note that it's not all good news.

Just upgraded my Nokia browser, the version now is 2.3.0.0.48, and as expected there is a change in HTTPS behaviour. There is a good news and a bad news. The good news is with this browser, they are no more doing Man-In-The-Middle attack on HTTPS traffic, which was originally the issue, and the bad news is the traffic is still flowing through their servers. This time they are tunneling HTTPS traffic over HTTP connection to their server

Filed Under: browser proxy, encryption, https, man in the middle, security, xpress browser
Companies: nokia