This blogpost will cover the research I presented at BSides JoBurg. You can watch the talk on YouTube, and code can be found on our GitHub page.
This journey started after having looked at some certificate-pinned apps.
The majority of apps that appear to implement cert pinning, don’t actually have cert pinning but rather just use a custom trust manager or are not proxy aware (this also applies to things like Flutter). Thus the first step is to ensure application traffic is forced through our proxy. I utilised an OpenVPN server when working with a physical device and the Android emulator proxy settings when working with a virtual device.
I’ve been performing internal assessments for seven years and out of all the things I have learnt, one is certain: without a proper tiering model, security tools alone won’t stop your organization from collapsing after a major compromise.
In this post I’ll explain what a tiering model is, how to break a flat network even when protections are present, and, most importantly, how to build a defense-in-depth network providing practical tips and diagrams.