Hacker News Reader

Comment by mox1 | Hacker News Reader

Certificate pinning spoils that, no spoofing of certs with pinning.

Cert (or hash of) delivered with app. If server cert doesn't match expected value coded into app, someone is messing with something, terminate connection.

View on HN

Yes that complicates things. But if you can find the cert in the binary's data section, maybe you can patch it with your own.

This probably runs into the same issue mentioned in the article, where the checksums are wrong and you end up in an infinite loop.

Assuming this is for Android, the APK would no longer be signed and would cause all login attempts to fail.

Have a read about "SafetyNet Attestion API" for Android.

You could patch Android and run it in an emulator. Or patch Snap not to care. Not super familiar, but there should be a way. Client side security can only do so much.

You can't patch Snap to not care because the safetynet process is (roughly) like that: The App asks the Play libraries whether the phone is okay. This is verified (in part) on the Google servers, so the Snap servers can ask Google whether a call came from a non-tampered phone. The client can't do anything about it, except tricking google into believing the phone is not tampered with. Which is notoriously hard, because nobody knows how the process really works.

Except not all Android devices have Play Services, for example is Snap available in China?

In my experience, SafeteyNet bypass on rooted devices has been a solved problem for a long time through Magisk Hide.

Just don’t do something like only trust a specific CA cert. really-really pin to a leaf.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com