CVE-2017-9559 in App
Summary
by MITRE
The MEA Financial vision-bank/id420406345 app 3.0.1 for iOS does not verify X.509 certificates from SSL servers, which allows man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof servers and obtain sensitive information via a crafted certificate.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/18/2019
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2017-9559 affects the MEA Financial vision-bank/id420406345 mobile application version 3.0.1 for iOS devices. This represents a critical security flaw in the application's implementation of secure communication protocols, specifically within its handling of SSL/TLS certificate verification processes. The issue stems from the application's failure to properly validate X.509 certificates presented by SSL servers during secure connections, creating a significant attack surface that compromises the integrity of the communication channel between the mobile client and backend servers.
The technical flaw manifests as a complete absence of certificate pinning or validation mechanisms within the application's network security implementation. This allows malicious actors to perform man-in-the-middle attacks by presenting forged SSL certificates that appear legitimate to the vulnerable application. The vulnerability directly maps to CWE-295, which addresses improper certificate validation, and represents a failure in the application's cryptographic implementation that violates fundamental security principles for secure communications. When an attacker successfully intercepts communications, they can establish fake server identities that the application accepts without proper verification, enabling them to decrypt and potentially modify sensitive data transmitted between the mobile application and financial servers.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is severe for users of the MEA Financial application, as it exposes sensitive financial information to unauthorized access. Attackers can exploit this weakness to intercept user credentials, account details, transaction data, and other confidential information transmitted through the application's secure channels. The vulnerability undermines the core security assurances that users expect from financial mobile applications, potentially leading to financial fraud, identity theft, and unauthorized access to banking services. This type of attack aligns with ATT&CK technique T1041, which describes data compression and encryption techniques used by adversaries to avoid detection while exfiltrating sensitive information from compromised systems.
Mitigation strategies for this vulnerability require immediate implementation of proper SSL certificate validation mechanisms within the application. The fix should include implementing certificate pinning, where the application maintains a trusted list of certificate fingerprints or public keys that must match the server's certificate during connection establishment. Additionally, the application should enforce strict certificate chain validation, ensuring that certificates are issued by trusted certificate authorities and have not been tampered with during transmission. The implementation should follow industry best practices outlined in NIST SP 800-52 for certificate management and should incorporate proper error handling to prevent the application from proceeding with unverified connections. Regular security audits and penetration testing should be conducted to ensure that similar certificate validation issues do not exist in other components of the application's security architecture.