A gaggle of researchers on the Royal Holloway, University of London, have discovered 4 vital flaws in fashionable messaging app Telegram.
The platform has typically touted safety as a key purpose for customers coming to it. However, whereas Telegram provides probably the most most popular end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) apps via a characteristic referred to as secret chats, it additionally provides common cloud chats that aren’t encrypted. E2EE provides customers safety from man-in-the-middle (MITM) assaults, the place an attacker locations themselves between the sender or receiver of a message and the cloud server that routes that message. E2EE ensures that even a service supplier similar to WhatsApp or Telegram received’t be capable of learn messages that customers ship, which additionally implies that they can not present the content material of these messages to governments, regulation enforcement businesses, or others.
Telegram makes use of a protocol referred to as MTProto to safe its cloud chats, which is the corporate’s personal model of transport layer safety (TLS), a well-liked cryptographic normal meant to make sure safety of information in transit. TLS additionally protects in opposition to MITM assaults to an extent, however doesn’t cease servers held by firms similar to Telegram from studying these texts when wanted.
According to the researchers, Telegram’s cloud chats have a flaw the place an adversary on the community can reorder messages. The researchers stated they didn’t know of examples the place this vulnerability was exploited, however famous that it may be utilized by an attacker to govern Telegram bots.
The researchers discovered code within the Android, iOS, and desktop variations of Telegram that might permit attackers to extract plaintext from encrypted messages. Such an assault will be devastating for the platform and its customers, however would require a major quantity of labor by the attacker. That implies that such an assault shall be carried out by a considerably motivated attacker similar to nation-state backed hacker teams.
This, together with two different flaws, have all been fastened by Telegram, the platform stated in a weblog put up on 16 July. “The newest variations of official Telegram apps already comprise the modifications that make the 4 observations made by the researchers not related,” the platform wrote.
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