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Basic questions, admittedly. Just noticed that the final solution was to simply modify a few bytes of the binary, which seemed preventable.
There's no point in implementing cert pinning if you don't also have integrity checking... Being able to alter bytes in the physical file and running it should not be possible (without another bypass).
Eh, clearly it raises the barrier to entry significantly. You’re never safe from a truly determined adversary, but you can keep out the riff raff.
How come applications from such big players are not completely obfuscated and have all kinds of other protections in them to e.g. deny modified binaries from running?
Obfuscation has costs, and certificate pinning is more to make it more difficult for user-adversarial MITM than to prevent reverse engineering. Although the impact on reverse engineering is more than a happy accident. At the end of the day, your code runs on user machines, and they can observe what the code does, so it's always possible to deobfuscate, and if one person does it and shares their results, it becomes ve…
Would a runtime binary checksum have helped to complicate such modification? This isn’t sop for mobile apps? Do iOS or Android SDK’s provide such facilities? Presumably associated with the official release process and enforced on their respective non-jailbroken platforms? Basic questions, admittedly. Just noticed that the final solution was to simply modify a few bytes of the binary, which seemed preventable.
Would a runtime binary checksum have helped to complicate such modification? This isn’t sop for mobile apps? Do iOS or Android SDK’s provide such facilities? Presumably associated with the official release process and enforced on their respective non-jailbroken platforms? Basic questions, admittedly. Just noticed that the final solution was to simply modify a few bytes of the binary, which seemed preventable.
macOS (desktop), not iOS (mobile).
There's no point in implementing cert pinning if you don't also have integrity checking... Being able to alter bytes in the physical file and running it should not be possible (without another bypass).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately while this thing helps it doesn't actually conclusively stop any speculation. If I wanted to spy on you via app, I would encrypt the data inside the HTTPS stream and only decrypt it on my server.
Pretty sure anything you encrypt client side can be decrypted client side, as long as you have control over the binary and OS/hardware. It's just a matter of effort.
There's no point in implementing cert pinning if you don't also have integrity checking... Being able to alter bytes in the physical file and running it should not be possible (without another bypass).
Integrity checking is user-hostile, but certificate pinning can be good for users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately while this thing helps it doesn't actually conclusively stop any speculation. If I wanted to spy on you via app, I would encrypt the data inside the HTTPS stream and only decrypt it on my server.
Pretty sure anything you encrypt client side can be decrypted client side, as long as you have control over the binary and OS/hardware. It's just a matter of effort.