Pascal Gadient

Pascal Gadient, Oscar Nierstrasz, Mohammad Ghafari

HTTP headers are commonly used to establish web communications, and some of them are relevant for security. However, we have only little information about the usage and support of security-relevant headers in mobile applications. We explored the adoption of such headers in mobile app communication by querying 9,714 distinct URLs that were used in 3,376 apps and collected each server's response information. We discovered that support for secure HTTP header fields is absent in all major HTTP clients, and it is barely provided with any server response. Based on these results, we discuss opportunities for improvement particularly to reduce the likelihood of data leaks and arbitrary code execution. We advocate more comprehensive use of existing HTTP headers and timely development of relevant web browser security features in HTTP client libraries.

Pascal Gadient, Pascal Gerig, Oscar Nierstrasz et al.

IT professionals have no simple tool to create phishing websites and raise the awareness of users. We developed a prototype that can dynamically mimic websites by using enriched screenshots, which requires no additional programming experience and is simple to set up. The generated websites are functional and remain up-to-date. We found that 98% of the hyperlinks in mimicked websites are functional with our tool, compared to 43% with the best competitor, and only two participants suspected phishing attempts at the time they were performing tasks with our prototype. This work intends to raise awareness for phishing attempts especially with local websites by providing an easy to use prototype to set up such phishing sites.