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Threema Beneath Fireplace After Downplaying Safety Analysis

By Eduard Kovacs on January 12, 2023

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The builders of the open supply safe messaging app Threema have come underneath fireplace over their public response to a safety evaluation carried out by researchers on the Swiss college ETH Zurich.

The Swiss firm that makes Threema claims to have greater than 10 million customers and over 7,000 on-premises prospects. Prospects reportedly embrace the Swiss authorities and German chancellor Olaf Scholz.

ETH Zurich researchers analyzed the appliance and its communication protocol final yr and found seven varieties of assaults that could possibly be launched by an attacker who can intercept communications, one who has compromised a server, or one who has hacked the focused consumer’s machine.

In response to the researchers, they discovered points associated to authentication and encryption that might enable an attacker to acquire message metadata (not precise conversations), stop messages from being delivered, clone accounts, get well the personal key related to a consumer’s Threema ID, and encrypt probably compromising messages and ship them to a consumer in an effort to plant proof.

The researchers printed a paper detailing their findings and arrange a devoted web site for his or her safety evaluation of Threema.

The findings had been reported to Threema builders in October 2022 and the corporate has since launched mitigations, in addition to a brand new protocol, to mitigate the assault strategies.

In an announcement printed on its web site the day the researchers made their findings public, Threema thanked them, however famous that not one of the assault strategies they described “ever had any appreciable real-world affect”.

The corporate identified that the assaults should not straightforward to drag off, requiring prolonged bodily entry to an unlocked machine, in depth social engineering, or appreciable computing sources.

“Most [attacks] assume in depth and unrealistic conditions that will have far better penalties than the respective discovering itself,” Threema mentioned in a weblog submit.

The assertion downplays the findings, however that’s not unusual for distributors. Nevertheless, a message posted by Threema on Twitter led to the corporate being vastly criticized by the cybersecurity neighborhood.

“There’s a brand new paper on Threema’s outdated communication protocol. Apparently, right now’s academia forces researchers and even college students to hopelessly oversell their findings,” the corporate wrote in a message pointing to its official assertion.

The corporate’s weblog submit on the matter was initially titled “New Paper on Previous Threema Protocol”, however was later renamed to “Assertion on ETH Findings”.

Kenneth Paterson, an ETH Zurich professor concerned within the analysis, described the tweet as “unexpectedly dismissive”, claiming that the Threema protocol was up to date because of their work.

Threema, alternatively, denies this and claims that the introduction of the brand new protocol “was deliberate for a while and coincided with the disclosure interval of the researchers”.

Members of the cybersecurity neighborhood described the corporate’s response as aggressive, unprofessional, and smug. It appears that evidently the vulnerabilities gained extra consideration as a result of Threema’s poor response relatively than the precise severity of the issues.

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