Viber Has No Encryption Protection

Have you used Viber before? For those of you who do not know it, Viber is an app on mobile devices that will be able to send the likes of video and images from one person to another, but apparently, it does so without any kind of encryption protection. Surely this would raise up some alarm bells among users, as researchers have recently demonstrated that Viber sends data in the open apart from storing it publicly online.

Both Ibrahim Baggili and Jason Moore, researchers from the University of New Haven’s Cyber Forensics Research & Education Group, did show off how Viber’s open transmission of the data happened recently. They managed to both data and links to the online location through the interception of traffic on a Windows 7 PC which was specially set up as a wireless access point for one of the smartphones which saw action in the test.

Of course, gaining access to the transmitted data is not a walk in the park, but attackers with the necessary technical know how are able to achieve their nefarious objective by setting up malicious wireless access points, or perhaps to fall back upon man-in-the-middle attacks by intercepting network traffic. Viber has since commented on the situation, touting that it is already in the middle of fixing the issue.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: viber