As part of a penetration testing team, you are tasked with evaluating the security of a large financial corporation's mobile banking app. The app employs certificate pinning to secure HTTPS traffic. Which of the following techniques could you leverage to bypass the certificate pinning and analyze the encrypted traffic?
Spoofing DNS records to redirect the app's network traffic to a server controlled by the testing team.
Cloning the server's actual certificate and using it in a MitM position to bypass the pinning mechanism.
Generating a new certificate pair for the server and replacing the pinned certificate within the app's configuration.
Installing an unauthorized version of the app containing a rogue certificate instead of the pinned certificate.
Setting up a proxy and using a Frida script to bypass the application's certificate pinning while the traffic routes through the proxy.
Modifying the network traffic routing to pass through a proxy would allow an attacker to analyze the encrypted traffic if the attacker can install their own certificate authority on the device and trust it to intercept SSL/TLS communications. Since the mobile banking app employs certificate pinning, this would typically prevent the proxy from intercepting the traffic; however, combining it with a Frida script to hook into the application and bypass the pinning check can successfully enable the interception of network traffic. Frida is a dynamic code instrumentation toolkit that allows testers to change the behavior of apps at runtime.
Installing a rogue application version would be possible if the attacker could create one but does not directly solve the challenge of bypassing certificate pinning. Generating a new certificate pair does not bypass pinning, as the app is programmed to only trust a specific certificate. Cloning the server's actual certificate is not practical without access to the server's private key, and the application would still recognize it as non-pinned. Spoofing DNS records would not affect HTTPS traffic in this context, as certificate pinning is designed to resist this kind of attack.
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