Zoë Reichert

Zoë Reichert is an undergraduate research assistant at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Her interests include security research and tech policy.


Sessions

07-12
16:00
50min
Protecting the Network Traffic of One Billion People: Reverse-Engineering Chinese Cryptography
Jeffrey Knockel, Mona Wang, Zoë Reichert

TLS is not as universal as we might think! To this day, extremely popular Chinese applications use home-rolled network cryptography. Mona, Jeff, and Zoë have been reverse-engineering various home-rolled cryptography that protects hundreds of millions of users' sensitive data. They'll present various case studies from the past several years, including but not limited to: MMTLS, the custom cryptographic protocol that governs all WeChat traffic; various network encryption schemes used by popular Chinese keyboard apps; and flawed cryptography found in popular Chinese browsers. Their research found that faulty cryptography in multiple browsers and keyboard apps - each with hundreds of millions of users - effectively exposed every site visited and every keystroke made to any network eavesdropper. After studying and reporting the (often severe) flaws in these schemes, the companies mostly switched to standard cryptography like TLS.

The presentation will end with a call to action for hackers to help study the network encryption ecosystem in China, which continues to be overlooked by the modern security community.

Talks & Panels
Marillac Auditorium