Samsung's official responds to Knox vulnerability allegations

Samsung has come out in the open and responded to the allegations about a vulnerability issue in its Knox security software designed for Android. 

See also: Samsung’s Galaxy Gear With New Updates

The breach that was discovered by researchers at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev allowed hackers to track emails and record data communications. It even allowed them to intercept secure data and modify it, as well as compromise the security of the network.
Well, Samsung launched an investigation and discovered that the problem isn’t with Knox but a Men in the Middle attack that can be triggered due t user’s omission while configuring the software. Here’s what the company had to say:
“This research did not identify a flaw or bug in Samsung KNOX or Android; it demonstrated a classic Man in the Middle (MitM) attack, which is possible at any point on the network to see unencrypted application data. The research specifically showed this is also possible via a user-installed program, reaffirming the importance of encrypting application data before sending it to the Internet. Android development practices encourage that this be done by each application using SSL/TLS. Where that’s not possible (for example, to support standards-based unencrypted protocols, such as HTTP), Android provides built-in VPN and support for third-party VPN solutions to protect data. Use of either of those standard security technologies would have prevented an attack based on a user-installed local application.”
And here’s how users can avoid it:
1.    Mobile Device Management — MDM is a feature that ensures that a device containing sensitive information is set up correctly according to an enterprise-specified policy and is available in the standard Android platform. KNOX enhances the platform by adding many additional policy settings, including the ability to lock down security-sensitive device settings.  With an MDM configured device, when the attack tries to change these settings, the MDM agent running on the device would have blocked them. In that case, the exploit would not have worked.
2.    Per-App VPN — The per-app VPN feature of KNOX allows traffic only from a designated and secured application to be sent through the VPN tunnel. This feature can be selectively applied to applications in containers, allowing fine-grained control over the tradeoff between communication overhead and security.
3.    FIPS 140-2 — KNOX implements a FIPS 140-2 Level 1 certified VPN client, a NIST standard for data-in-transit protection along with NSA suite B cryptography. The FIPS 140-2 standard applies to all federal agencies that use cryptographically strong security systems to protect sensitive information in computer and telecommunication systems.  Many enterprises today deploy this cryptographically strong VPN support to protect against data-in-transit attacks.
 Source:samsungknox

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.