Facebook has introduced a new feature in it’s platforms which has been designed to make it easier for bug bounty hunters to find security flaws in facebook,Messenger and Instagram Android applications.
With all Facebook-owned apps using a security mechanism such as Certificate Pinning to ensure integrity and confidentiality of the traffic, it makes it harder for white hat hackers and security researchers to intercept and analyze network traffic to find server-side security vulnerabilities.
What is Certificate Pinning
Certificate Pinning is a security mechanism designed to prevent users of an application from being a victim of network-based attacks by automatically rejecting the whole connection from sites that offer bogus SSL certificates.
How To Hack Facebook
Dubbed “Whitehat Settings,” the new option now lets researchers easily bypass Certificate Pinning on the Facebook-owned mobile apps by:
- Disabling Facebook’s TLS 1.3 support
- Enabling proxy for Platform API requests
- Using user-installed certificates
“Choose not to use TLS 1.3 to allow you to work with proxies such as Burp or Charles which currently only support up to TLS 1.2,” Facebook says.
Whitehat Settings is not visible to everyone by default. Instead, researchers have to explicitly enable this feature for their Android apps from a web interface on the Facebook website, as shown.
“To ensure the settings show up in each mobile apps, we recommend you sign out from each mobile app, close the app, then open the app and sign in again. The sign in process will fetch the new configuration and setting updates you have just made. You only need to do this once, or whenever you make changes to these settings,” Facebook says.
How to Hack Instagram Using the Facebook’s New Settings
If you want to test the Instagram app for security vulnerabilities using the newly-launched Whitehat Settings, you are first advised to link your Instagram app with your Facebook app.
It should be noted that Whitehat Settings are not meant for everyone to use, as it reduces the security for Facebook apps installed on your device.
“For the security of your account, we advise turning these settings off when not testing our platform to find Whitehat bug bounty vulnerabilities,” says facebook”
There are other companies that challenges hackers.Find the complete list of bug bounty programs here
