[FR] Reverse-engineering Waze: A story about MASF, protobuf and a Raspberry Pi with Maliciarogue

Most of our everyday mobile applications take advantage of services provided by Google. Back in 2001, Google designed the Protocol Buffers, a.k.a protobuf. This serialisation protocol, also known as marshalling an object, is widely used to ensure communications between software of mixed technologies (C++, Java, etc.).

Naturally, a variety of Google services mobilise it as well, e.g. Google Location Services (GLS). Waze, the popular navigation app, Google Maps and many other location-based applications use GLS and thus protobuf. We will predominantly focus on Waze. In addition to navigation, the app allows to add new roads, report accidents, traffic jams and speed traps directly. Every app sends the user’s position to Waze which is able to generate traffic information in real time. Thus, the position data of smartphones is also used to optimise navigation.

During this workshop, we will explore ways to reverse-engineer the entire protocol stack involved in communications with GLS. Taking Waze as a start, we will dive deeply into MASF (Mobile Application Sensing Framework), protobuf and GLS protocols to get readable data to exploit. To achieve this, we will use the PiRanha analysis suite, that is a PiRogue (custom Kali-based full packet capture Raspberry Pi) and its companion software.

Considerations about privacy, control over real-time navigation data and the authenticity of traffic flow data may or may not be elaborated.

About Maliciarogue @maliciarogue

Rayna Stamboliyska is a risk management and crisis mitigation expert with a focus on security governance, data protection and compliance. An award-winning author for her most recent book "La face cachée d'Internet" ("The hidden face of the Internet", published with Larousse-Hachette), Rayna has extensively explored the impact of data and technology in conflict and post-conflict zones in the MENA region and Eastern Europe. She has consulted for international organisations, private companies, governments and non-profits. Energetic and passionate, Rayna has grown to become a recognised information security speaker committed to educating those outside of the industry on security threats and best practices. She writes up the cybersecurity expert column "50 nuances d’Internet" ("50 shades of Internet") at ZDNet.fr."