Adventures in Video Conferencing Part 3: The Even Wilder World of WhatsApp

Not every attempt to find bugs is successful. When looking at WhatsApp, we spent a lot of time reviewing call signalling hoping to find a remote, interaction-less vulnerability. No such bugs were found. We are sharing our work with the hopes of saving other researchers the time it took to go down this very long road. Or maybe it will give others ideas for vulnerabilities we didn’t find.

Overall, our video conferencing research found a total of 11 bugs in WebRTC, FaceTime and WhatsApp. The majority of these were found through less than 15 minutes of mutation fuzzing RTP. We were surprised to find remote bugs so easily in code that is so widely distributed. There are several properties of video conferencing that likely led to the frequency and shallowness of these issues.

Over the past five years, video conferencing support in websites and applications has exploded. Facebook, WhatsApp, FaceTime and Signal are just a few of the many ways that users can make audio and video calls across networks. While a lot of research has been done into the cryptographic and privacy properties of video conferencing, there is limited information available about the attack surface of these platforms and their susceptibility to vulnerabilities. We reviewed the three most widely-used video conferencing implementations. In this series of blog posts, we describe what we found.

Announcement post introducing Project Zero's redesigned blog, explaining the migration, new layout and features, and where readers can find the archive of past security research.

Part 7 of the Windows Registry Adventure series, mapping which Windows components parse registry data and identifying the most promising attack surface for deeper research.

Part one of a macOS audio series: building a fuzzer for CoreAudio by sending Mach messages, covering the attack surface, harness design, and early results.