CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidsecuritysslhttpsbidirectional
JavaForAndroid
JavaForAndroid

Reputation: 1179

Bidirectional SSL communication on Android?

I would like to send a request to a webserver. It should be secure against Man-In-The-Middle-Attacks. Therefore I have created a SSL certificate on the webserver (https). As a response I would get a random String. This works well.

But how can I secure the response to protect it against MITM-Attacks? How should the response be sent from the webserver to Android and what do I have to configure on Android? Do I have to buy another trusted certificate?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 142

Answers (1)

quinz
quinz

Reputation: 1342

In a typical as-called 1-way TLS (a.k.a "server certificate authentication") setup a server would listen requests from basically any client, but the clients would only trust the server with a valid certificate. When the client thinks it can trust the received certificate, the communication channel can be opened and it will be encrypted both ways.

As-called 2-way TLS (a.k.a "client certificate authentication" or "mutual authentication") setup means that both ends present a certificate to the other end. In other words your server would trust only certain clients (the ones that present a valid certificate). This would have no impact on your protection against MITM. You would just be limiting the pool of trusted clients.

So as a conclusion - if your only concern is to protect your communication against MITM-attacks, 1-way TLS is fine.

TLS v1.2: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5246

Upvotes: 1

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