Two Guwahati-based students have caught the attention of the cyberspace by discovering a vulnerability in the wildly-popular messaging app WhatsApp, which allows anyone to remotely crash WhatsApp just by sending a specially crafted message. Indrajeet Bhuyan, a class XII student of the Army Public School, Narengi and Saurav Kar, a class XI student of KV IOC, Noonmati in a video demonstration have showed how a 2000 words (2kb in size) message in special character set can crash WhatsApp messenger app. This discovery of the young students has been reported by a host of online news portals including the widely popular The Hacker News, which happens to be one of the world’s biggest security news portal. They tested the same and published an article about it on December 1. The report has been carried also by SOFTPEDIA giving elaborate details. “On November 30 this year we reported a serious vulnerability on the widely popular messenger app WhatsApp using which anyone can remotely crash WhatsApp just by sending a specially-crafted message,” said Indrajeet while talking to The Assam Tribune. He informed that already the WhatsApp team has been contacted in this connection and that the duo has received a communication from the team. Indrajeet said that such an issue with the same outcome was discovered in the past wherein someone had to send a huge message (greater than 7mb in size) on WhatsApp to crash victim device and app immediately. He further said that the bug he and his friend Saurav found does not require the message to be this large and only 2KB of text containing special characters is enough to crash the app. “The worrying aspect is that the user who received the specially-crafted message will have to delete his/her whole conversation and start a fresh chat, because the message keeps on crashing WhatsApp unless the chat is deleted completely,” said Saurav. Whatsapp has 600 million users as of October 2014, and an estimated number of users affected by the vulnerability could be 500 million. Interested in cyber security research, both the teenagers have been working on the vulnerability aspect of various applications. “Any member of your WhatsApp group could intentionally send a specially-crafted message to exit people from the group and delete the group. Also, for example, if I don’t want someone to keep records of my chat with them, then also I can send the same message to the person,” explained Indrajeet.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 17:23:31 +0000
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