Read Between the Lines: Finding Flaws in EPUB Reading Systems

guest · Oct 27, 2021

Read Between the Lines: Finding Flaws in EPUB Reading Systems
October 27, 2021
https://www.darkreading.com/vulnera...e-lines-finding-flaws-in-epub-reading-systems

How secure is your e-reader? A team of security researchers curious to explore e-book security analyzed free EPUB reading applications and physical e-readers and found that many apps don't comply with security recommendations, and some popular applications are vulnerable to exploitation.

Gertjan Franken and Tom Van Goethem are doctoral students with imec-DistriNet at KU Leuven in Belgium. Their project began when Franken was thinking about his own e-reader and how e-books are rendered. Some initial reading revealed the subject area shared commonalities with other topics they were exploring as part of their Ph.D. program, so they decided to dig into it.

"I discussed with Tom, and we quickly discovered that a lot of these applications aren't actually as secure as they should be," Franken says in an interview with Dark Reading.
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Their investigation consisted of a large-scale study in which they analyzed 97 free EPUB reading applications across seven platforms, as well as five physical e-readers.
The team analyzed the EPUB applications using a semi-automated framework they built.

To demonstrate the severity of their results, Franken and Van Goethem performed three case studies in which they manually exploited the most popular application on three platforms: Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and the browser extension EPUBReader for Chrome and Firefox.
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Fortunately, he says, they didn't find any ongoing attacks but given their findings, it seems this might be an area for attackers to possibly move into in the future.

Franken and Van Goethem will present their research at Black Hat Europe in an upcoming talk entitled "How Your E-book Might Be Reading You: Exploiting EPUB Reading Systems."
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