Question

A mobile banking application communicates with backend APIs over HTTPS. During a security review, an IS auditor discovers that the app accepts any certificate signed by a trusted root CA rather than validating a specific expected certificate. Which risk is MOST directly increased by this design?

Accepted Answer

An attacker who obtains a fraudulent but CA-signed certificate could perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the connection

Answer

Data at rest on the device would be stored without encryption

Answer

The application would be unable to establish any TLS session with the backend

Answer

The backend server's private key could be extracted from the mobile client