Securing app distribution process of iOS exploiting the notion of authentic update

iOS is, perhaps, considered as one of the most secured and reliable operating systems available now-a-days. However, its loopholes are coming into light in recent times causing a few security breaches such as the Masque attack. Even though prompt and pragmatic fixes for such breaches are of utmost significance, a fix for the Masque attack is yet to be proposed. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel mechanism for guarding against the Masque attack. In our proposed mechanism, we exploit a synergy between authentication and non-repudiation to guard against different forms of Masque attack. Our exploitation leads towards a simple mechanism for preventing Replay attacks and for rejecting unauthenticated update, both of which generally paves the way of performing Masque attack. Consequently, the mechanism offers a pragmatic and easy-to-implement solution for the Masque attack.