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My guess is the X-Snapchat is a one-time use token that changes on a per-call basis and may even been hashed to the actual data being sent in the API call. For example, if Snapchat is sending a pic that has a MD5 hash of X, the token somehow encodes that or other information so you cannot reuse that token.

I’m confident the security engineering team at Snap has all kinds of white hat teams to prove and probe the security constantly.

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According to a old AppSec talk, they used a third-party security company to implement this stuff. They are a customer to a company called ‘Arxan Technologies’ that implements these ‘guards’ in their software. They’re very good at not revealing this, but it came up whilst looking at their private API.

These secret keys are there but heavily obfuscated and is nothing more than white-box cryptography which can be bypassed via emulation.

Worked with Arxan before. They are legit - what is described here is the tip of the iceberg. Haven’t even gotten into in-memory instruction and data encryption. If you’re dumping the binary you’re likely not even seeing all of what is executing at runtime

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