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Science

+ - Scientists Develop Remote Control System for Cockroaches->

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes "Much to the annoyance of home-owners everywhere, cockroaches are amazingly tough, and they’re able to squeeze into remarkably small spaces. These are some of the same qualities that researchers would like to see in tiny reconnaissance robots that could perform tasks such as searching earthquake-damaged buildings for survivors. Such adaptable, robust mini-robots would be quite challenging to create, however. A team of scientists from North Carolina State University are working on an alternative – sensor-equipped cockroaches that are remotely controlled by human operators."
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Encryption

+ - New Attack Uses SSL/TLS Information Leak to Hijack HTTPS Sessions->

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes "There is a feature supported by the SSL/TLS encryption standard and used by most of the major browsers that leaks enough information about encrypted sessions to enable attackers decrypt users' supposedly protected cookies and hijack their sessions. The researchers who developed the attack that exploits this weakness say that all versions of TLS are affected, including TLS 1.2, and that the cipher suite used in the encrypted session makes no difference in the success of the attack.

The attack was developed by researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong, the same pair who last year released details of a similar attack on SSL/TLS and wrote a tool called BEAST, which also gave them the ability to decrypt users' cookies and hijack sessions with sensitive sites such as e-commerce or online banking sites.

The researchers plan to present their findings at the Ekoparty conference in Argentina later this month and are not revealing exactly which feature of SSL/TLS is providing the information leak, but they said that the new attack works much like the BEAST attack. Once they have a man-in-the-middle position on a given network, they can sniff HTTPS traffic and launch the attack.

"By running JavaScript code in the browser of the victim and sniffing HTTPS traffic, we can decrypt session cookies. We don't need to use any browser plug-in and we use JavaScript to make the attack faster but in theory we could do it with static HTML," Rizzo said."
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Democracy becomes a government of bullies, tempered by editors. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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