Submission + - Attack Breaks Confidentiality Model of SSL (threatpost.com)
Gunkerty Jeb writes: Two researchers have developed a new attack on TLS 1.0/SSL 3.0 that enables them to decrypt client requests on the fly and hijack supposedly confidential sessions with sensitive sites such as online banking, e-commerce and payment sites. The attack breaks the confidentiality model of the protocol and is the first known exploitation of a long-known flaw in TLS, potentially affecting the security of transactions on millions of sites.
The attack, developed by Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong, will be presented at the Ekoparty conference in Argentina on Friday, and, unlike many other attacks on TLS and SSL, it has nothing to do with the certificate trust model in the protocol. Instead, the researchers have developed a tool called BEAST that enables them to grab and decrypt HTTPS cookies from active user sessions. The attack can even decrypt cookies that are marked HTTPS only from sites that use HTTP Strict Transport Security, which forces browsers to communicate over TLS/SSL when it's available.
The attack, developed by Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong, will be presented at the Ekoparty conference in Argentina on Friday, and, unlike many other attacks on TLS and SSL, it has nothing to do with the certificate trust model in the protocol. Instead, the researchers have developed a tool called BEAST that enables them to grab and decrypt HTTPS cookies from active user sessions. The attack can even decrypt cookies that are marked HTTPS only from sites that use HTTP Strict Transport Security, which forces browsers to communicate over TLS/SSL when it's available.