» Wed Sep 21, 2011 10:01 pm Researchers have discovered a serious weakness in virtually all websites protected by the secure sockets layer protocol that allows attackers to silently decrypt data that's passing between a webserver and an end-user browser.
The vulnerability resides in versions 1.0 and earlier of TLS, or transport layer security, the successor to the secure sockets layer technology that serves as the internet's foundation of trust. Although versions 1.1 and 1.2 of TLS aren't susceptible, they remain almost entirely unsupported in browsers and websites alike, making encrypted transactions on PayPal, GMail, and just about every other website vulnerable to eavesdropping by hackers who are able to control the connection between the end user and the website he's visiting.
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At the moment, BEAST requires about two seconds to decrypt each byte of an encrypted cookie. That means authentication cookies of 1,000 to 2,000 characters long will still take a minimum of a half hour for their PayPal attack to work. Nonetheless, the technique poses a threat to millions of websites that use earlier versions of TLS, particularly in light of Duong and Rizzo's claim that this time can be drastically shortened.
In an email sent shortly after this article was published, Rizzo said refinements made over the past few days have reduced the time required to under 10 minutes.
The vulnerability resides in versions 1.0 and earlier of TLS, or transport layer security, the successor to the secure sockets layer technology that serves as the internet's foundation of trust. Although versions 1.1 and 1.2 of TLS aren't susceptible, they remain almost entirely unsupported in browsers and websites alike, making encrypted transactions on PayPal, GMail, and just about every other website vulnerable to eavesdropping by hackers who are able to control the connection between the end user and the website he's visiting.
...
At the moment, BEAST requires about two seconds to decrypt each byte of an encrypted cookie. That means authentication cookies of 1,000 to 2,000 characters long will still take a minimum of a half hour for their PayPal attack to work. Nonetheless, the technique poses a threat to millions of websites that use earlier versions of TLS, particularly in light of Duong and Rizzo's claim that this time can be drastically shortened.
In an email sent shortly after this article was published, Rizzo said refinements made over the past few days have reduced the time required to under 10 minutes.
This comes after the rampant fraudulent ssl cert problems of DigiNotar, Comodo, and GlobalSign. There's also been many attacks on SSL before such as SSL Strip, a MiTM attack that removes SSL encryption from requested pages, usually without the user ever being aware (always pay attention to make sure your ssl connection has the s
). The current attack doesn't seem really capable of doing much against SSL VPNs (such as OpenVPN) due to its slow nature, but that can change in the future.All this seriously undermines the infrastructure used to create secure transactions over the Internet.
