Another Gaping Wound in Web Encryption Uncovered
On Thursday, the OpenSSL Foundation published an advisory warning to users to update their SSL yet again, this time to fix a previously unknown but more than decade-old bug in the software that allows any network eavesdropper to strip away its encryption. The non-profit foundation, whose encryption is used by the majority of the Web’s SSL servers, issued a patch and advised sites that use its software to upgrade immediately.
The new attack, found by Japanese researcher Masashi Kikuchi, takes advantage of a portion of OpenSSL’s “handshake” for establishing encrypted connections known as ChangeCipherSpec, allowing the attacker to force the PC and server performing the handshake to use weak keys that allows a “man-in-the-middle” snoop to decrypt and read the traffic.
“This vulnerability allows malicious intermediate nodes to intercept encrypted data and decrypt them while forcing SSL clients to use weak keys which are exposed to the malicious nodes,” reads an FAQ published by Kikuchi’s employer, the software firm Lepidum. Ashkan Soltani, a privacy researcher who has been involved in analyzing the Snowden NSA leaks for the NSA and closely tracked SSL’s woes, offers this translation: “Basically, as you and I are establishing a secure connection, an attacker injects a command that fools us to thinking we’re using a ‘private’ password whereas we’re actually using a public one.”
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