Researchers Break Open SSL/TLS Decryption

Posted 09/20/2011 at 10:22am | by Brad Chacos

2

Comments

Print

Cynics say that the world runs on money, but money wouldn’t run as smoothly on the World Wide Web if it wasn’t for SSL/TLS. It’s the go-to encryption protocol for a lot of the Internet, and it’s supported by every major browser and many of the top websites around. But how secure is it? A pair of security researchers plan on demonstrating a serious TLS security flaw at the Ekoparty security conference later this week, and they plan on doing it with a bang: by decrypting a Paypal authentication cookie.

Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo call their snippet of JavaScript code BEAST, which is a snazzy acronym for “Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS.”  It works in conjunction with a network sniffer. While most other SSL breaches involve spoofed authentication certificates, BEAST takes a different tactic and actually breaks the encryption spit out by the TLS protocol block by block.

“BEAST is different than most published attacks against HTTPS,” Duong told The Register. “While other attacks focus on the authenticity property of SSL, BEAST attacks the confidentiality of the protocol. As far as we know, BEAST implements the first attack that actually decrypts HTTPS requests.”

Rizzo claims BEAST can decrypt the Paypal cookiein less than 10 minutes, and plans to prove in the Buenos Aires security conference. The good news: only TLS 1.0 connections are vulnerable to the exploit, and TLS 1.1 and 1.2 were released in 2006 and 2008, respectively. The bad news: upgrading to 1.1 or 1.2 can often break applications based on the widely popular TLS 1.0 protocol, so most browsers and major websites don’t offer support for the newer versions, despite the fact that TLS 1.0 is over 10 years old. Maybe Rizzo and Duong’s exploit will kick browsers in the butt and increase conversion rates?