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Domain: links.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to links.org.
Stories · 3
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Google Researchers Propose Plan To Fix CA System
Trailrunner7 writes "The security industry has no shortage of hard problems to solve, but the one getting the most attention right now is finding a way to improve, or ideally, replace, the CA infrastructure. The latest in what has become a series of recent proposals to help shore up the certificate authority system comes from a pair of Google security researchers who have laid out a plan for providing auditable public logs of certificates as well as proofs for each certificate issued. The system proposed by Google's Adam Langley and Ben Laurie (PDF) comprises three separate ideas, but relies on the creation of a publicly viewable log of every public certificate that's issued by a CA. There could be any number of public logs of these certificates, but the logs will be structured so that they are append-only. The entries in the logs will be the end certificates in the issuance chain. In addition to the logs, the proposal includes the use of proofs that are sent with each certificate to the user's browser. Laurie and Langley haven't defined exactly what the proof would look like, but suggest that it could be an extra certificate or a TLS extension." -
Man-In-the-Middle Vulnerability For SSL and TLS
imbaczek writes "The SSL 3.0+ and TLS 1.0+ protocols are vulnerable to a set of related attacks which allow a man-in-the-middle (MITM) operating at or below the TCP layer to inject a chosen plaintext prefix into the encrypted data stream, often without detection by either end of the connection. This is possible because an 'authentication gap' exists during the renegotiation process, at which the MitM may splice together disparate TLS connections in a completely standards-compliant way. This represents a serious security defect for many or all protocols which run on top of TLS, including HTTPS." -
Hashing Email Addresses For Web Considered Harmful
cce writes "The MicroID standard, despite getting thrashed soundly by Ben Laurie two years ago, has since been recommended by the DataPortability Project and published on the user profiles of millions of users at Digg and Last.fm. MicroID is basically a hash calculated using a user's profile page URL and registered email address, producing a token that makes the email address vulnerable to dictionary attacks. To see how easy it was to crack these tokens, I conducted a small study, choosing 56,775 random Digg users, and cracking the email addresses of 14,294 of them (25%) using just their MicroID, username, and a list of popular email domains. Digg has more than 2 million users, and that means half a million of them — mostly people who had never heard of MicroID, and had probably not logged in for a long time — had their email addresses exposed to this trivial attack. I also applied this attack to Last.fm (19%) and ClaimID (34%). Digg and Last.fm have since removed support for MicroID, but the lesson is clear: don't publish a hash of my email address online, guys!"