SSLStrip Now In the Wild

An anonymous reader writes "Moxie Marlinspike, who last week presented his controversial SSL stripping attacks at Black Hat Federal, appears to have released his much-anticipated demonstration tool for performing MITM attacks against would-be SSL connections. This vulnerability has been met with everything from calls for more widespread EV certificate deployment to an even more fervent push for DNSSEC."

Comments

Alternatives

[jetsci]

I guess the question then is, what do we use as an alternative? What can we even do?

Re:Not the end of the world

[IBBoard]

If you read some of the articles (Forbes and a linked one) he can spoof the appearance of a valid certificate as well using International Domain Names. The certificate won't be valid for the site that you wanted, but that won't matter because it'll have redirected you to https://a/ load of characters that look like 'paypal.com/somepath' but are actually non-ASCII characters].evil.com with a wildcard certificate for *.evil.com and look like https://paypal.com/some-path-here-that-is-really-really-really-really-long.evil.com/

For the basic attack then actually checking for HTTPS and a proper validation (not just a padlock, but a padlock and the other markers), but for the fuller attack that takes advantage of the IDN then you'd probably need to read the certificate itself, which would require you to know which certificate you're expecting, which would require something like a page with the signature on saying "look for this", which could then also be spoofed (in cases where it was worth it, e.g. a bank).