SSL Renegotiation Attack Becomes Real

rastos1 and several other readers noted that the SSL vulnerability we discussed a couple of weeks back, which some researchers had claimed was too theoretical to worry about, has now been demonstrated by exploit. The attack description is available on securegoose.org. "A Turkish grad student has devised a serious, real-world attack on Twitter that targeted a recently discovered vulnerability in the SSL protocol. The exploit by Anil Kurmus is significant because it successfully targeted the so-called SSL renegotiation bug to steal Twitter login credentials that passed through encrypted data streams. All in all, a man in the middle is able to steal the credentials of a user authenticating himself through HTTPS to a trusted website."

Comments

Good explanation of the bug by TLS spec author

[cullenfluffyjennings]

A good source of info about what this attack is and how serious it is can be found at
http://www.educatedguesswork.org/2009/11/understanding_the_tls_renegoti.html