Researchers Find, Analyze Forged SSL Certs In the Wild

An anonymous reader writes "A group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook has managed to get a concrete sense of just how prevalent SSL man-in-the-middle attacks using forged SSL certificates are in the wild. Led by Lin-Shung Huang, PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University and, during the research, an intern with the Facebook Product Security team, they have created a new method (PDF) for websites to detect these attacks on a large scale: a widely-supported Flash Player plugin was made to enable socket functionalities not natively present in current browsers, so that it could implement a distinct, partial SSL handshake to capture forged certificates."

Comments

Bluecoat and other security products

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm behind a Bluecoat proxy at work. The software plays man-in-the-middle when I access my mailbox or online bank.
I never understood where my employer got the right to impersonate gmail or xyz-bank with their own certificates.

Re:One more reason Flash sucks

[1s44c]

Flash is evil and should be destroyed, I agree. But this story is about how researchers did something cool with flash to detect forged SSL certs.

In this one case Flash isn't the security issue, it's the useful software helping to find the security issue.