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A Third of All HTTPS Websites Vulnerable To DROWN Attack (drownattack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The OpenSSL project has released versions 1.0.2g and 1.0.1s to address a high severity security issue known as the DROWN attack (CVE-2016-0800) which allows attackers to break HTTPS and steal encrypted information. In layman terms, the attack uses an improperly patched issue (from 1998) in SSL to attack websites using the more modern TLS protocol. Servers where admins use SSL and TLS are in danger. Additionally, servers where only TLS is used, but the admins are sharing the same certificate for other servers where they have SSL, are also vulnerable, since the attack targets RSA, employed in both SSL and TLS. The entire attack is also easy to carry out, costing only $440 on Amazon EC2.
Sure, but that's how mbed TLS (former PolarSSL, the TLS library used in Hiawatha) and Hiawatha helped me. mbed TLS dropped support for it long ago and Hiawatha uses sane and secure default settings. Without any tweaking, it gives you an A rating at ssllabs.com.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
To be fair, the described attack requires resources that haven't been available to the majority of the world until very recently. Had you managed to sit on this zero-day for twenty years, and you'd started the computations listed on consumer-grade equipment in the late 90s, you might be halfway done by now. Bottom line is, now that datacenter-level resources are becoming available to any script kiddie with a credit card, you're going to see a lot more of this kind of attack, regardless of the source.