Security researchers have discovered a new technique for deciphering the contents of supposedly secure communications.
DROWN is a critical vulnerability that affects HTTPS and other services that rely on SSL and TLS, some of the essential cryptographic protocols for Internet security. These protocols allow everyone on the Internet to browse the web, use email, shop online, and send instant messages without third-parties being able to read the communication. DROWN allows hackers and cyber attackers to break the encryption and read or steal sensitive communications, including passwords, credit card numbers, trade secrets, or financial data. Our measurements indicate 33% of all HTTPS servers are vulnerable to the attack. Websites, mail servers, and other TLS-dependent services are at risk for the DROWN attack, and many popular millions of websites are affected. Operators of vulnerable servers need to take action. There is nothing practical that browsers or end-users can do on their own to protect against this attack. Modern servers and clients use the TLS encryption protocol. However, due to misconfigurations, many servers also still support SSLv2, a 1990s-era predecessor to TLS. This support did not matter in practice, since no up-to-date clients actually use SSLv2. Therefore, even though SSLv2 is known to be badly insecure, until now, merely supporting SSLv2 was not considered a security problem, because clients never used it. DROWN shows that merely supporting SSLv2 is a threat to modern servers and clients. It allows an attacker to decrypt modern TLS connections between up-to-date clients and servers by sending probes to a server that supports SSLv2 and uses the same private key. To protect against DROWN, server operators need to ensure that their private keys are not used anywhere with server software that allows SSLv2 connections. This includes web servers, SMTP servers, IMAP and POP servers, and any other software that supports SSL/TLS. Security and server administrators need to ensure they have disabled support for SSLv2 on their servers. The researchers have provided instructions on how to do that for some of the most common TLS libraries and Web servers. Administrators should also ensure that even if a server doesn't support SSLv2, its private key is not reused on other servers that might. The researchers released a test tool that determines if a server is vulnerable and is affected by key reuse. An estimated 25 percent of all HTTPS-enabled websites in Alexa's top million traffic list are vulnerable. Once again, we realise that use of obsolete SSLv2.0 crypto protocol is dangerous. Comments are closed.
|