Category: SSL

TLS/SSL Vulnerabilities

“Which SSL ciphers should I disable?”



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Adding HTTP Security Headers to WordPress

There are a couple of sites out there which will take a look at the configuration of your site and give pointers as to where you can tighten up your configuration, pointing out if you’re missing headers such as Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options or X-XSS-Protection.

If you run a WordPress Blog there’s a quick way of adding and removing headers – you can do it within the WordPress Admin interface, with the Appearance Editor:

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CRIME against TLS?

Compression Ratio Info-leak Made Easy

CRIME is an attack against SSL, like Heartbleed, but it has a much smaller probability of exploitation. The authors of CRIME also wrote the BEAST attack. The attack can allow an attacker to recover web cookies and thereby perform session hijacking attacks, much like BEAST and the specific restrictions for the attack are similar. The attacker requires the ability to repeatedly inject predictable data whilst monitoring the resulting encrypted traffic. This requires the attacker to achieve two main prerequisites before the attack is possible: the attacker must be able to observe network traffic and manipulate the victim’s browser to submit requests to the target site.

The manipulation could be possible through Cross-site scripting attacks; JavaScript is not required and an attack could be possible with HTML Injection alone however it would be less efficient.

For CRIME to be possible the server must support compression of the request before encryption. TLS supports DEFLATE which is vulnerable, as is SPDY. The client must also support compression but only a small percentage of browsers do.

What is BEAST?

Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS

BEAST is an attack against SSL/TLS which is the cryptographic system that protects data sent online. A practical attack was found to be possible against TLS v1.0 and SSLv3.0 (and below). The issue is that the Initialisation Vector (IV) utilised as part of the encryption process can be determined by an attacker. IVs are utilised to prevent encrypted data from being deterministic, they essentially make it harder for attackers to determine patterns in encrypted data. Without them if a repeating pattern is evident in the plaintext then it will be evident in the ciphertext and this type of informations is greatly useful to an attacker. IVs are designed to prevent this, however with the BEAST attack they are shown to be deterministic which greatly reduces their use as a protection mechanism.

It reduces the protection but the deterministic nature is of limited use to an attacker and they are only able to retrieve small amounts of information from the encrypted data, however with attacks against web applications small amounts of data can cause a large impact – if an attacker is able to retrieve information such as session tokens.

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