HTTP 2.0 Protocol | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, and Google on Tuesday said they took steps to mitigate record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that relied on a novel technique called HTTP/2 Rapid Reset. The  layer 7 attacks  were detected in late August 2023, the companies said in a coordinated disclosure. The cumulative susceptibility to this attack is being tracked as  CVE-2023-44487 , and carries a CVSS score of 7.5 out of a maximum of 10. While the attacks aimed at Google's cloud infrastructure peaked at  398 million requests per second  (RPS), the ones that struck AWS and Cloudflare exceeded a volume of 155 million and 201 million RPS, respectively. HTTP/2 Rapid Reset refers to a zero-day flaw in the HTTP/2 protocol that can be exploited to carry out DDoS attacks. A significant feature of HTTP/2 is multiplexing requests over a single TCP connection, which manifests in the form of concurrent streams. What's more, a client that wants to abor...

If your web-server runs on Apache, you should immediately install the latest available version of the server application to prevent hackers from taking unauthorized control over it. Apache recently fixed multiple vulnerabilities in its web server software that could have potentially led to the execution of arbitrary code and, in specific scenarios, even could allow attackers to cause a crash and denial of service. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2020-9490, CVE-2020-11984, CVE-2020-11993, were uncovered by Felix Wilhelm of Google Project Zero, and have since been addressed by the Apache Foundation in the latest version of the software ( 2.4.46 ). The first of the three issues involve a possible remote code execution vulnerability due to a buffer overflow with the "mod_uwsgi" module (CVE-2020-11984), potentially allowing an adversary to view, change, or delete sensitive data depending on the privileges associated with an application running on the server. "[A] Malici...

It's time once again to pay our respects to the once-famous cybersecurity solutions whose usefulness died in the past year. The cybercriminal world collectively mourns the loss of these solutions and the easy access they provide to victim organizations. These solutions, though celebrated in their prime, succumbed to the twin forces of time and advancing threats. Much like a tribute to celebrities lost in the past year, this article will look back at a few of cybersecurity's brightest stars that went dark in the past year.  1. Legacy Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Cause of Death: Compromised by sophisticated phishing, man-in-the-middle (MitM), SIM-swapping, and MFA prompt bombing attacks. The superstar of access security for more than twenty years, legacy MFA solutions enjoyed broad adoption followed by almost-universal responsibility for cybersecurity failures leading to successful ransomware attacks. These outdated solutions relied heavily on SMS or email-based codes o...

Security researchers have outlined a new technique that renders a remote timing-based side-channel attack more effective regardless of the network congestion between the adversary and the target server. Remote timing attacks that work over a network connection are predominantly affected by variations in network transmission time (or jitter), which, in turn, depends on the load of the network connection at any given point in time. But since measuring the time taken to execute cryptographic algorithms is crucial to carrying out a timing attack and consequently leak information, the jitter on the network path from the attacker to the server can make it impractical to successfully exploit timing side-channels that rely on a small difference in execution time. The new method, called Timeless Timing Attacks (TTAs) by researchers from DistriNet Research Group and New York University Abu Dhabi, instead leverages multiplexing of network protocols and concurrent execution by applicati...

Various implementations of HTTP/2 , the latest version of the HTTP network protocol, have been found vulnerable to multiple security vulnerabilities affecting the most popular web server software, including Apache, Microsoft's IIS, and NGINX. Launched in May 2015, HTTP/2 has been designed for better security and improved online experience by speeding up page loads. Today, over hundreds of millions of websites, or some 40 percent of all the sites on the Internet, are running using HTTP/2 protocol. A total of eight high-severity HTTP/2 vulnerabilities , seven discovered by Jonathan Looney of Netflix and one by Piotr Sikora of Google, exist due to resource exhaustion when handling malicious input, allowing a client to overload server's queue management code. The vulnerabilities can be exploited to launch Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against millions of online services and websites that are running on a web server with the vulnerable implementation of HTTP/2 , knocking...

Google is trying every effort to make the World Wide Web faster for Internet users. The company has announced plans to propose its homemade networking protocol, called Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) , to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in order to make it the next-generation Internet standard. Probably the term QUIC is new for you, but if you use Google's Chrome browser then there are chances that you have used this network protocol already. What is QUIC? QUIC is a low-latency transport protocol for the modern Internet over UDP, an Internet protocol that is often used for streaming media, gaming and VoIP services. The search engine giant first unveiled the experimental protocol QUIC and added it to Chrome Canary update in June 2013. The protocol already included a variety of new features, but the key feature is that QUIC runs a stream multiplexing protocol on top of UDP instead of TCP. The Idea behind QUIC: QUIC was developed to s...

Good news for Internet folks! Get Ready as the entire web you know is about to change. The new and long-awaited version of HTTP took a major step toward becoming a reality on Wednesday – It is been officially finalized and approved. Mark Nottingham, chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group behind creating the standards, announced in a blog post that the HTTP 2.0 specifications have been formally approved. Now, the specifications will go through a last formality – Request for comment and editorial processes – before being published as a standard. LARGEST CHANGE IN HTTP OVER LAST 16 YEARS HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is one of the web standards familiar to most as the https:// at the beginning of a web address. HTTP protocol governs the connections between a user's browser and the server hosting a website, invented by the father of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee. HTTP/2 is simply an update to the protocol, but is really a huge deal be...