13-year-old SSL/TLS Weakness Exposing Sensitive Data in Plain Text
Mar 28, 2015
The most popular and widely used encryption scheme has been found to be weaker with the disclosure of a new attack that could allow attackers to steal credit card numbers, passwords and other sensitive data from transmissions protected by SSL ( secure sockets layer ) and TLS ( transport layer security ) protocols. The attack leverages a 13-year-old weakness in the less secure Rivest Cipher 4 (RC4) encryption algorithm , which is the most commonly used stream cipher for protecting 30 percent of TLS traffic on the Internet today. BAR-MITZVAH ATTACK The attack, dubbed " Bar-Mitzvah ", can be carried out even without conducting man-in-the-middle attack (MITM) between the client and the server, as in the case of most of the previous SSL hacks. Itsik Mantin, a researcher from security firm Imperva, presented his findings in a research titled, " Attacking SSL when using RC4 " at the Black Hat Asia security conference Thursday in Singapore. Bar Mitzv...
