Research and Development

SSL

Secure communications are one of the most important topics in information security and the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol is currently the most used protocol to provide secure communications on Internet. For example, when you are connecting to your online banking application, your favorite instant message application or social networks, all those communications are being transmitted using TLS. With TLS the information sent by the browser and the service is secured and encrypted, meaning that the information cannot be modified or tampered with by an attacker. Moreover the communications are verified to ensure that the browser is connected to the right endpoint (e.g. Wikipedia). Continue reading

Last night, researchers from Google released details of a new attack that they have called the Padding Oracle On Downgrade Legacy Encryption (POODLE) attack which has been assigned CVE-2014-3566.

The summary is, essentially, that SSLv3 uses a MAC-then-encrypt construction, which doesn’t authenticate the padding as it is applied on the plaintext message before padding or encryption are applied. This gives rise to a padding oracle bug, which is how BEAST worked too. Continue reading

As previously mentioned in SSL: Light at the end of the tunnel, today is the day that our SSL recommendations officially change. From today onwards the Team recommend only TLS versions 1.1 and 1.2. Up until now the Team have accepted the need for SSLv3 and TLSv1 for compatibility reasons, however the time has come to cut the cord. The loss of compatibility should only affect legacy systems. If these systems cannot be updated to support the newer protocols, then weak SSL is likely to be the least of your security concerns! Continue reading

This post seeks to demonstrate why users learning to ignore those certificate warnings for SSL-based RDP connection could leave them open to “Man-In-The-Middle” attacks. The MiTM attack demonstrated displays keystrokes sent during an RDP session. We conclude with some advice on how to avoid being the victim of such an attack. Continue reading