PKI Consortium blog

2017 – Looking Back, Moving Forward
January 13, 2017 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) 3DES Apple Attack CA/Browser Forum CAA Chrome Code Signing Encryption Firefox Google Identity Malware MITM Policy Revocation RSA SSL 3.0 SSL/TLS TLS 1.3 TSA Vulnerability

Looking Back at 2016

Fortunately, 2016 was not a year full of SSL/TLS vulnerabilities. Although some researchers did prove old cryptography algorithms should be put out to pasture. The year showed the end of public-trusted SHA-1 SSL/TLS certificates. It also showed more transparency should be considered due to issues discovered with a few certification authorities (CAs). The great news is HTTPS is no longer the minority — after 20 years, connections using HTTPS has surpassed HTTP.

2016 – Looking Back, Moving Forward
December 14, 2015 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack CA/Browser Forum CAA Chrome Code Signing DH Encryption Firefox Google Hash Function IETF Microsoft MITM OpenSSL Policy RC4 Revocation RSA SSL/TLS TLS 1.2 TLS 1.3 Vulnerability

Looking Back at 2015

A number of new tactics proved 2015 was no exception to an active year defending against ever increasing security issues. Vendors found new and creative ways to provide vulnerabilities including the now popular man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks.  MitM as well as a host of other new vulnerabilities caused browsers to rethink their security requirements.  This article gives a flashback of the exploits and industry changes from 2015 and looks ahead at the latest security requirements and how it impacts IT security teams.

OpenSSL High Severity Vulnerability
July 10, 2015 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack DTLS Google MITM OpenSSL SSL/TLS Vulnerability

OpenSSL has announced a high severity vulnerability, CVE-2015-1793 which will require an upgrade to some OpenSSL installations.

The vulnerability was discovered by Google personnel Adam Langley and David Benjamin on June 24, 2015. Google has been working on an alternative to OpenSSL called BoringSSL. This has allowed Google to reduce vulnerabilities in their installations, but is also a benefit to OpenSSL as issues have been reported. Note that BoringSSL is not impacted.

The Insecurity of Mobile Applications
June 11, 2015 by Rick Andrews Android Attack MITM OpenSSL SSL/TLS Vulnerability

Recently, we read about lots of SSL/TLS-related vulnerabilities found in mobile apps, which should come as no surprise. We were warned about this back in 2012 (see these studies). More warnings came in 2014 from CERT and FireEye. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) listed “insufficient transport layer protection” as number three (#3) in its top 10 list of mobile security problems of 2014. Apps that don’t use SSL/TLS are particularly vulnerable, given the ease of reading and modifying unsecured traffic at Wi-Fi hot spots, for example. But even apps that use SSL/TLS must be careful to implement proper checking to ensure that attackers can’t exploit weaknesses.

Server Name Indication and Fewer IP Addresses
June 2, 2015 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack Chrome MITM SSL/TLS

You have a dilemma. You want to continue to deploy your web service but are running out of IPv4 addresses. You consider deploying multiple virtual servers that will use the same IP address. However, your thought is that you can only have one SSL certificate per IP address. How will you make your service secure?

Server Name Indication (SNI) is an extension to the SSL/TLS protocol that allows the browser or client software to indicate which hostname it is attempting to connect. SNI is defined in RFC 6066.

Practical Steps to Counter the Logjam Attack
May 26, 2015 by Kirk Hall (Entrust) Apple Attack Encryption Google MITM SSL/TLS Vulnerability

Another flaw has been found in the basic encryption algorithms that secure the Internet. This flaw, named the Logjam attack by its discoverers (researchers from various universities and companies), allows an attacker that can carry out man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks to weaken the encryption used in secure connections (such as HTTPS, SSH, and VPNs). In theory, this means that an attacker (with sufficient resources) can break the encryption and read the “secure” traffic.

Fighting the Good Fight for Online Trust
April 2, 2015 by CA Security Council Apple CAA CASC Google HSM Mis-issued MITM Mozilla Policy Root Program SSL/TLS WebTrust

Once again Browsers and Certificate Authorities are in the news over the reported mis-issuance of an SSL server certificate to a google.com domain. Discovered by Google most likely via technology known as key pinning and discussed by Google’s Adam Langley in this blog, a Chinese certificate authority, CNNIC (Chinese Internet Network Information Center), apparently issued an intermediate certificate to an Egyptian company called MCS Holdings. Because the CNNIC root certificate is included in the root store of most major browsers, users would not see any warnings on sites that have certificates issued by CNNIC or MCS Holdings. When MCS installed their intermediate into a Man in the Middle (MITM) proxy device, that device could then issue certificates for sites which users connected to that proxy would visit. (MITM is described in more detail in our previous blog here: https://casecurity.org/2015/01/08/gogo-found-spoofing-google-ssl-certificates/)

Is Your SSL Server Vulnerable to a FREAK Attack?
March 11, 2015 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Android Attack Encryption Forward Secrecy Microsoft MITM RSA SSL/TLS Vulnerability

FREAK is a new man-in-the-middle (MITM) vulnerability discovered by a group of cryptographers at INRIA, Microsoft Research and IMDEA. FREAK stands for “Factoring RSA-EXPORT Keys.”

The vulnerability dates back to the 1990s, when the US government banned selling crypto software overseas, unless it used export cipher suites which involved encryption keys no longer than 512-bits.

The issue is there are still some clients who let crypto be degraded from “strong RSA” to “export grade RSA”. These clients use OpenSSL, Apple’s Secure Transport and Windows Secure Channel. As such, users of Android mobiles, Apple Macs, iPhones and iPads, and Windows platforms will be impacted.

Lenovo Enables Man-in-the-Middle Attacks Via Superfish Adware
February 20, 2015 by Doug Beattie (GlobalSign) Attack Code Signing Firefox Malware Microsoft MITM Mixed Content SSL/TLS Vulnerability

Lenovo is selling computers that contain the Superfish application which “supplements” the user’s SSL sessions to enable their adware application to deliver content transparently; however, due to poor security design this leaves users vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

How it was supposed to work

Superfish uses the program “Visual Discovery” to process images in browser content and then displays ads for similar goods and services. This sounds like any other adware application, but in order to maintain SSL sessions and not alert users with security warnings, Superfish is serving up these images over https. They were able to do this by creating SSL certificates on the fly that imitate the certificates on the “real” websites they have intercepted and using them in a local SSL proxy to deliver content from the Visual Discovery server over the same apparent domain, without clearly revealing what they have done.  This is a classic “man in the middle” or MITM process.

Gogo Found Spoofing Google SSL Certificates
January 8, 2015 by Rick Andrews Google Malware MITM SSL/TLS

It was recently disclosed that Gogo, a provider of Wi-Fi Internet services on commercial aircraft, has been issuing spoofed SSL certificates for Google sites that were viewed by customers of Gogo’s service. It appears that Gogo Inflight Internet was acting as an SSL Man-in-the-middle (MITM), a technique used within some enterprises to allow themselves to inspect and control all web traffic, even traffic to secure web sites.  To understand what this means, let me explain MITM in a bit more detail.