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I don't like it that Firesheep is driving everyone to use HTTPS. You cannot have multiple SSL certs on a single IP and you have to pay a significant amount to
by codexon 16y ago
I don't like it that Firesheep is driving everyone to use HTTPS.
You cannot have multiple SSL certs on a single IP and you have to pay a significant amount to get a cert that won't pop up an annoying page which turns away most non-technical users.
There needs to be an alternative which just does key exchange and symmetric encryption without the identification.
- jgrahamc 16y agoYour alternative to SSL would allow MITM attacks. Thus it would be useless.
- codexon 16y agoI don't see another compromise that wouldn't require the signature infrastructure. MITM attacks are much less common than sniffing attacks as we can see here.
- jgrahamc 16y agoIf people moved to your scheme MITM would become common and we'd be writing about FirePiggyInTheMiddle or similar. They can be automated. You need some trust infrastructure for encryption to work.
- codexon 16y agoIn order to do FirePiggyInTheMiddle, you need to control the router. You can't just sit in the subnet and start sending commands to random clients to hijack their connection, especially when it is symmetrically encrypted.
- thwarted 16y agoA much more likely and easier setup is to poison DNS with results that direct the victim to your own machine.
- wmf 16y agoARP poisoning doesn't require control of the router; it makes MITMs pretty trivial. http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Understanding-Man-in-the-Middle-Attacks-ARP-Part1.html http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Understanding-Man-in-...
- codexon 16y agoOk you guys can stop with the "but what about this" now. We all realize there are 1000 different attacks with various levels of difficulty and all of which have appropriate countermeasures and are nowhere near the success rate nor ubiquity of simply receiving packets.
- regularfry 16y agoMITM over wifi isn't much harder than this attack, you've just got to convince people to associate with your AP rather than the default. Ettercap has been able to do that sort of thing for years; all that's needed is a swanky front-end.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoUse the DNSSEC signature infrastructure. Generate your own self signed SSL certificate, then stick a hash of that cert in the DNS for your DNSSEC protected domain. Of course, people need to start using DNSSEC, and browsers need to be updated to work with this system, but it beats paying a CA.
- bensummers 16y agoThere's a 'new' TLS (SSL) feature called Server Name Indication, which allows more than one cert per IP address. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication It has surprisingly high client support, but obviously isn't universal enough for you to rely on it working. With a protocol which doesn't require a certificate, you're still subject to MITM attacks. These are particularly viable on public wifi networks -- just set up a rogue access point.
- there 16y agoso now firesheep will lead to massive ipv6 deployment...