5 ms·
Researchers exploit HTTP/2, WPA3 protocols to stage ‘timeless timing’ attacks
- reificator 6y agoWow, there's a real Experts Exchange vibe to this site. Edit: I'm talking about the url here which at first glance is incredibly inappropriate.
- __MatrixMan__ 6y agoWait, it wasn't Expert Sexchange? No wonder I never left with my questions answered...
- lucb1e 6y agoPortSwigger and Burp Suite are... interesting (poor?) names when it comes up among those who don't already know it, but that aside, they're very common tool in the industry for web pentesting and some of their articles are really good. It's also not a Q&A site like Experts Exchange is, and you don't have to pay for the answers, just for their software product.
- wglb 6y agoI'm reminded of Don Lancaster saying that "Fluke" is a bad name for voltmeters and other electrical instruments. They have done well enough in the 20 years since he said that.
- lucb1e 6y agoI don't doubt that a company can do well regardless of its name. PortSwigger is making a killing off all the pentesting companies, but I'm still allowed to find it a bad name and awkward to bring up outside the in-crowd.
- reificator 6y agoThe difference is that Fluke doesn't sound offensive in a URL unless maybe your name is Luke.
- reificator 6y agoI'm not implying anything about the site being a Q&A site. I'm just saying that while Pen Island might be a fine name for your pen store, you shouldn't make it your url. Spacing and casing make all the difference.
- JeremyBanks 6y agoSomebody tell Homebrew
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dec0dedab0de 6y agoThere's a chain of restaurants around here called Han dynasty Everyone I know just calls it handy nasty
- lucb1e 6y agoThere's a Chinese company near us in Germany. We don't know how it's supposed to be pronounced, but it sounds like "weich ei", meaning "soft egg". Handy nasty is even better, though.
- punnerud 6y agoSummary: “[For HTTP/2], we just need to make sure that both requests are placed in a single packet (e.g. by writing both to the socket at once)“ And then looking at the order of the packages when they get back. Now you have a way to measure computation time at the server, that opens up a whole range of attacks.
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y agoWhy does having a way to measure computation time at the server open up a whole range of attacks? I’m ignorant on the topic.
- jacksnipe 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack
- CapriciousCptl 6y agoIf the webapp compares hmac digests, for instance, with something like (a == b), the comparison is short-circuited the sooner it hits an unmatched byte (the more left-ward). So, an attacker can go byte by byte left to right. There's a lot of noise over HTTP/1.1, but these attacks are at least theoretically possible over the wire. If you can do it without noise and with 10s of microseconds of resolution, your attack just got much more efficient. And it probably opens the door to timing things more crazy then simple equality.
- eis 6y agoIf your crypto code doesn't use constant time functions for timing attack sensitive stuff (like digest comparisons) then you have more serious problems already. Relying on HTTP or other noise is not a good idea.
- bawolff 6y agoWell, lots of web apps don't use constant time comparisons when checking $password == $actualPassword. Whether there exists enough timing difference to do something with that is very unclear even in ideal conditions
- runeks 6y agoSo, how much closer are we to an actual exploit with this attack? > The main advantage of the timeless timing attacks is that these are much more accurate, so much fewer requests are needed. How much fewer? And how close is this to what is achievable in practice?
- robocat 6y agoThey used it to exploit 2 known timing attacks that were not previously fixed because they were thought infeasible to attack: From article: In case of the HackerOne bug, it was already reported at least three times (bug IDs #350432, #348168, and #4701), but was not fixed, as the attack was considered infeasible to exploit. I then created a basic PoC with the timeless timing attacks. From article: Mathy Vanhoef, one of the co-authors of the paper, had previously discovered a potential timing leak in WPA3’s handshake protocol. But the timing was either too small to exploit on high-performance devices or could not be exploited against servers. “With the new timeless timing attacks, we show that it is in fact possible to exploit the WiFi authentication handshake (EAP-pwd) against servers, even if they use performant hardware,” Van Goethem says.
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