4 ms·
Easier to conceal the attack. The MiTM attacker can pass through a command stream without STARTTLS. If they intercepted 5223 they would have to do their own c
by KirillPanov 3y ago
Easier to conceal the attack.
The MiTM attacker can pass through a command stream without STARTTLS. If they intercepted 5223 they would have to do their own client-side TLS handshake with the attacked server, which would look really obvious to anybody doing TLS fingerprinting on the server: all of a sudden, 100% of their clients have the exact same TLS fingerprint.
Stop outsourcing your PKI to ICANN, folks. Domains are not public keys.
- MattJ100 3y agoThey were doing their own TLS handshake - that's how the attack was discovered (the attacker presented a different certicate, which eventually expired, presumably due to negligence). They were decrypting and re-encrypting.
- KirillPanov 3y agoRead it again: > they would have to do their own client-side TLS handshake By intercepting the STARTTLS port the attacker can merely decrypt -- rather than, as you wrote, decrypting and re-encrypting.
- fuzzy2 3y agoThis is not what the attackers did however. From the original article (not this one): > Traffic dump on port 5222, the connection is hijacked on application level (L7), the server receives replaced ClientHello message from the client.
- MattJ100 3y agoI don't know what jabber.ru's policy is, it's running a very old version of ejabberd. But you would be hard-pressed to find an XMPP server that would allow authentication without TLS. Starttls makes no difference.