Raevenlord
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Another week, yet another security bulletin in tech news, with yet another vulnerability that joins the fray of both Intel's meltdown and Western Digital's MyCloud hacks. A team of researchers recently wrote a paper they titled "Return Of Bleichenbacher's Oracle Threat (ROBOT)". This paper went on to show how a well-known, circa 1998 exploit is still a viable way to take advantage of websites of even big name companies and services, such as Facebook and PayPal (in total, around 2.8% of the top 1 million sites also tested positive). The ROBOT exploit, a critical, 19-year-old vulnerability that allows attackers to decrypt encrypted data and sign communications using compromised sites' secret encryption key, is still valid. Only, it's 19 years later.
The heart of the issue stems from a vulnerability that was discovered in 1998 by researcher Daniel Bleichenbacher, who found the vulnerability in the TLS predecessor known as secure sockets layer. The attack is dubbed an Oracle threat because attackers can write specialized queries to which the websites and affected systems respond with "Yes" or "No"; as such, it's possible, given enough time, for attackers to build up the amount of disclosed sensitive information and get a clear picture of the protected data. To the flaw's discovery by Bleichenbacher, SSL architects apparently responded in a B-movie type of way, which nevertheless might have been needed to keep all systems green: by designing workarounds on top of workarounds, rather than removing or rewriting the faulty RSA algorithm.
"We were able to identify eight vendors and open-source projects and a significant number of hosts that were vulnerable to minor variations of Bleichenbacher's adaptive-chosen ciphertext attack from 1998," the researchers wrote in their research paper. "The most notable fact about this is how little effort it took us to do so. We can therefore conclude that there is insufficient testing of modern TLS implementations for old vulnerabilities." Affected products include some made by F5, Citrix, and Cisco.
"The surprising fact is that our research was very straightforward. We used minor variations of the original attack and were successful. This issue was hiding in plain sight," the researchers wrote in a blog post. "This means neither the vendors of the affected products nor security researchers have investigated this before, although it's a very classic and well-known attack."
View at TechPowerUp Main Site
The heart of the issue stems from a vulnerability that was discovered in 1998 by researcher Daniel Bleichenbacher, who found the vulnerability in the TLS predecessor known as secure sockets layer. The attack is dubbed an Oracle threat because attackers can write specialized queries to which the websites and affected systems respond with "Yes" or "No"; as such, it's possible, given enough time, for attackers to build up the amount of disclosed sensitive information and get a clear picture of the protected data. To the flaw's discovery by Bleichenbacher, SSL architects apparently responded in a B-movie type of way, which nevertheless might have been needed to keep all systems green: by designing workarounds on top of workarounds, rather than removing or rewriting the faulty RSA algorithm.
"We were able to identify eight vendors and open-source projects and a significant number of hosts that were vulnerable to minor variations of Bleichenbacher's adaptive-chosen ciphertext attack from 1998," the researchers wrote in their research paper. "The most notable fact about this is how little effort it took us to do so. We can therefore conclude that there is insufficient testing of modern TLS implementations for old vulnerabilities." Affected products include some made by F5, Citrix, and Cisco.
"The surprising fact is that our research was very straightforward. We used minor variations of the original attack and were successful. This issue was hiding in plain sight," the researchers wrote in a blog post. "This means neither the vendors of the affected products nor security researchers have investigated this before, although it's a very classic and well-known attack."
View at TechPowerUp Main Site
