Posts

Showing posts from September, 2011

BEAST

Image
So we gave a talk and a live demo at ekoparty last week to show how BEAST exploits a weakness in SSL to decrypt secret cookies. Please note that BEAST does not do any harm to remote servers. In fact, no packet from BEAST has ever been sent to any servers. We chose PayPal because they do everything right when it comes to server-side SSL, and that is good to demonstrate the power of BEAST, which is a client-side SSL attack. We reported the vulnerability to browser, plugin and SSL vendors several months ago (CVE-2011-3389). Current version of BEAST consists of Javascript/applet agents and a network sniffer. We have some choices for the agent. At the time we reported the bug to vendors, HTML5 WebSockets could be used to build a BEAST agent but, due to unrelated reasons, the WebSockets protocol was already in the process of changing in such a way that stopped it. We can't use the new WebSockets protocol shipped with browsers. We use a Java applet in this video, but please be aware