http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/23/side_channel_attacks_web_apps/ By Dan Goodin in San Francisco The Register 23rd March 2010 Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Bing, and other leading websites are leaking medical histories, family income, search queries, and massive amounts of other sensitive data that can be intercepted even when encrypted, computer scientists revealed in a new research paper. Researchers from Indiana University and Microsoft itself were able to infer the sensitive data by analyzing the distinct size and other attributes of each exchange between a user and the website she was interacting with. Using man-in-the-middle attacks, they could glean the information even when transactions were encrypted using the Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, protocol or the WPA, or Wi-fi Protected Access protocol. "Our research shows that surprisingly detailed sensitive user data can be reliably inferred from the web traffic of a number of high-profile, top-of-the-line web applications" offered by Google, Yahoo, and Bing as well as the leading online providers of tax, health and investments services, which the researchers didn't name. "An eavesdropper can infer the medications/surgeries/illnesses of the user, her annual family income and investment choices and money allocations, even though the web traffic is protected by HTTPS. We also show that even in a corporate building that deploys the up-to-date WPA/WPA2 wi-fi encryptions, a stranger without any credential can sit outside the building to glean the query words entered into employees' laptops, as if they were exposed in plain text in the air." [...] ___________________________________________________________ Register now for HITBSecConf2010 - Dubai, the premier deep-knowledge network security event in the GCC, featuring keynote speakers John Viega and Matt Watchinski! http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2010dxb/Received on Tue Mar 23 2010 - 23:48:02 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Tue Mar 23 2010 - 23:59:52 PDT