[ISN] 90% of popular SSL sites vulnerable to exploits, researchers find

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/90-of-popular-ssl-sites-vulnerable-to-exploits-researchers-find.ars

By Dan Goodin
ars technica
April 26, 2012

Less than 10 percent of the most popular websites offering Secure Socket 
Layer protection are hardened against known attacks that could allow 
hackers to decrypt or tamper with encrypted traffic, researchers said 
Thursday.

The grim figure was generated by SSL Pulse, a website that monitors the 
effectiveness of the 200,000 most popular websites that use SSL, also 
known as Transport Layer Security, to protect e-mail and other sensitive 
data from being snooped on while in transit. The product of a group of 
SSL experts from Google, Twitter, PayPal, Qualys and other firms, SSL 
Pulse systematically scans all subdomains of the top-ranked sites as 
measured by Alexa for pages that use the protocol to prevent 
man-in-the-middle eavesdropping. By examining the top 200,000 
SSL-enabled sites, the researchers aim to give a snapshot of the overall 
health of SSL protection, which is offered by an estimated 1.5 million 
sites in total.

Out of the 200,000 sites examined, only 19,024 were configured to 
withstand an attack discovered in 2009 that allows attackers to inject 
data into encrypted traffic passing between two endpoints. The 
vulnerability resides in the SSL protocol itself and can be exploited by 
renegotiating the protected session, something that often happens to 
generate a new cryptographic key. Just a few weeks after the bug was 
discovered, a Turkish grad student showed how it allowed him to steal 
Twitter login credentials that passed through encrypted data streams.

Although the Internet Engineering Task Force signed off on a fix in 
early 2010 and major SSL packages have been updated to include it, only 
72 percent of the sites examined by SSL Pulse were found to be safe from 
renegotiation exploits. Of the remainder, 13 percent were classified as 
"insecure renegotiation," one percent was classified as offering both 
secure and insecure renegotiation, and 14 percent offered no 
renegotiation at all.

[...]


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