A vital role is played by the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol in securing all communications between website servers and web browsing, email, instant messaging, and Voice over IP (VoIP) applications.
implementation-level issues have been found by researchers in production-grade TLS applications. A novel timing attack technique named Raccoon attack was disclosed by a team of academics.
- The Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange process was targeted by attackers to find the time required to perform any cryptographic operation and use that information to obtain some parts of the algorithm.
- An attacker can develop a simple algorithm that could identify whether a computed premaster secret starts with zero bytes or not by having a precise measurement of timing.
- The attacker can create a set of equations and use a Hidden Number Problem (HNP) solver to compute the original premaster secret by just knowing the values leading to a premaster secret starting with zero.
Upon this discovery, several vendors have taken actions and released patches that address the flaw in their TLS implementations. This includes Microsoft (CVE-2020-1596), Mozilla, OpenSSL (CVE-2020-1968), and F5 Networks (CVE-2020-5929).
Attacks from the Past –
- In August, the TLS 1.3 sessions were turned vulnerable to an attack by a bug (CVE-2020-13777) in the open-source TLS library GnuTLS.
- To carry out Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attacks, researchers had identified a way to exploit the features in TLS in the same month. They also developed a tool called TLS poison that allows a generic SSRF via TLS.
Our security experts state that the Raccoon Attack is an extremely difficult attack to execute since it requires extremely rare conditions to be executed. However, these vulnerabilities may be leveraged by some hackers in combination with other attack methods to sharpen their attacks. Hence, it is necessary to patch these vulnerabilities at the earliest possible.
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