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This article discusses the security of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) internet protocol.
SSL 2.0 was flawed in a variety of ways:[1]
SSL 2.0 was disabled by default, beginning with Internet Explorer 7,[3] Mozilla Firefox 2,[4] Opera 9.5,[5] and Safari. Support for SSL 2.0 (and weak 40-bit and 56-bit ciphers) was removed completely from Opera as of version 10.[6][7]
SSL 3.0 improved upon SSL 2.0 by adding SHA-1–based ciphers and support for certificate authentication.
From a security standpoint, SSL 3.0 should be considered less desirable than TLS 1.0. The SSL 3.0 cipher suites have a weaker key derivation process; half of the master key that is established is fully dependent on the MD5 hash function, which is not resistant to collisions and is, therefore, not considered secure. Under TLS 1.0, the master key that is established depends on both MD5 and SHA-1 so its derivation process is not currently considered weak. It is for this reason that SSL 3.0 implementations cannot be validated under FIPS 140-2.[8]
In October 2014, the vulnerability in the design of SSL 3.0 was reported, which makes CBC mode of operation with SSL 3.0 vulnerable to the padding attack (see #POODLE attack).
TLS has a variety of security measures:
Significant attacks against TLS/SSL are listed below.
In February 2015, IETF issued an informational RFC[9] summarizing the various known attacks against TLS/SSL.
A vulnerability of the renegotiation procedure was discovered in August 2009 that can lead to plaintext injection attacks against SSL 3.0 and all current versions of TLS.[10] For example, it allows an attacker who can hijack an https connection to splice their own requests into the beginning of the conversation the client has with the web server. The attacker can't actually decrypt the client–server communication, so it is different from a typical man-in-the-middle attack. A short-term fix is for web servers to stop allowing renegotiation, which typically will not require other changes unless client certificate authentication is used. To fix the vulnerability, a renegotiation indication extension was proposed for TLS. It will require the client and server to include and verify information about previous handshakes in any renegotiation handshakes.[11] This extension has become a proposed standard and has been assigned the number RFC 5746. The RFC has been implemented by several libraries.[12][13][14]
A protocol downgrade attack (also called a version rollback attack) tricks a web server into negotiating connections with previous versions of TLS (such as SSLv2) that have long since been abandoned as insecure.
Previous modifications to the original protocols, like False Start[15] (adopted and enabled by Google Chrome[16]) or Snap Start, reportedly introduced limited TLS protocol downgrade attacks[17] or allowed modifications to the cipher suite list sent by the client to the server. In doing so, an attacker might succeed in influencing the cipher suite selection in an attempt to downgrade the cipher suite negotiated to use either a weaker symmetric encryption algorithm or a weaker key exchange.[18] A paper presented at an ACM conference on computer and communications security in 2012 demonstrated that the False Start extension was at risk: in certain circumstances it could allow an attacker to recover the encryption keys offline and to access the encrypted data.[19]
Encryption downgrade attacks can force servers and clients to negotiate a connection using cryptographically weak keys. In 2014, a man-in-the-middle attack called FREAK was discovered affecting the OpenSSL stack, the default Android web browser, and some Safari browsers.[20] The attack involved tricking servers into negotiating a TLS connection using cryptographically weak 512 bit encryption keys.
Logjam is a security exploit discovered in May 2015 that exploits the option of using legacy "export-grade" 512-bit Diffie–Hellman groups dating back to the 1990s.[21] It forces susceptible servers to downgrade to cryptographically weak 512-bit Diffie–Hellman groups. An attacker can then deduce the keys the client and server determine using the Diffie–Hellman key exchange.
The DROWN attack is an exploit that attacks servers supporting contemporary SSL/TLS protocol suites by exploiting their support for the obsolete, insecure, SSLv2 protocol to leverage an attack on connections using up-to-date protocols that would otherwise be secure.[22][23] DROWN exploits a vulnerability in the protocols used and the configuration of the server, rather than any specific implementation error. Full details of DROWN were announced in March 2016, together with a patch for the exploit. At that time, more than 81,000 of the top 1 million most popular websites were among the TLS protected websites that were vulnerable to the DROWN attack.[23]
On September 23, 2011 researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo demonstrated a proof of concept called BEAST (Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS)[24] using a Java applet to violate same origin policy constraints, for a long-known cipher block chaining (CBC) vulnerability in TLS 1.0:[25][26] an attacker observing 2 consecutive ciphertext blocks C0, C1 can test if the plaintext block P1 is equal to x by choosing the next plaintext block P2 = x [math]\displaystyle{ \oplus }[/math] C0 [math]\displaystyle{ \oplus }[/math] C1; as per CBC operation, C2 = E(C1 [math]\displaystyle{ \oplus }[/math] P2) = E(C1 [math]\displaystyle{ \oplus }[/math] x [math]\displaystyle{ \oplus }[/math] C0 [math]\displaystyle{ \oplus }[/math] C1) = E(C0 [math]\displaystyle{ \oplus }[/math] x), which will be equal to C1 if x = P1. Practical exploits had not been previously demonstrated for this vulnerability, which was originally discovered by Phillip Rogaway[27] in 2002. The vulnerability of the attack had been fixed with TLS 1.1 in 2006, but TLS 1.1 had not seen wide adoption prior to this attack demonstration.
RC4 as a stream cipher is immune to BEAST attack. Therefore, RC4 was widely used as a way to mitigate BEAST attack on the server side. However, in 2013, researchers found more weaknesses in RC4. Thereafter enabling RC4 on server side was no longer recommended.[28]
Chrome and Firefox themselves are not vulnerable to BEAST attack,[29][30] however, Mozilla updated their NSS libraries to mitigate BEAST-like attacks. NSS is used by Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome to implement SSL. Some web servers that have a broken implementation of the SSL specification may stop working as a result.[31]
Microsoft released Security Bulletin MS12-006 on January 10, 2012, which fixed the BEAST vulnerability by changing the way that the Windows Secure Channel (SChannel) component transmits encrypted network packets from the server end.[32] Users of Internet Explorer (prior to version 11) that run on older versions of Windows (Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows Server 2008 R2) can restrict use of TLS to 1.1 or higher.
Apple fixed BEAST vulnerability by implementing 1/n-1 splitTemplate:Explain-wrap and turning it on by default in OS X Mavericks, released on October 22, 2013.[33]
The authors of the BEAST attack are also the creators of the later CRIME attack, which can allow an attacker to recover the content of web cookies when data compression is used along with TLS.[34][35] When used to recover the content of secret authentication cookies, it allows an attacker to perform session hijacking on an authenticated web session.
While the CRIME attack was presented as a general attack that could work effectively against a large number of protocols, including but not limited to TLS, and application-layer protocols such as SPDY or HTTP, only exploits against TLS and SPDY were demonstrated and largely mitigated in browsers and servers. The CRIME exploit against HTTP compression has not been mitigated at all, even though the authors of CRIME have warned that this vulnerability might be even more widespread than SPDY and TLS compression combined. In 2013 a new instance of the CRIME attack against HTTP compression, dubbed BREACH, was announced. Based on the CRIME attack a BREACH attack can extract login tokens, email addresses or other sensitive information from TLS encrypted web traffic in as little as 30 seconds (depending on the number of bytes to be extracted), provided the attacker tricks the victim into visiting a malicious web link or is able to inject content into valid pages the user is visiting (ex: a wireless network under the control of the attacker).[36] All versions of TLS and SSL are at risk from BREACH regardless of the encryption algorithm or cipher used.[37] Unlike previous instances of CRIME, which can be successfully defended against by turning off TLS compression or SPDY header compression, BREACH exploits HTTP compression which cannot realistically be turned off, as virtually all web servers rely upon it to improve data transmission speeds for users.[36] This is a known limitation of TLS as it is susceptible to chosen-plaintext attack against the application-layer data it was meant to protect.
Earlier TLS versions were vulnerable against the padding oracle attack discovered in 2002. A novel variant, called the Lucky Thirteen attack, was published in 2013.
Some experts[38] also recommended avoiding Triple-DES CBC. Since the last supported ciphers developed to support any program using Windows XP's SSL/TLS library like Internet Explorer on Windows XP are RC4 and Triple-DES, and since RC4 is now deprecated (see discussion of RC4 attacks), this makes it difficult to support any version of SSL for any program using this library on XP.
A fix was released as the Encrypt-then-MAC extension to the TLS specification, released as RFC 7366.[39] The Lucky Thirteen attack can be mitigated in TLS 1.2 by using only AES_GCM ciphers; AES_CBC remains vulnerable.
On October 14, 2014, Google researchers published a vulnerability in the design of SSL 3.0, which makes CBC mode of operation with SSL 3.0 vulnerable to a padding attack (CVE-2014-3566). They named this attack POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption). On average, attackers only need to make 256 SSL 3.0 requests to reveal one byte of encrypted messages.[40]
Although this vulnerability only exists in SSL 3.0 and most clients and servers support TLS 1.0 and above, all major browsers voluntarily downgrade to SSL 3.0 if the handshakes with newer versions of TLS fail unless they provide the option for a user or administrator to disable SSL 3.0 and the user or administrator does so. Therefore, the man-in-the-middle can first conduct a version rollback attack and then exploit this vulnerability.[40]
In general, graceful security degradation for the sake of interoperability is difficult to carry out in a way that cannot be exploited. This is challenging especially in domains where fragmentation is high.[41]
On December 8, 2014, a variant of POODLE was announced that impacts TLS implementations that do not properly enforce padding byte requirements.[42]
Despite the existence of attacks on RC4 that broke its security, cipher suites in SSL and TLS that were based on RC4 were still considered secure prior to 2013 based on the way in which they were used in SSL and TLS. In 2011, the RC4 suite was actually recommended as a work around for the BEAST attack.[43] New forms of attack disclosed in March 2013 conclusively demonstrated the feasibility of breaking RC4 in TLS, suggesting it was not a good workaround for BEAST.[44] An attack scenario was proposed by AlFardan, Bernstein, Paterson, Poettering and Schuldt that used newly discovered statistical biases in the RC4 key table[45] to recover parts of the plaintext with a large number of TLS encryptions.[46][47] An attack on RC4 in TLS and SSL that requires 13 × 220 encryptions to break RC4 was unveiled on 8 July 2013 and later described as "feasible" in the accompanying presentation at a USENIX Security Symposium in August 2013.[48][49] In July 2015, subsequent improvements in the attack make it increasingly practical to defeat the security of RC4-encrypted TLS.[50]
As many modern browsers have been designed to defeat BEAST attacks (except Safari for Mac OS X 10.7 or earlier, for iOS 6 or earlier, and for Windows; see #Web browsers), RC4 is no longer a good choice for TLS 1.0. The CBC ciphers which were affected by the BEAST attack in the past have become a more popular choice for protection.[38] Mozilla and Microsoft recommend disabling RC4 where possible.[51][52] RFC 7465 prohibits the use of RC4 cipher suites in all versions of TLS.
On September 1, 2015, Microsoft, Google and Mozilla announced that RC4 cipher suites would be disabled by default in their browsers (Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 7/8.1/10, Firefox, and Chrome) in early 2016.[53][54][55]
A TLS (logout) truncation attack blocks a victim's account logout requests so that the user unknowingly remains logged into a web service. When the request to sign out is sent, the attacker injects an unencrypted TCP FIN message (no more data from sender) to close the connection. The server therefore doesn't receive the logout request and is unaware of the abnormal termination.[56]
Published in July 2013,[57][58] the attack causes web services such as Gmail and Hotmail to display a page that informs the user that they have successfully signed-out, while ensuring that the user's browser maintains authorization with the service, allowing an attacker with subsequent access to the browser to access and take over control of the user's logged-in account. The attack does not rely on installing malware on the victim's computer; attackers need only place themselves between the victim and the web server (e.g., by setting up a rogue wireless hotspot).[56] This vulnerability also requires access to the victim's computer. Another possibility is when using FTP the data connection can have a false FIN in the data stream, and if the protocol rules for exchanging close_notify alerts is not adhered to a file can be truncated.
This attack, discovered in mid-2016, exploits weaknesses in the Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol (WPAD) to expose the URL that a web user is attempting to reach via a TLS-enabled web link.[59] Disclosure of a URL can violate a user's privacy, not only because of the website accessed, but also because URLs are sometimes used to authenticate users. Document sharing services, such as those offered by Google and Dropbox, also work by sending a user a security token that's included in the URL. An attacker who obtains such URLs may be able to gain full access to a victim's account or data.
The exploit works against almost all browsers and operating systems.
The Sweet32 attack breaks all 64-bit block ciphers used in CBC mode as used in TLS by exploiting a birthday attack and either a man-in-the-middle attack or injection of a malicious JavaScript into a web page. The purpose of the man-in-the-middle attack or the JavaScript injection is to allow the attacker to capture enough traffic to mount a birthday attack.[60]
The Heartbleed bug is a serious vulnerability specific to the implementation of SSL/TLS in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library, affecting versions 1.0.1 to 1.0.1f. This weakness, reported in April 2014, allows attackers to steal private keys from servers that should normally be protected.[61] The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret private keys associated with the public certificates used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.[62] The vulnerability is caused by a buffer over-read bug in the OpenSSL software, rather than a defect in the SSL or TLS protocol specification.
In September 2014, a variant of Daniel Bleichenbacher's PKCS#1 v1.5 RSA Signature Forgery vulnerability[63] was announced by Intel Security Advanced Threat Research. This attack, dubbed BERserk, is a result of incomplete ASN.1 length decoding of public key signatures in some SSL implementations, and allows a man-in-the-middle attack by forging a public key signature.[64]
In February 2015, after media reported the hidden pre-installation of Superfish adware on some Lenovo notebooks,[65] a researcher found a trusted root certificate on affected Lenovo machines to be insecure, as the keys could easily be accessed using the company name, Komodia, as a passphrase.[66] The Komodia library was designed to intercept client-side TLS/SSL traffic for parental control and surveillance, but it was also used in numerous adware programs, including Superfish, that were often surreptitiously installed unbeknownst to the computer user. In turn, these potentially unwanted programs installed the corrupt root certificate, allowing attackers to completely control web traffic and confirm false websites as authentic.
In May 2016, it was reported that dozens of Danish HTTPS-protected websites belonging to Visa Inc. were vulnerable to attacks allowing hackers to inject malicious code and forged content into the browsers of visitors.[67] The attacks worked because the TLS implementation used on the affected servers incorrectly reused random numbers (nonces) that are intended be used only once, ensuring that each TLS handshake is unique.[67]
In February 2017, an implementation error caused by a single mistyped character in code used to parse HTML created a buffer overflow error on Cloudflare servers. Similar in its effects to the Heartbleed bug discovered in 2014, this overflow error, widely known as Cloudbleed, allowed unauthorized third parties to read data in the memory of programs running on the servers—data that should otherwise have been protected by TLS.[68]
(As of May 2019), Trustworthy Internet Movement estimate the ratio of websites that are vulnerable to TLS attacks.[69]
Attacks | Security | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Insecure | Depends | Secure | Other | ||
Renegotiation attack | 0.4% support insecure renegotiation |
0.4% support both |
98.3% support secure renegotiation |
1.2% no support |
|
RC4 attacks | 1.3% support RC4 suites used with modern browsers |
12.6% support some RC4 suites |
86.1% no support |
N/A | |
TLS Compression (CRIME attack) | 0.1% vulnerable |
N/A | N/A | N/A | |
Heartbleed | <0.1% vulnerable |
N/A | N/A | N/A | |
ChangeCipherSpec injection attack | 0.2% vulnerable and exploitable |
1.3% vulnerable, not exploitable |
96.8% not vulnerable |
1.8% unknown |
|
POODLE attack against TLS (Original POODLE against SSL 3.0 is not included) |
0.3% vulnerable and exploitable |
N/A | 98.3% not vulnerable |
1.4% unknown |
|
Protocol downgrade | 11.7% Downgrade defence not supported |
N/A | 72.0% Downgrade defence supported |
16.3% unknown |
Forward secrecy is a property of cryptographic systems which ensures that a session key derived from a set of public and private keys will not be compromised if one of the private keys is compromised in the future.[70] Without forward secrecy, if the server's private key is compromised, not only will all future TLS-encrypted sessions using that server certificate be compromised, but also any past sessions that used it as well (provided of course that these past sessions were intercepted and stored at the time of transmission).[71] An implementation of TLS can provide forward secrecy by requiring the use of ephemeral Diffie–Hellman key exchange to establish session keys, and some notable TLS implementations do so exclusively: e.g., Gmail and other Google HTTPS services that use OpenSSL.[72] However, many clients and servers supporting TLS (including browsers and web servers) are not configured to implement such restrictions.[73][74] In practice, unless a web service uses Diffie–Hellman key exchange to implement forward secrecy, all of the encrypted web traffic to and from that service can be decrypted by a third party if it obtains the server's master (private) key; e.g., by means of a court order.[75]
Even where Diffie–Hellman key exchange is implemented, server-side session management mechanisms can impact forward secrecy. The use of TLS session tickets (a TLS extension) causes the session to be protected by AES128-CBC-SHA256 regardless of any other negotiated TLS parameters, including forward secrecy ciphersuites, and the long-lived TLS session ticket keys defeat the attempt to implement forward secrecy.[76][77][78] Stanford University research in 2014 also found that of 473,802 TLS servers surveyed, 82.9% of the servers deploying ephemeral Diffie–Hellman (DHE) key exchange to support forward secrecy were using weak Diffie–Hellman parameters. These weak parameter choices could potentially compromise the effectiveness of the forward secrecy that the servers sought to provide.[79]
Since late 2011, Google has provided forward secrecy with TLS by default to users of its Gmail service, along with Google Docs and encrypted search, among other services.[80] Since November 2013, Twitter has provided forward secrecy with TLS to users of its service.[81] (As of May 2019), about 80% of TLS-enabled websites are configured to use cipher suites that provide forward secrecy to most web browsers.[69]
TLS interception (or HTTPS interception if applied particularly to that protocol) is the practice of intercepting an encrypted data stream in order to decrypt it, read and possibly manipulate it, and then re-encrypt it and send the data on its way again. This is done by way of a "transparent proxy": the interception software terminates the incoming TLS connection, inspects the HTTP plaintext, and then creates a new TLS connection to the destination.[82]
TLS / HTTPS interception is used as an information security measure by network operators in order to be able to scan for and protect against the intrusion of malicious content into the network, such as computer viruses and other malware.[82] Such content could otherwise not be detected as long as it is protected by encryption, which is increasingly the case as a result of the routine use of HTTPS and other secure protocols.
A significant drawback of TLS / HTTPS interception is that it introduces new security risks of its own. Because it provides a point where network traffic is available unencrypted, attackers have an incentive to attack this point in particular in order to gain access to otherwise secure content. The interception also allows the network operator, or persons who gain access to its interception system, to perform man-in-the-middle attacks against network users. A 2017 study found that "HTTPS interception has become startlingly widespread, and that interception products as a class have a dramatically negative impact on connection security".[82]