The BEAST attack method that has security researchers, including myself cringing is at the fact that SSL may not be as secure as we thought it was. It'd concerned me that PayPal wasn't using the RC4 cipher to encrypt it's data and protect it from attackers. Suddenly it seems every security researcher is starting to examine for himself whether the sites we depend on for services may not be as secure in the SSL Protocol as we thought. Even though an organization may have an SSL server installed and working that doesn't mean the job is over. Are some of the top web companies really secure with the latest version of TLS protocol or Rc4? Rc4 isn't used in every major website and that concerns me because in order to mitigate or have even a chance against the mighty BEAST attack you'd have to use the RC4 cipher to block it and to my surprise little attention is given to this major encryption player. I encourage every e commerce and financial company to truly inspect how secure there SSL server is and how Rc4 is implemented in their infrastructure.
My SSL Security Advisory For SSL Server Vendors
I am just manly concerned about how different SSL server vendors will approach patching this vulnerability and when they will release a fix for it. Even though for now security professionals can mitigate this attack with Rc4, that still isn't a permanent fix to the situation that we have with the servers. SSL vendors should release a fix immediately in order to make sure their products are not vulnerable to this attack. The way I see it is it's all about timing and how fast this vulnerability can be stopped by all the major SSL server vendors. However, we have seen time and time again where security professionals don't even implement the latest security patches that are released by vendors and this needs to change.
Examples Of BEAST Being Used In Real Life Situations
Say the attacker wants to recover the cookie for https://www.google.com/. He stands up a page with any origin he controls (e.g., http://www.attacker.com/. This page hosts JS that initiates a WebSockets connection to https://www.google.com/. Because WebSockets allows cross-origin requests, he can initiate a HTTPS connection to the target server if the target server allows it (e.g., because it wants to allow mash-ups). Because the URL is provided by the attacker, he can make it arbitrarily long and therefore put the Cookie wherever he wants it with respect to the CBC block boundary. Once he has captured the encrypted block with the cookie, he can then send arbitrary new packets via WebSockets with his appropriately constructed plaintext blocks as described above. There are a few small obstacles to do with the framing, but Rizzo and Duong claim that these can be overcome and those claims seem plausible.
Via this http://www.educatedguesswork.org/2011/09/security_impact_of_the_rizzodu.html
The same example could also be added to ecommcerce websites like www.transaction1.com and have the attacker obtain a cookie from it to then use his own website to start the attack. Like the above example the attacker could also create a page in which he uses to start a WebSocket connection to his targeted site of his choice. One weakness here is if the victims server allows the attacker to connect via an HTTPS connection then after that the attacker can start to guess the Cipher Block Chaining and place the blocks wherever he wants to. Like it says above since the attacker connected to his targeted site via his own domain then guessing the CBC is the next step since he now has full control of where to place the transaction1 cookie. So as you can see after all of these tasks are completed CBC guessing isn't that hard for the attacker since he now can do whatever he wants to the cookie like split it up in order to find where infact the encrypted password is being housed and this exactly what the BEAST attack does.
Humanity's Only Real Option To Secure Itself From The BEAST
The only true way to same humanity from this massive SSL hole is to use the Rc4 cipher since it's a stream cipher and stream ciphers are not used in BEAST, which for now anyways makes for the only option to try and keep servers secured from this attack.
