Facebook this week will begin turning on secure browsing be default for its millions of users in North America. The change will make HTTPS the default connection option for all Facebook sessions for those users, a shift that gives them a good baseline level of security and will help prevent some common attacks.
The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group on Tuesday recommended businesses replace 512- and 768-bit verification keys with 1024-bit or higher encryption to counter a current vulnerability that allows the shorter keys to be cracked within 72 hours using cheap cloud-based services.
Side-channel attacks against cryptography keys have, until now, been limited to physical machines. Researchers have long made accurate determinations about crypto keys by studying anything from variations in power consumption to measuring how long it takes for a computation to complete.A team of researchers from the University of North Carolina, University of Wisconsin, and RSA Security has ramped up the stakes, having proved in controlled conditions that it’s possible to steal a crypto key from a virtual machine.
The EFF has released an updated version of its popular HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin, which enables users to automatically connect over HTTPS to many sites. The newest version of the extension now supports more than 1,500 sites.
It’s been just a few days since NIST approved Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 competition, and it likely will be some time before we begin seeing the new hash algorithm popping up in common products and services. However, some in the cryptography community say it may not be a bad idea to start making plans to move away from the older SHA-1 algorithm fairly soon, given the quickly dropping cost of compute power.
Now that NIST has selected Keccak as the winner of the five-year-long SHA-3 competition, the next question to be answered is whether the new hash algorithm will be implemented in any meaningful way in the near future. The answer, for right now at least, appears to be probably not.
For the last five years, NIST, the government body charged with developing new standards for computer security, among other things, has been searching for a new hash function to replace the aging SHA-2 function. Fives years is a long time, but this is the federal government and things move at their own pace in Washington, but NIST soon will be announcing the winner from the five finalists that were chosen last year. Despite the problems that have cropped up with some versions of SHA-2 in the past and the long wait for the new function, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of breathless anticipation for this announcement. So much so, in fact, that Bruce Schneier, a co-author of one of the finalists not only isn’t hoping that his entry wins, he’s hoping that none of them wins.
The new attack on TLS developed by researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong takes advantage of an information leak in the compression ratio of TLS requests as a side channel to enable them to decrypt the requests made by the client to the server. This, in turn, allows them to grab the user’s login cookie and then hijack the user’s session and impersonate her on high-value destinations such as banks or e-commerce sites.
A flaw in the EMV protocol which lays out the rules for chip-and-PIN card transactions at ATMs and point-of-sale terminals could enable persistent attackers to carry out bogus card transactions.
There is a feature supported by the SSL/TLS encryption standard and used by most of the major browsers that leaks enough information about encrypted sessions to enable attackers decrypt users’ supposedly protected cookies and hijack their sessions. The researchers who developed the attack that exploits this weakness say that all versions of TLS are affected, including TLS 1.2, and that the cipher suite used in the encrypted session makes no difference in the success of the attack.
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
