The new attack plucks secrets from HTTPS-protected pages was demonstrated on Blackhat last Thursday. The well known “HTTPS” which protects millions of sites across the world is prone to attack. The exploit called BREACH bypasses the SSL crypto scheme protecting millions of sites.
It decodes encrypted data that online banks and e-commerce sites send in responses that are protected by the widely used transport layer security (TLS) and secure sockets layer (SSL) protocols. The attack can extract specific pieces of data, such as social security numbers, e-mail addresses, certain types of security tokens, and password-reset links. It works against all versions of TLS and SSL regardless of the encryption algorithm or cipher that’s used.
As per arctecch,
It requires that the attacker have the ability to passively monitor the traffic traveling between the end user and website. The attack also requires the attacker to force the victim to visit a malicious link. This can be done by injecting an iframe tag in a website the victim normally visits or, alternatively, by tricking the victim into viewing an e-mail with hidden images that automatically download and generate HTTP requests. The malicious link causes the victim’s computer to make multiple requests to the HTTPS server that’s being targeted. These requests are used to make “probing guesses” that will be explained shortly.
“We’re not decrypting the entire channel, but only extracting the secrets we care about,” Yoel Gluck, one of three researchers who developed the attack, told Ars. “It’s a very targeted attack. We just need to find one corner [of a website response] that has the token or password change and go after that page to extract the secret. In general, any secret that’s relevant [and] located in the body, whether it be on a webpage or an Ajax response, we have the ability to extract that secret in under 30 seconds, typically.”
More details on this can be found on blackhat. Link to the paper is available here
