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Researcher busts into Twitter via SSL reneg hole

A Turkish grad student has devised a serious, real-world attack on Twitter that targeted a recently discovered vulnerability in the secure sockets layer protocol. The exploit by Anil Kurmus is significant because it successfully targeted the so-called SSL renegotiation bug to steal Twitter login credentials that passed through …

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Anonymous Coward
Boffin

Fixes...

At present "fixes" can only disable renegotiation by brute force. This can cause major problems with some websites but is the best that can be done for the moment. A standard which fully addresses this issue is still at the draft stage and being discussed. Unreleased (but publicly available) versions of OpenSSL implement the current draft standard.

Anonymous Coward
Boffin

This is Why I Now Always Use Server-Based Sessions

1 Login, then a constantly-changing SESSION_ID.

Makes hacking a wee bit more difficult, although hackers are smart. I have no illusions that they will never be able to crack these (especially if I write stupid server code).

Mat

remind me

What is halfway between twat and shitter?

David Hicks

Why does twitter renegotiate?

I really thought that re-negotiation was a rare phenomenon, and that this attack was hard to pull off without some way to force a renegotiation to occur, or a site that specifically uses it for either client certificate authentication (unusual) or multiple different crypto levels for different parts of a site (totally unnecessary).

Hmmm.

Paul Simmonds
Badgers

Surprised! (not!)

David, this may be because a lot of these things are run by script kiddies.

One world twitters, One Turk twiddles, One site becomes twaddle!

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