Josh Wieder

Some time ago I wrote a post about the dismaying history of US government attempts to regulate encryption out of existence . I had to omit quite a bit; it was a post and not a book after all. One of the details left out of the story was the DHE_EXPORT cipher suites. During the 90's, developers were forced by the US government to us deliberately insecure ciphers when communicating with entities in foreign countries (readers will remember from the last post that law makers were convinced that encryption should fall under the same rules as weapons technology, and thus could not be shared with anyone outside the Father Land). These insecure ciphers became DHE_EXPORT. The DH stands for Diffie-Hellman; the key exchange system that bears their name was first published in 1976. Along with the cipher suite was a mechanism to force a normal encrypted transaction to downshift to a lower-bit DHE_EXPORT cipher. As so many short-sighted technology regulations have done in the past, this silly ...

Amazon S3 subscribers recently received a form letter like this one: Dear AWS Customer, This message explains some security improvements in our services. Your security is important to us. Please review the entire message carefully to determine whether your use of the services will be affected, and if so what you need to do. As of 12:00 AM PDT May 20, 2015, AWS will discontinue support of SSLv3 for securing connections to S3 buckets. Security research published late last year demonstrated that SSLv3 contained weaknesses in its ability to protect and secure communications. These weaknesses have been addressed in Transport Layer Security (TLS), which is the replacement for SSL. Consistent with our top priority to protect AWS customers, AWS will only support versions of the more modern TLS rather than SSLv3. You are receiving this email because some of your users are accessing Amazon S3 using a browser configured to use SSLv3, or some of your existing applications that use Amazon S3 a...

I received a notification from a large security auditing firm that of the ciphers currently available, only RC4 ciphers will be considered PCI compliant. My assumption based on the notification is that this move is intended as a rejection of CBC (Cipher Block Chaining). Well, that's fine as far as I am concerned. CBC has some serious issues as implemented in SSL v3 / TLS v1.0. In a nutshell, you can time responses for applications using the block cipher to get ranges of possible data in SSLv3 and partial payload decryption in TLS. So-called "stream" ciphers like RC4 are immune to this particular attack vector. You don't get private keys from the attack, its by no means a fast attack (minimum of three hours), and you need access to monitor the session . Further, patches for CBC exist to over-ride the timing exploit (for example the NSS libraries used by Mozilla have been patched). I will save debunking the man in the middle hysteria for a later post. What frustrate...