Beast and Crime : How chrome is impacted
One of the first discussions I noticed around TLS/SSL was in a news report last year.
At the Ekoparty security conference in Buenos Aires later this week, researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo plan to demonstrate proof-of-concept code called BEAST, which is short for Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS. The stealthy piece of JavaScript works with a network sniffer to decrypt encrypted cookies a targeted website uses to grant access to restricted user accounts. The exploit works even against sites that use HSTS, or HTTP Strict Transport Security, which prevents certain pages from loading unless they're protected by SSL.These guys came back again this year with another attack called "CRIME". A simplified version of how this attack is executed is described here along with the plan on how chrome is going to address is.
The problem that CRIME highlights is that sensitive cookie data and an attacker controlled path is compressed together in the same context. Cookie data makes up most of the red, uncompressed bytes in the diagram. If the path contains some cookie data, then the compressed headers will be shorter because zlib will be able to refer back to the path, rather than have to output all the literal bytes of the cookie. If you arrange things so that you can probe the contents of the cookie incrementally, then (assuming that the cookie is base64), you can extract the cookie byte-by-byte by inducing the browser to make requests.
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