http://www.wired.com/2014/10/poodle-explained/
By Kim Zetter
Threat Level
Wired.com
10.14.14
On a day when system administrators were already taxed addressing several
security updates released by Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe, there is now
word of a new security hole discovered in a basic protocol used for
encrypting web traffic. Its name is POODLE, which stands for Padding
Oracle on Downgraded Legacy Encryption, and it was discovered by three
Google security researchers—Bodo Moller, Thai Duong, and Krzysztof
Kotowicz. They published a paper (.pdf) about it today.
POODLE affects SSLv3 or version 3 of the Secure Sockets Layer protocol,
which is used to encrypt traffic between a browser and a web site or
between a user’s email client and mail server. It’s not as serious as the
recent Heartbleed and Shellshock vulnerabilities, but POODLE could allow
an attacker to hijack and decrypt the session cookie that identifies you
to a service like Twitter or Google, and then take over your accounts
without needing your password.
To exploit the vulnerability, you must be running javascript, and the
attacker has to be on the same network as you—for example, on the same
Starbucks Wi-Fi network you’re using. This makes it less severe than an
attack that can be conducted remotely against any computer on the
Internet.
The attack works only on traffic sessions using SSLv3. Although this is an
old protocol that has been replaced in many client and server
configurations with TLS (Transport Layer Security), many browser clients
and web servers that use TLS for connections still support SSLv3. Some
products and browsers, like Internet Explorer 6 for Windows XP, only use
SSLv3. There are also clients that support SSLv3 as an alternative to use
whenever a TLS connection to a web server fails. An attacker could exploit
this compatibility to downgrade a connection to SSLv3 and then conduct the
POODLE attack to hijack your session.
[...]
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