24 of Top 100 HTTPS Sites Now Safe From TLS Renegotiation Attacks

Via Netcraft.com -

24 of the 100 most popular HTTPS websites appear to be safe from the recently documented TLS renegotiation flaws. Meanwhile, the other 76 sites are still vulnerable to renegotiation attacks, which allow a man-in-the-middle attacker to inject data into secure communication streams. To demonstrate the seriousness of the issue, Anil Kurmus published details of an attack scenario that showed how the flaw could be used to steal passwords from vulnerable sites such as Twitter.

Among the top 100 HTTPS websites, there are several banks and commerce companies that remain vulnerable. A few of these sites give the appearance of being intermittently vulnerable, as client requests are load balanced among a mixture of vulnerable and non-vulnerable machines.

Ben Laurie of Google was working on the renegotiation flaw around six weeks before it was made public, so it is perhaps unsurprising that 7 of the 24 safe sites are owned by Google. A further 7 sites are running Microsoft IIS 6.0, which is currently believed not to be vulnerable.

Since discovering the renegotiation problem, PhoneFactor has created a Status of Patches list, showing which vendors have already responded to the problem. A few were quick to act by disabling renegotiation support in their products, and some vendors have already implemented Eric Rescorla's proposed fix.

Netcraft's November SSL Survey found 1,217,395 distinct valid third-party SSL certificates in use on the web.

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Eariler this month, Thierry Zoller released a draft paper that attempts to explain the vulnerability to a broader audience and summarizes the information that is currently available. He plans to release updates as needed. For example, on the 18th, he added the SMTP over TLS attack scenario.