Yesterday a new vulnerability has been announced in OpenSSL/LibreSSL. A padding oracle in CBC mode decryption, to be precise. Just like Lucky13. Actually, it’s in the code that fixes Lucky13. It was found by Juraj Somorovsky using a tool he developed called TLS-Attacker. Like in the “old days”, it has no name except CVE-2016-2107. (I […]
Tag Archives: cryptography
How to build your own public key infrastructure
A major part of securing a network as geographically diverse as CloudFlare’s is protecting data as it travels between datacenters. Customer data and logs are important to protect but so is all the control data that our applications use to communicate with each other. For example, our application servers need to securely communicate with our […]
Logjam: the latest TLS vulnerability explained
Yesterday, a group from INRIA, Microsoft Research, Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania published a deep analysis of the Diffie-Hellman algorithm as used in TLS and other protocols. This analysis included a novel downgrade attack against the TLS protocol itself called Logjam, which exploits EXPORT cryptography (just like FREAK). First, […]
Why some cryptographic keys are much smaller than others
If you connect to CloudFlare’s web site using HTTPS the connection will be secured using one of the many encryption schemes supported by SSL/TLS. When I connect using Chrome I get an RC4_128 connection (with a 128-bit key) which used the ECDHE_RSA key exchange mechanism (with a 2,048-bit key) to set the connection up. If […]