Researcher busts into Twitter via SSL reneg hole

A Turkish grad student has devised a serious, real-world attack on Twitter that targeted a recently discovered vulnerability in the secure sockets layer protocol. The exploit by Anil Kurmus is significant because it successfully targeted the so-called SSL renegotiation bug to steal Twitter login credentials that passed through …

[Anonymous Coward]

Fixes...

At present "fixes" can only disable renegotiation by brute force. This can cause major problems with some websites but is the best that can be done for the moment. A standard which fully addresses this issue is still at the draft stage and being discussed. Unreleased (but publicly available) versions of OpenSSL implement the current draft standard.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Why I Now Always Use Server-Based Sessions

1 Login, then a constantly-changing SESSION_ID.

Makes hacking a wee bit more difficult, although hackers are smart. I have no illusions that they will never be able to crack these (especially if I write stupid server code).

[Mat]

remind me

What is halfway between twat and shitter?

[David Hicks]

Why does twitter renegotiate?

I really thought that re-negotiation was a rare phenomenon, and that this attack was hard to pull off without some way to force a renegotiation to occur, or a site that specifically uses it for either client certificate authentication (unusual) or multiple different crypto levels for different parts of a site (totally unnecessary).

Hmmm.

[Paul Simmonds]

Surprised! (not!)

David, this may be because a lot of these things are run by script kiddies.

One world twitters, One Turk twiddles, One site becomes twaddle!