A paper detailing a new attack vector on TLS was released on December 30. The attack, known as the
HTTPS Bicycle Attack,
is able to determine the length of specific parts of the plain-text
data underneath captured TLS packets using a side-channel attack with
already known information. The attack has a few prerequisites but could
be applied in a real world scenario, and is completely undetectable due
to its passive nature.
Executive Summary
The HTTPS Bicycle attack can result in the length of personal and
secret data being exposed from a packet capture of a user's HTTPS
traffic. For example, the length of passwords and other data (such as
GPS co-ordinates) can be determined simply by analysing the lengths of
the encrypted traffic.
Some of the key observations of this attack are as below:
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Requires a packet capture containing HTTPS (TLS) traffic from a browser to a website
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The TLS traffic must use a stream-based cipher
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Can reveal the lengths of unknown data as long as the length of the
rest of the data is known - this includes passwords, GPS data and IP
addresses
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Packet captures from several years ago could be vulnerable to this attack, with no mitigation possible
-
The real world impact is unknown, as there are several prerequisites that may be hard to fulfill.
This leads us into interesting discussions on the resilience of
passwords as a form of authentication method. First we will explain how
the attack works.
http://blogs.forcepoint.com/security-labs/https-bicycle-attack-obtaining-passwords-tls-encrypted-browser-requests
https://guidovranken.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/https-bicycle-attack.pdf
You can keep up to date with the discussion of HTTPS Bicycle on Reddit at
https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/3zc5qu/https_bicycle_attack/