Defeating Ssl Using Sslstrip (Marlinspike Blackhat)

Relevant part starts here [this video] Although for anyone interested in HTTPS, I'd recommend watching the whole thing. Very entertaining.

This guide is very hand-wavey. Tor alone is a poor operational security strategy; using nikto and unix-privesc-check does not a hacker make. This may be a decent place to begin one's inquiry, but don't let it end here too. Here are some talks I recommend: Tricks for Defeating SSL in Practice - Moxie Marlinspike [this video] OPSEC: Because Jail is for wuftpd - thegrugq [link]

We don't have humans in the loop for issuing certificate; this can and has been exploited for fun and profit, with fun attacks like getting a cert for "citibank.com\0.mydomain.com" which used to trick the C strcmp in most browser certificate checking routines. Moxie has an entertaining talk: [this video] Your problem would be getting people to "thecitibank.com." Chrome, Firefox, and GMail would all eventually figure out it was a phishing site and warn users about clicking through to it.

Perhaps one of the techniques discussed here: [this video] ? Or, as this was published a couple of days ago, it might have utilized POODLE, or even BEAST in unmitigated cases. But yeah, I'd also believe user error in some cases.

If it helps, the attack you're describing is called sslstrip and was presented by Moxie Marlinspike at Black Hat in 2009: [this video] (code here: [link] ) As others have mentioned, the current best defence against this is HSTS (and, in particular, HSTS preloading). I think the best explanation of it is here: [link]

> How viable is the interception a http-to-https redirect page? It can be very powerful if done maliciously: [this video] (This kind of attack is a primary motivation for the existence of HSTS.)

History lesson incoming: [this video] The only effective way to get guaranteed security is with HSTS preloading. Anything short of that leaves you vulnerable to the linked attack, which dates way back to 2012.