Bypassing HTTP Strict Transport Security

Presented at Black Hat Europe 2014, Oct. 16, 2014, 10:15 a.m. (60 minutes)

For the last few years, some different attacks against SSL/TLS have been released. Some of them based on cryptography or protocol weaknesses such as BEAST, CRIME, etc, and some others, such as SSLStrip, based on rewriting https links into http ones and keep user communications always in HTTP. In order to protect users against SSLStrip attacks, a new protection called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) has been developed and it's currently supported by most widely used browsers.

However, under certain circumstances, an attacker could exploit an inter-operation vulnerability in order to bypass HTTP Strict Transport Security protection and use other well-known attack techniques such as SSLStrip. In this presentation, we review the HSTS strengths and weaknesses, and we go in-depth on this inter-operation vulnerability and how it could be exploited.


Presenters:

  • Jose Selvi - INCIDE
    Jose Selvi is a Senior Penetration Tester & Forensics Analyst with INCIDE. His 11 years of expertise performing advanced security services and solutions in various industries (government, telecom, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, financial, technology...) include mainly penetration tests and information security research in new technologies. He is also a SANS Institute community instructor for penetration testing courses and a regular speaker at security conferences (mostly in Spain). Jose holds a masters degree in Computer Engineering, a bachelors degree in Telecommunication Engineering and he is preparing his PhD thesis. Since 2013, he is one of the individuals who have earned the GIAC Security Expert (GSE) designation.

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