Researchers at INRIA, the French national research institute for computer science, have devised a new way to decrypt secret cookies which could leave your passwords vulnerable to theft.
Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaetan Leurent, have devised and carried out an attack – in a crypto research lab – which can pirate traffic from over 600 of the web’s most popular sites and lay bare your previously secure login information.
The exploit, dubbed ‘Sweet32’, isn’t easy to carry out, however. It involves mining hundreds of gigabytes of data, and targeting specific users who have accessed a malicious website which saddled them with a bit of malware. Still, the difficulty in carrying out the attack is outweighed by just how completely it subverts some of the internet’s most common encryption schemes. – READ MORE
