Hands-On Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers

BEAST (CVE-2011-3389) and Other SSL-Based Attacks

The Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS (BEAST) attack assumes a fair degree of client-side control, with the attacker able to inject packets in the browser's TLS stream by performing a Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attack, which then allows the attacker to guess the initialization vector involved and decrypt other information.

As the security product company, Acunetix, notes in one of its blog posts about the attack:

It’s worth noting that for the BEAST attack to succeed, an attacker must have reasonable control of the victim’s browser, in which case it's [sic] more probable that an easier attack vector is chosen.

This exemplifies a couple of themes common to our no-reward staple of would-be vulnerabilities: ...