More Security for Firesheep from Mozilla | HSTS
Satyajit (Admins,a.k.a Satosys)
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
Firesheep was a buzz word few months ago then came the blacksheep to counter protect users from it.
The firesheep tutorial I demonstrated in a post shows how an attacker can gain access to any account(Twitter,Facebook,Gmail etc) with out even knowing the password using Sidejacking.
Now with the increase of threats from the tools like Firesheep Mozilla has come with a concept of "HTTP Strict-Transport-Security", that will be employed in the version 4 of it and is available in the beta versions available.
Now with the increase of threats from the tools like Firesheep Mozilla has come with a concept of "HTTP Strict-Transport-Security", that will be employed in the version 4 of it and is available in the beta versions available.
What is "HTTP Strict-Transport-Security" ?
Actually when we access any login page it is done by default with http so our initial connection is unencrypted so an attacker can plant a MITM(Man in the Middle Attack) to recieve the connection from the user and the user feels that he/she is connected to the real server.Here comes the role of "HTTP Strict-Transport-Security" in protecting the user's session.What it does is that it guides the user's session to be strictly over Https there by encrypting the user's session from the initial point and also protect the sniffing of cookies.
How to use this feature?
1.A site need to ebable the "Strict-Transport-Security HTTP header",in order to allow the user to access a https login page and the firefox 4 will take care rest of the thing.
2.If you are using Firefox 3.6 you can use an addon called "ForceTLS" to use this functionality.
3.This is built in with Firefox 4 and in the beta but you can also use additonal controls by using "STS-UI" addon.
With this feature added to Firefox 4 the online activities of users from public
Wifi hotspots can be secured to some extent... :)
With this feature added to Firefox 4 the online activities of users from public
Wifi hotspots can be secured to some extent... :)
More Security for Firesheep from Mozilla | HSTS
Reviewed by Satyajit (Admins,a.k.a Satosys)
on
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
Rating:
