Forums Community SSL vulnerabilities – WikiLeaks Reply To: SSL vulnerabilities – WikiLeaks

#5749 Reply

Svante
Spectator

Hello,

No, SSL cannot be intercepted by anyone in a privileged position – unless you by that mean you, yourself or someone else with administrator permissions on your local PC who can install any certificate in your certificate store to mount a man-in-the-middle attack. But this entity does not need to break into SSL! Anyone with admin permissions on your system can get at your secrets there in a number of easier ways. Corporate firewalls cannot terminate an SSL-connection without you being aware of this, and if they instead mount a MITM “attack” we’re back at previous argument. A trusted root certificate needs to be installed in your device.

SSL *is* used to protect both secrets and economic resources. Very few will use VPN to connect to their Internet bank.

You have tested the wrong site, http://www.axcrypt.net – no secrets are ever passed to that server (that being said, we’re in a continuing discussion with our hosting provider about that. It’s a known issue, but not really relevant to this discussion).

The correct site account.axcrypt.net , which currently receives a ‘B’ rating, due some minor issues that may be caused by the user having older browsers. This is a tradeoff between what users are allowed to connect. If we set up too strong a cipher suite, some users with older browsers can’t even connect. Users with modern browsers will not use the older problematic ciphers. But thanks, we’ll take another look at this and see if we can setup a suitable cipher suite giving us the ‘A’ rating, without locking out users.

Adding another layer of security may, or may not, increase the level of security. We may indeed do so in the future but adding layers also increases complexity and difficulty of analysis. Peer review is great – but it’s not a guarantee. There have been problems found in just about any protocol ever published, and the advantage of SSL/TLS is that there are literally thousands of researchers trying to find flaws, and publishing when they do. And they’ve been doing this for a long time.

Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t still applies.