CVE-2012-4930

Published: 15 September 2012

The SPDY protocol 3 and earlier, as used in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and other products, can perform TLS encryption of compressed data without properly obfuscating the length of the unencrypted data, which allows man-in-the-middle attackers to obtain plaintext HTTP headers by observing length differences during a series of guesses in which a string in an HTTP request potentially matches an unknown string in an HTTP header, aka a "CRIME" attack.

Notes

Firefox 15 disables compression
For SPDY to be used with OpenSSL in any way, NPN must be available
in openssl. This was not introduced until 1.0.1. No patch for upstream
OpenSSL. This may be considered a flaw in the applications using OpenSSL and
not OpenSSL itself.

Status

References

• https://community.qualys.com/blogs/securitylabs/2012/09/14/crime-information-leakage-attack-against-ssltls
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=857737
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/14/crime_tls_attack/
• http://www.iacr.org/cryptodb/data/paper.php?pubkey=3091
• http://www.ekoparty.org/2012/thai-duong.php
• http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/crime-attack-uses-compression-ratio-tls-requests-side-channel-hijack-secure-sessions-091312
• http://isecpartners.com/blog/2012/9/14/details-on-the-crime-attack.html
• http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/09/crime-hijacks-https-sessions/
• https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2012-4930
• NVD
• Launchpad
• Debian

Bugs

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=857051
• https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=779952