Defeating Ssl Using Sslstrip (Marlinspike Blackhat)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an entertaining talk and the original source on the stripping attack that motivated HSTS.
What it is
Moxie Marlinspike's Black Hat talk presenting sslstrip, which defeats SSL in practice by intercepting the http-to-https redirect.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2014 to 2018.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec ktta · 2017-09 · on “Broadening HSTS to secure more of the Web”
Relevant part starts here [this video] Although for anyone interested in HTTPS, I'd recommend watching the whole thing. Very entertaining.
Recommends fabulist · 2014-11 · on “How to Learn Hacking”
This guide is very hand-wavey. Tor alone is a poor operational security strategy; using nikto and unix-privesc-check does not a hacker make. This may be a decent place to begin one's inquiry, but don't let it end here too. Here are some talks I recommend: Tricks for Defeating SSL in Practice - Moxie Marlinspike [this video] OPSEC: Because Jail is for wuftpd - thegrugq [LINK]
Recommends superuser2 · 2015-09 · on “Our First Certificate Is Now Live”
We don't have humans in the loop for issuing certificate; this can and has been exploited for fun and profit, with fun attacks like getting a cert for "citibank.com\0.mydomain.com" which used to trick the C strcmp in most browser certificate checking routines. Moxie has an entertaining talk: [this video] Your problem would be getting people to "thecitibank.com." Chrome, Firefox, and GMail would all eventually figure out it was a phishing site and warn users about clicking through to it.
Cites samman · 2014-10 · on “Why public WiFi is dangerous”
Perhaps one of the techniques discussed here: [this video] ? Or, as this was published a couple of days ago, it might have utilized POODLE, or even BEAST in unmitigated cases. But yeah, I'd also believe user error in some cases.
Cites sgentle · 2016-11 · on “Here’s to more HTTPS on the web”
If it helps, the attack you're describing is called sslstrip and was presented by Moxie Marlinspike at Black Hat in 2009: [this video] (code here: [LINK] ) As others have mentioned, the current best defence against this is HSTS (and, in particular, HSTS preloading). I think the best explanation of it is here: [LINK]
Cites schoen · 2017-09 · on “Broadening HSTS to secure more of the Web”
> How viable is the interception a http-to-https redirect page? It can be very powerful if done maliciously: [this video] (This kind of attack is a primary motivation for the existence of HSTS.)
Cites CydeWeys · 2018-01 · on “Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones”
History lesson incoming: [this video] The only effective way to get guaranteed security is with HSTS preloading. Anything short of that leaves you vulnerable to the linked attack, which dates way back to 2012.