Security News > 2020 > September > New Raccoon Attack Could Let Attackers Break SSL/TLS Encryption

A group of researchers has detailed a new timing vulnerability in Transport Layer Security protocol that could potentially allow an attacker to break the encryption and read sensitive communication under specific conditions.

Dubbed "Raccoon Attack," the server-side attack exploits a side-channel in the cryptographic protocol to extract the shared secret key used for secure communications between two parties.

A Timing Attack to Leak Secret Keys Using time measurements to compromise a cryptosystem and leak sensitive information has been the heart of many timing attacks, and Raccoon employs the same strategy to the Diffie-Hellman key exchange process during a TLS handshake, which is crucial to trading data over a public network securely.

F5, Microsoft, Mozilla, and OpenSSL Release Security Updates While Raccoon may be hard to replicate in the real world, several F5 products were found to be vulnerable to a "Special" version of the attack without resorting to timing measurements by directly observing the contents of server responses.

"In this context, Raccoon teaches a lesson for protocol security: For protocols where some cryptographic secrets can be continuously queried by one of the parties, the attack surface is made broader. The Raccoon attack showed that we should be careful when giving attackers access to such queries."

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