Protecting login forms alone is NEVER sufficient to protect a user’s account or personal information. However, what about the user’s session ID? If we protect passwords but fail to protect the session ID, an attacker is still fully capable of stealing the session cookie while in transit and performing a Session Hijacking attack to impersonate the user on their own PC. Credit card details, personally identifiable information and passwords are obviously in need of securing. I will go into far more detail over the course of the chapter, but everything boils down to asking those questions and identifying the vulnerabilities where they fail to hold true.Ī second core understanding is what user data must be secured. These questions are your core knowledge for this entire chapter.
If we allow pages loaded over HTTPS to, in turn, load non-HTTPS resources then we must accept that a MitM has a vehicle with which to inject Cross-Site Scripting attacks to turn the user’s browser into a pre-programmed weapon that will operate over the browser’s HTTPS connection tranparently.
For example, if we allow a user to submit an application’s login form data over HTTP we must then accept that an MitM is completely capable of intercepting that data and recording the user’s login data for future use. They each work to perfectly complement the other three goals and it is the presence of all four that provides reliable and robust Transport Layer Security.Īside from the technical aspects of how Transport Layer Security works, the other facet of securely exchanging data lies in how well we apply that security. So, all four of the above security goals MUST be met before a secure communication can take place.
#Axway secure transport supported encryption verification
Without that verification check, we have no way of telling the difference between a genuine target server and an MitM attacker. Obviously, we therefore need the second goal - the ability to verify the identity of the server that the client is communicating with. This would allow the attacker to decrypt all the data sent by the client. This encryption key will be negotiated with the MitM and not the target server. However, an attacker may be able to place themselves between the client and the server using a number of simple methods to trick a client machine into believing that the attacker is the server being contacted, i.e. This is possible because the client and the server will agree on an encryption key (among other details) during the negotiation phase when the client attempts a secure connection. Encryption of the data being transmitted requires that the other party be capable of decrypting the data. If any one of the above are compromised, we have a real problem.Ī common misconception, for example, is that encryption is the core goal and the others are non-essential. The most important point to notice in the above is that all four goals must be met in order for Transport Layer Security to be successful. To guarantee the identity of one or both parties.To securely encrypt data being exchanged.The broad goals of these security measures is as follows:
The answer to these concerns when it comes to defending the transfer of data from between any two parties is to use Transport Layer Security, typically involving HTTPS, TLS and SSL. Application and browser users have an extremely high expectation in this regard placing a high value on the integrity of their credit card transactions, their privacy and their identity information. Protecting sensitive or private data is serious business. You can imagine the consequences of an attacker being able to read your session cookie, or to manipulate the payee, product or billing address, or to simply to inject new HTML or Javascript into the markup sent in response to a user request to the store. When you are sending payment instructions to a store using their online facility, the very last thing you ever want to occur is for an attacker to be capable of intercepting, reading, manipulating or replaying the HTTP request to the online application. Insufficient Transport Layer Security (HTTPS, TLS and SSL) ¶Ĭommunication between parties over the internet is fraught with risk.