So there's a new SSL bug making the rounds this week and it's got a name, obviously, because that's just how we do security vulnerabilities now. This one's called FREAK, which stands for Factoring RSA Export Keys, and researchers went public with it a couple days ago. If you're on an iPhone or iPad using Safari, or pretty much any Android device with the stock browser, you were vulnerable to it until your OS gets patched.
Here's the short version, because I spent about forty minutes last night reading through the technical writeup and I don't want you to have to do that. Back in the 90s the US government wouldn't let companies export "strong" encryption software overseas, this was treated basically like exporting weapons. So browsers shipped with a deliberately weaker "export grade" encryption option baked in, just for servers overseas, that used keys short enough (512 bits) to be crackable if you had enough compute lying around. Almost nobody uses export-grade crypto anymore, obviously, but the code path never actually got ripped out of a bunch of browsers and servers. Turns out a bug in how the handshake gets negotiated meant an attacker sitting on your network could quietly force a connection down into using that old weak mode even if both sides supported strong encryption, then crack the key (something like seven hours on Amazon's cloud, per the researchers) and read your traffic.
That's the kind of thing that sounds abstract until you go to freakattack.com and paste in some domain names. I checked my bank. Vulnerable. I checked two different airline sites. Vulnerable. I checked my own domain for this blog, which took approximately zero seconds to fail too since I'm running a fairly old Apache config I have honestly been meaning to touch for like a year and a half now.
I'll be honest, I'm getting a little numb to this whole genre of story at this point. Heartbleed had its own logo and a bleeding heart icon. POODLE got a dog picture. Shellshock. Now FREAK, which admittedly has the best acronym of the bunch even if "Factoring RSA Export Keys" is a bit of a stretch to get there. I don't say this to be dismissive of the actual severity, because man-in-the-middle attacks on banking traffic are genuinely bad. I say it because there's something almost funny about the fact that the root cause here traces back to Clinton-era export control law from literally two decades ago, sitting dormant in code nobody looked at twice, only to become an active security hole in 2015 because nobody ever went back and deleted it. Old decisions really do just sit there waiting.
The fix, if you're a regular person reading this and not running a server, is annoyingly mostly "wait." Apple's already said a patch is coming for iOS and OS X. Google's pushed something out for the Android browser but since Android updates take approximately forever to actually reach real phones (a complaint I will apparently be making on this blog until the heat death of the universe), a huge chunk of Android users are going to be sitting exposed for a good while regardless of what Google ships upstream. If you're running your own server, the fix is simpler: just disable export cipher suites entirely, which you had zero reason to have enabled in this decade anyway.
Meanwhile everyone's still talking about the Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge from the Samsung event in Barcelona last week, and yeah, the curved edge screen on the Edge looks slick in photos, but I'll wait for actual hands-on impressions before I get excited about a phone that reportedly ditches the removable battery and SD card slot, two things I use constantly and would genuinely miss.
Anyway. Go check your bank's site on freakattack.com. It'll take you ten seconds and it's a nice little dose of mild paranoia to start your week with.