BREACH attack

A few lines of Bash script let you check which compression methods are supported by a SSL/TLS-enabled webserver.

 target=URL-OF-TARGET
for compression in compress deflate exi gzip identity pack200-gzip br
bzip2 lzma peerdist sdch xpress xz; do
curl -ksI -H "Accept-Encoding: ${compression}" https://${target} | grep -i ${compression}
done
If you see any output (and the server supports one of these compression algorithms), the site might be vulnerable to a BREACH attack. Might, because an attacker has to 'inject' content into the output (and have some control over it): This is called a chosen plaintext attack.
By carefully injecting certain content to the page, an attacker is able to deduce (parts) of the page content by merely looking at the response size (speed). An attacker therefore also has to be able to observe the server's response. A third prerequisite is that the secret (that an attacker wants to steal) is contained in the server response's body, and not 'just' in the response's header. Cookies are therefore out of scope.

The easiest mitigation is to disable HTTP compression completely. Other less practical mitigations are adding random content to each page, which changes the compressed size per page request, rate limiting the requests, or changing the secret per request.

See for more information http://breachattack.com/


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