Famous Cryptographic attack of an Iranian launches Man-in-the-Middle Attack Against Google

Famous Cryptographic attack of an Iranian launches Man-in-the-Middle Attack Against Google 

This Demonstrates Dangerous Weakness of Certificate Authorities

What’s worse than discovering that someone has launched a man-in-the-middle attack against Iranian Google users, silently intercepting everything from email to search results and possibly putting Iranian activists in danger? Discovering that this attack has been active for two months.

A man-in-the-middle attack is a type of cyberattack where a malicious actor inserts him/herself into a conversation between two parties, impersonates both parties and gains access to information that the two parties were trying to send to each other. A man-in-the-middle attack allows a malicious actor to intercept, send and receive data meant for someone else, or not meant to be sent at all, without either outside party knowing until it is too late. Man-in-the-middle attacks can be abbreviated in many ways, including MITM, MitM, MiM or MIM.

People all over the world use Google services for sensitive or private communications every day. Google enables encrypted connections to these services in order to protect users from spying by those who control the network, such as ISPs and governments. Today, the security of this encryption relies entirely on certificates issued by certificate authorities (CAs), which continue to prove vulnerable to attack. When an attacker obtains a fraudulent certificate, he can use it to eavesdrop on the traffic between a user and a website even while the user believes that the connection is secure.

The good news is that the computer security community is now taking this threat very seriously. Unfortunately, the bad news is spectacularly bad: users in Iran (or on any network where an eavesdropper had the key to this certificate) may have been vulnerable for two months. What's more, there are hundreds of certificate authorities in dozens of jurisdictions, and several have been tricked into issuing false certificates. So there may well be other certificates like this out there that we don't know about. That means almost all Internet users are still vulnerable to this sort of attack.

Most of the effective defences against MITM can be found only on router or server-side. You won’t be having any dedicated control over the security of your transaction. Instead, you can use a strong encryption between the client and the server. In this case server authenticates client’s request by presenting a digital certificate, and then only connection could be established.

Another method to prevent such MITM attacks is, to never connect to open WiFi routers directly. If you wish to so, you can use a browser plug-in such as HTTPS Everywhere or ForceTLS. These plug-ins will help you establishing a secure connection whenever the option is available.

I recommend to watch this video which shows how MITM attack works:

Reassures:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/iranian-man-middle-attack-against-google

http://www.veracode.com/security/man-middle-attack

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/man-in-the-middle-attack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6B_x7FtUII