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posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 10 2016, @02:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-good-news dept.

Submitted via IRC for Beige

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) have identified a weakness in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) of all Linux operating systems since late 2012 that enables attackers to hijack users' internet communications completely remotely.

Such a weakness could be used to launch targeted attacks that track users' online activity, forcibly terminate a communication, hijack a conversation between hosts or degrade the privacy guarantee by anonymity networks such as Tor.

Led by Yue Cao, a computer science graduate student in UCR's Bourns College of Engineering, the research will be presented on Wednesday (Aug. 10) at the USENIX Security Symposium in Austin, Texas. The project advisor is Zhiyun Qian, an assistant professor of computer science at UCR whose research focuses on identifying security vulnerabilities to help software companies improve their systems.

While most users don't interact directly with the Linux operating system, the software runs behind-the -scenes on internet servers, android phones and a range of other devices. To transfer information from one source to another, Linux and other operating systems use the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to package and send data, and the Internet Protocol (IP) to ensure the information gets to the correct destination.

For example, when two people communicate by email, TCP assembles their message into a series of data packets—identified by unique sequence numbers—that are transmitted, received, and reassembled into the original message. Those TCP sequence numbers are useful to attackers, but with almost 4 billion possible sequences, it's essentially impossible to identify the sequence number associated with any particular communication by chance. The UCR researchers didn't rely on chance, though. Instead, they identified a subtle flaw (in the form of 'side channels') in the Linux software that enables attackers to infer the TCP sequence numbers associated with a particular connection with no more information than the IP address of the communicating parties.

[...] Encrypted connections (e.g., HTTPS) are immune to data injection, but they are still subject to being forcefully terminated by the attacker. The weakness would allow attackers to degrade the privacy of anonymity networks, such as Tor, by forcing the connections to route through certain relays. The attack is fast and reliable, often taking less than a minute and showing a success rate of about 90 percent. The researchers created a short video showing how the attacks works.

Source: https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/39030


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @03:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @03:00PM (#386276)

    thus anonymity is compromised but I don't see which other effect this will have on the user of Tor. Anyone care to illuminate me?

    Isn't anonymity kind of the whole point of using Tor? If that is compromised, any other potential effects are not really all that important.