This is an introduction to some basic concepts around how POODLE (Padding Oracle on downgraded legacy encryption) works. There are plenty of other blogs/videos that go into greater detail about how it works but the basics can help to provide a framework to navigate through the detail.
Basically POODLE discovered that it was possible to decrypt some parts of encrypted SSL sessions via a man-in-the-middle. A victim can be vulnerable when using public wifi or if they have some nasty malware on their computers.
1. Basics of Cipher Block Chaining
During the SSL handshake, symmetric keys are exchanged to encrypt sessions. Sessions encrypted via the Cipher block chaining method are susceptible to what is known as a padding oracle attack. CBC is a method of symmetric block cipher cryptography. In CBC, a message is broken into 3 blocks of equal size blocks (eg 8 bit blocks). Each plaintext block is…
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oogenhand 