To Stop BEAST, Mozilla Developer Proposes Blocking Java Framework 309
rastos1 writes with this news from The Register: "In a demonstration last Friday, it took less than two minutes for researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo to wield the exploit to recover an encrypted authentication cookie used to access a PayPal user account. ... The researchers settled on a Java applet as their means to bypass SOP, leading Firefox developers to discuss blocking the framework in a future version of the browser. ... 'I recommend that we blocklist all versions of the Java Plugin,' Firefox developer Brian Smith wrote on Tuesday in a discussion on Mozilla's online bug forum. 'My understanding is that Oracle may or may not be aware of the details of the same-origin exploit. As of now, we have no ETA for a fix for the Java plugin.'"
Java still there (Score:3, Informative)
I have to say I am actually surprised to see how many people still have a Java plugin for their browsers. I had a look at the analytics of my website and it looks like more than 80% of my visitors have one.
I heavily use Java on the desktop (Eclipse, etc) and on my servers (Tomcat) but I thought Java Applets to be dead for long.
Re:Java still there (Score:5, Informative)
I know no one rtfa but thearticle gives plenty of examples of webapps that rely on Java. Loads of corporate apps rely on it. I think that this is a bad move without a whitelist being released in tandem,which they are considering
The problem is not Java (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is NOT java, the problem is SSL/TLS. Java was just the vector which was used to exploit this, and disabling Java doesn't disable the real problem, especially since Mozilla refuses to support TLS 1.1.
Its also unclear in the press how the Java same origin bypass worked for this test: Was it click to install or a real flaw? As a tool author (Netalyzr [berkeley.edu]), being able to bypass same origin without a signature dialog would be a big deal in improving the quality of our tool.
Protection is already available (Score:4, Informative)
I have been using noscript http://noscript.net/ [noscript.net] for years. Paste from thier page,
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The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Seamonkey and other mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plugins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser.
NoScript's unique whitelist based pre-emptive script blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even not known yet!) with no loss of functionality...
You can enable JavaScript, Java and plugin execution for sites you trust with a simple left-click on the NoScript status bar icon (look at the picture), or using the contextual menu, for easier operation in popup statusbar-less windows.
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I have always thought that a white list approach was the best for anything as powerful as java & javascript, either one is essentially running someone else's unknown programs on your machine there may be a "sandbox" now but I really don't know how secure that is either