Firesheep, a day later

Re:Firesheep, a day later by tiles on Tuesday October 26, 2010 @01:57PM (#1835279)

This is incredibly necessary for HTTP authentication to be useful, and bizarrely, has been given little to no attention over the years. There's a proposal for HTTP authentication in HTML dating all the way back to 1999:

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-authentform

With only some complex Javascript hacks making it a possible solution:

http://www.peej.co.uk/articles/http-auth-with-html-forms.htm...

Also, HTTP authentication is a benefit to RESTful service design. Cookies have always been the wrong solution to this problem, having all web services to move to HTTPS feels like missing the point.

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Re:Firesheep, a day later by pornel on Tuesday October 26, 2010 @03:01PM (#1835542)

It's all been discussed by WHATWG/W3C and the conclusion was that cookies have too large momentum, Digest is not secure enough, and everyone should be using HTTPS.

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/13?changelog

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-Nov...

Digest is vulnerable to MITM attacks. It's only secure against passive sniffing, but if you can sniff, you usually can also modify response, spoof DNS/ARP/base station. If everyone switched to Digest, it would be only a matter of time when someone writes Digest-stripping Firesheep2.

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