ImperialViolet

(See the original post for background.)

Everyone seems to have settled on 1/n-1 record splitting as a workaround for the BEAST attack in TLS 1.0 and SSLv3. Briefly: 1/n-1 record splitting breaks CBC encrypted records in two: the first with only a single byte of application data and the second with the rest. This effectively randomises the IV and stops the attack.

The workaround which OpenSSL tried many years ago, and which hit significant issues, was 0/n record splitting. It's the same thing, but with the first record being empty. The problem with it was that many stacks processed the empty record and returned a 0-byte read, which higher levels took to mean EOF.

1/n-1 record splitting doesn't hit that problem, but it turns out that there's a fair amount of code out there that assumes that the entire HTTP request comes in a single read. The single byte record breaks that.

We first implemented 1/n-1 record splitting in Chrome 15 but backed off after only a couple of days because logging into several large sites broke. But that did motivate the sites to fix things so that we could switch it on in Chrome 16 and it stuck that time.

Opera also implemented it around this time, but I think Chrome took the brunt of the bug reports and it's time consuming dealing with them. Myself and a colleague have been emailing and phoning a lot of sites and vendors while dealing with upset users and site admins. Chrome certainly paid a price for moving before Firefox and IE but then we're nice like that.

Thankfully, this week, Microsoft released a security update which implements 1/n-1 record splitting in SChannel and switches it on in IE. (Although it defaults to off for other users of SChannel, unlike NSS.) Now the sites which broke with Chrome 16 are also broken in a patched IE and that takes some pressure off us. In a few weeks, Firefox 10 should be released and then we'll be about as good as we're going to get.

After taking the brunt with Chrome 16, there is one case that I'm not going to fight: Plesk can't handle POST payloads that don't come in a single read. Chrome (currently) sends POSTs as two writes: one for the HTTP headers and a second for the POST body. That means that each write is split into two records and Plesk breaks because of the second split. IE and Firefox send the headers and body in a single write, so there's only a single split in the HTTP headers, which Plesk handles.

Chrome will start merging small POST bodies into the headers with Chrome 17 (hopefully) and this will fix Plesk. Also, merging as Firefox and IE do saves an extra packet so it's worthwhile on its own. Once again, anything that's mostly true soon becomes an unwritten rule on the Internet.

It's worth contrasting the BEAST response to the renegotiation attack. The BEAST workaround caused a number of problems, but it worked fine for the vast majority of sites. The renegotiation fix requires that very nearly every HTTPS site on the Internet be updated and then that browsers refuse to talk to unpatched servers.

I'd bet that we'll not manage to get enough patched servers for any browser to require it this side of 2020. Unpatched servers can still disable renegotiation to protect themselves, but it's still not hard to find major sites that allow insecure renegotiation (www.chase.com was literally the second site that I tried).