Attacking Suggest Boxes in Web Applications Over HTTPS Using Side-Channel Stochastic Algorithms

• Published in: Lecture notes in computer science Vol. 8924; pp. 116 - 130
• Main Authors: Schaub, Alexander, Schneider, Emmanuel, Hollender, Alexandros, Calasans, Vinicius, Jolie, Laurent, Touillon, Robin, Heuser, Annelie, Guilley, Sylvain, Rioul, Olivier
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2015; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Computer security; HTTPS; Information architecture; Network hardware; Side-channel leak; Stochastic algorithms; Suggest box; Web application
• ISBN: 9783319171265; 3319171267
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-17127-2_8

Web applications are subject to several types of attacks. In particular, side-channel attacks consist in performing a statistical analysis of the web traffic to gain sensitive information about a client. In this paper, we investigate how side-channel leaks can be used on search engines such as Google or Bing to retrieve the client’s search query. In contrast to previous works, due to payload randomization and compression, it is not always possible to uniquely map a search query to a web traffic signature and hence stochastic algorithms must be used. They yield, for the French language, an exact recovery of search word in more than $$30$$  % of the cases. Finally, we present some methods to mitigate such side-channel leaks.