A POODLE (Padding Oracle on Downgraded Legacy Encryption) attack is a form of man-in-the-middle attack that takes advantage of a cryptographic weakness in Secure Socket Layer (SSL) version 3.0. Although Internet web server security has been updated to TLS (Transport Layer Security) for years, not all servers support it yet. And if a client’s web server can only use SSL, a session between the two will default to SSL. POODLE attacks take advantage of this fallback and will even trick the web server into switching to SSL protocols if it doesn’t automatically. The server assumes that one of the parties cannot use TLS, when in reality the attacker convinced the server to downgrade.
Once the session is using SSL 3.0, the attacker moves to the encrypted information. SSL ciphers are in blocks and must have a certain byte length. These ciphers are padded with extra bytes if needed to reach that specification. The encrypted information also has a message authentication code (MAC). Because the block cipher is padded to reach the required amount of bytes, the end of the cipher will include the number of bytes padded (04 if four bytes are added for padding, for example). But the server doesn’t check all of the padding except for the last bytes. This presents a security weakness in which any bytes can be substituted in that section of padding.
If an attacker guesses a byte and is wrong, the server will reject their request. Then they know they were wrong and can just continue guessing. It’s relatively easy for an attacker to guess the last bytes of the cipher and then move from there to continue substituting bytes until they reach the correct combination of numbers. Then they can decrypt the cipher and steal the data being transmitted. The attack is called a “padding oracle” attack because it tells an attacker which part of the process they’ve gotten wrong.
Any server connection that is susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks will also be more vulnerable to POODLE attacks, especially Wi-Fi networks that don’t require passwords. It’s also worth noting that SSL isn’t the only protocol that permits POODLE attacks: even TLS version 1.2 has experienced that weakness.
