Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Researchers demo cloud security issue with Amazon AWS hijacking attack

Researchers demo cloud security issue with Amazon AWS hijacking attack

Researchers from the Horst Goertz Institute (HGI) of the Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) in Germany have demonstrated an account hijacking attack against Amazon Web Services (AWS) that they believe affects other cloud computing products as well.

The attack uses a technique, known at XML signature wrapping or XML rewriting, that has been known since 2005 and exploits a weakness in the way Web services validate signed requests.