Skip to main content

GMail goes HTTP-S 'by default'

Today I noticed something new in the upside right corner of my Gmail account- "More Gmail Security".
Now Gmail offers HTTP-S connection by-default.Last June, a group of researchers and academics released an open-letter calling on Google protect users' communications from theft and snooping by enabling industry standard transport encryption technology (HTTPS) for Google Mail, Docs, and Calendar. And latest rise in incidents of Gmail account hijack from China made Google to act fast.
According to Google "We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there's a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we've been researching the security/latency tradeoff and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do."

They are currently rolling out default https for everyone. If you've previously set your own https preference from Gmail Settings, nothing will change for your account. If you trust the security of your network and don't want default https turned on for performance reasons, you can turn it off at any time by choosing "Don't always use https" from the Settings menu.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ardilla- New tool for finding SQL Injection and XSS

Three Researchers -- MIT's Adam Kiezun , Stanford's Philip Guo , and Syracuse University's Karthick Jayaraman -- has developed a new tool ' Ardilla ' that automatically finds and exploits SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in Web applications. It creates inputs that pinpoint bugs in Web applications and then generates SQL injection and XSS attacks. But for now Ardilla is for PHP -based Web app only. The researchers say Ardilla found 68 never-before found vulnerabilities in five different PHP applications using the tool -- 23 SQL injection and 45 XSS flaws. More information is awaited. For their attack generation techniques refer to their document at: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/mernst/pubs/create-attacks-tr054.pdf
Post a Comment
Read more

File Upload through Null Byte Injection

Sometimes, during file upload we come across situation wherein there would be check on the file extension at the client side as well as server side too. If the application does allow only .jpeg extension to be uploaded, the client side java script checks for the extension of the file before passing the request. We all know that how easily this can be defeated. Some applications, checks for the extension at the server side also. That's not easy to bypass. However there are some ways with which it still can be bypassed. Most of server side scripts are written in high level languages such as Php, Java etc who still use some C/C++ libraries to read the file name and contents. That leads to the problem. In C/C++ a line ends with /00 or which is called Null Byte. So whenever the interpreter sees a null byte at the end of the a string, it stops reading thinking it has reached at the end of the string. This can be used for the bypass. It works for many servers, specially php servers. T
1 comment
Read more

jtool - an alternative to otool

jtool comes with a capability of running on Linux environment. Some ipa scanning tools are created to run on Linux environment where mac environment is not available. In such cases tools such as otool and class-dump-z will not work. So jtool can be an alternative to otool. For more information on jtool please refer to http://www.newosxbook.com/tools/jtool.html . It lists down various commands which have same output as otool or a equivalent. There are several commands mentioned in link. But for our customized requirements and basis checks I have listed down the below ones after running on many binaries. The outputs are similar or equivalent to otool and class-dump-z: Commands for checking PIE flag (ASLR) in jTool jtool -d -v -arch | grep stack ·           Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) protection: jtool -d -v -arch | grep _objc_release ·           To check if the device is jailbroken: jtool -d -v -arch | grep jail ·           Dyldinfo compatible options
1 comment
Read more