As you surely know, things blew up recently at Toorcon 12 with the release of the much talked about Firefox plugin called Firesheep.
There were various discussions about how to mitigate against it like using Firefox plug-ins to force SSL connections (where available). Microsoft also tried to secure Hotmail with SSL but kinda b0rked that too.
For the 1 person in the World left that doesn’t know, Firesheep allowed any user to seamlessly hijack the web session of another user on the same local network. Although such attacks are not new, the ease of use presented by Firesheep brought session hijacking to the masses.
BlackSheep, also a Firefox plugin is designed to combat Firesheep. BlackSheep does this by dropping ‘fake’ session ID information on the wire and then monitors traffic to see if it has been hijacked. While Firesheep is largely passive, once it identifies session information for a targeted domain, it then makes a subsequent request to that same domain, using the hijacked session information in order to obtain the name of the hijacked user along with an image of the person, if available. It is this request that BlackSheep identifies in order to detect the presence of Firesheep on the network. When identified, the user will be receive the following warning message:
It should be noted that Firesheep and BlackSheep cannot be installed on the same Firefox instance as they share much of the same code base. If you want to run both Firesheep and BlackSheep on the same machine, they should be installed in separate Firefox profiles.
Requirements
In order to install BlackSheep, you need:
- Mac OS X: 10.5 or newer on an Intel processor.
- Windows: XP or newer. Install Winpcap first!
- Firefox: 3.5 or newer. 32-bit only.
- Linux : details here
You can download BlackSheep here:
Or read more here.
mpg says
Sadly, the same protection against Firesheep can also be used to defeat Blacksheep. Set Firesheep to sniff on your wireless interface, but set all of your traffic to use an encrypted tunnel.
Fred says
If i understand :
To use BlackSheep, the client’s networkcard must accept promiscuous mode and the reply of the hijack must be on the same network access ?
If it doesn’t accept promiscuous mode and you use TOR to replay, i think blacksheep can’t see anything…
Darknet says
Yes to both, you gotta be on same LAN (connected via same AP) and your card must be able to enter promiscuous mode to pull the traffic off the wire.
Bogwitch says
Fred,
If you’re using TOR to log in to sites, the exit node operator can view all your traffic (and there’s a history of them doing so)
Gorindor says
If you are running Windows 7 and have User Access Control (UAC) enable one must go to “Start > All Programs > Mozilla” and then right-click on “Firefox” and select “Run as administrator…” in order for the BlackSheep plugin to see your network adapter.