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Tech Lawyers Debate Legality of Firesheep Application

By Eric Lipman

The danger inherent in "over-sharing" has been a favorite topic of ours here at Legal Blog Watch. Yesterday, FutureLawyer ratcheted the issue, and the potential for panic, up a notch. Last week, some wacky programmer released an add-on for the Firefox browser, which he cleverly named "Firesheep." What does Firesheep do? Let's hear it straight from the guy who created it, Eric Butler: It's extremely common for websites to protect your password by encrypting the initial login, but surprisingly uncommon for websites to encrypt everything else. This leaves the cookie (and the user) vulnerable. HTTP session hijacking (sometimes called "sidejacking") is when an attacker gets a hold of a user's cookie, allowing them to do anything the user can do on a particular website. On an open wireless network, cookies are basically shouted through the air, making these attacks extremely easy. This is a widely known problem that has been talked about to death, yet very popular websites continue to fail at protecting their users. The only effective fix for this problem is full end-to-end encryption, known on the web as HTTPS or SSL. Facebook is constantly rolling out new "privacy" features in an endless attempt to quell the screams...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on November 02, 2010 (boomark / email).