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This is Abraham Linkon from TrendingWP, and if you recently installed an SSL certificate on your website, then today’s article. In this article, I will discuss with example and using tools that why you should change your web credentials after installing an SSL certificate on your website. I will also point out why you should use an SSL certificate on your website.
Suppose your website is not processing any sensitive data like credit cards or any other sensitive information to the user. If your website has a simple login page, you should consider using an SSL certificate. Why am I saying this? Let me show you for demonstration purposes. I will use how trendingwp.com.
What is an SSL Certificate?
If you see here, there is no green padlock, which me that the SSL certificate is not installed on this domain. If I click on this info, I can state that a connection is not secure, which means that whenever a request is made between the browser and the server, all the information will be sent in plain text. This is a severe security risk and let me tell you how.
Today performing a man-in-the-middle attack using techniques like ARP poisoning or ARP spoofing is very easy. It just needs some ready-made tools, and you really don’t even need to have an operating system like Kali Linux or backtrack, and even a window user can perform a man-in-the-middle attack using some tools, but what is a man-in-the-middle attack? And how it works that see.
In a normal communication channel, your browser directly sends requests to the server. And the server responds directly back to the browser. But when a man-in-the-middle attack is initiated, the attacker sits between the browser.
How to Use SSL Certificate?
Instead of going through the normal communication channel, the server and every request are now routed through the attacker’s machine. Attacker eavesdrop on all the communication between the browser and the server. And he can even alter the requested data.
Let me do what a local online local. I will use a tool called Wireshark. It will sit between the browser and the server. Once activated, it will capture all the requests between my browser and the server, and in short, it will be like performing a man-in-the-middle attack on a local machine.
So let’s go back to trendingwp.com on which WordPress is installed. I will go to its login page by typing wp-admin. Since this domain is not using the SSL certificate, all the requests will be in plain text, even my username and password, and we will capture it using Wireshark.
Where to Use SSL Certificate?
Now I will go to the Wireshark, and I will start capturing, and then I will go back to the trendingwp.com, and I will type in my username, which is admin, and password is admin123, and then I will click on login. The login is successful, and I have logged-in into the dashboard.
Now I will stop capturing in Wireshark because it would have captured the login information that we wanted. I have applied a filter here to filter out any request that contains POST or GET in it. And here, you can see that our website uses the HTTP protocol, which is not secure. Here we will find a POST request to wp-login page and if we expand this HTML form Encoded here.
You can see the user name and the password in plain text that we have entered on the web login page because our domain is not using an SSL certificate, which is how a hacker can easily get your web credentials. If you install an SSL certificate after a hacker already has your web credentials, that can not prevent the hacker from accessing your website.
How does an SSL Certificate work on a Website?
Now let me show you how an SSL certificate will prevent a hacker from getting credentials even though he will be performing Man-In-The-Middle-Attack. I will pause the article here, and I will come back after installing the SSL certificate on the trendingwp.com domain.
Now you can see a green padlock here, which means an SSL certificate has been installed on this domain. I will start the capturing in the Wireshark, and I will go to the login page, and I will enter in my credentials. The username is admin, and the password is admin123, and I will hit the login button.
Once again, I am successfully logged in to the trendingwp.com admin panel; I will stop the capturing in Wireshark nowhere. We can see that our website uses TLS protocol, which is an enhanced version of the SSL certificate, and if we click on this and we will see our application data.
Verdict:
If we expand this secure socket layer here, we can see that our application data is now encrypted. Even though the hacker can have this request, he cannot decrypt it because it is encrypted with an SSL certificate. It is nearly impossible to decrypt this data, which is how you secure your passwords from an attacker who performs a Man-In-The-Middle- Attack.
Now, if you are interested in knowing how the SSL algorithm encrypts the data, please let me know in the comment section, and I will show you the simplest form of how the SSL algorithm works and create a shared secret key to encrypt data that even an attacker cannot decrypt.
