A downgrade attack or version rollback attack is a form of cryptographic attack on a computer system or communications protocol that makes it abandon a high-quality mode of operation in favor of an older, lower-quality mode of operation that is typically provided for backward compatibility with older systems. An example of such a flaw was found in OpenSSL that allowed the attacker to negotiate the use of a lower version of TLS between the client and server. This is one of the most common types of downgrade attacks. Another example is intercepting web traffic and redirecting the user from the secure, HTTPS version of a website to an unencryptedHTTP version.
Attack
Downgrade attacks are often implemented as part of a man-in-the-middle attack, and may be used as a way of enabling a cryptographic attack that might not be possible otherwise. Downgrade attacks have been a consistent problem with the SSL/TLS family of protocols; examples of such attacks include the POODLE attack. Downgrade attacks in the TLS protocol take many forms. Researchers have classified downgrade attacks with respect to four different vectors, which represents a framework to reason about downgrade attacks as follows: There are some recent proposals that exploit the concept of prior knowledge to enable TLS clients to protect sensitive domain names against certain types of downgrade attacks that exploit the clients' support for legacy versions or non-recommended ciphersuites such as the POODLE, ClientHello fragmentation, and a variant of the DROWN downgrade attacks. Removing backward compatibility is often the only way to prevent downgrade attacks. However, sometimes the client and server can recognize each other as up-to-date in a manner that prevents them. For example, if a Web server and user agent both implement HTTP Strict Transport Security and the user agent knows this of the server, then the user agent will refuse to access the site over vanilla HTTP, even if a malicious router represents it and the server to each other as not being HTTPS-capable.
