FREAK Attack.

A 2015 TLS attack (CVE-2015-0204) that downgrades RSA key exchange to 512-bit export-grade keys and factors them to decrypt sessions. It belongs to the Attacks & Threats category of cybersecurity.

A 2015 TLS attack (CVE-2015-0204) that downgrades RSA key exchange to 512-bit export-grade keys and factors them to decrypt sessions.

FREAK (Factoring RSA Export Keys) was disclosed in March 2015 by Beurdouche, Bhargavan, Delignat-Lavaud and others, with the main vulnerability tracked as CVE-2015-0204. An MITM rewrites the TLS handshake to ask for RSA_EXPORT and a vulnerable server happily signs a fresh 512-bit RSA modulus. Many implementations cached and reused this short key, and 512-bit moduli could be factored in hours on cloud resources, letting the attacker derive the premaster and decrypt the session. FREAK revealed how long-dead 1990s export controls survived in OpenSSL, Secure Transport, and SChannel. Fixes: remove export ciphersuites, never reuse ephemeral RSA keys, and migrate to TLS 1.2/1.3 with ECDHE.

Defences for FREAK Attack typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: FREAK, Factoring RSA Export Keys.