An iPhone 4S d Apple and Samsung Galaxy S3
An Apple iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S3 – Jung Yeon-Je AFP

PB with AFP

After Heartbleed, here is the “Freak” fault. Thousands of sites supposed to be secure are actually vulnerable, but only if they are visited from Safari (iOS and Mac) or from the old default browser of Android. Chrome him, Firefox and Internet Explorer are not affected.

The problem of weak encryption standards set in the 90 to allow the American intelligence agency NSA to spy on communications Foreign, according to a study published Tuesday.

The flaw could make these vulnerable sites-including sites run by the FBI and the NSA -aux hacker attacks if the problem is not resolved, according to This study by French and American researchers.

Allow the NSA to spy on hostile countries

According to the researchers, this flaw comes encryption standards imposed by the US government on software for export. The goal, they said, was to enable the United States to have access to these programs when they were sold to hostile countries. But even after strengthening encryption rules, some software dedicated to export continued to be regulated according to the previous standards.

The breach was discovered by Karthikeyan Bhargavan teams in France to National Institute of Computer Research and Control (INRIA) and Matthew Green in the United States, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

An update soon

Apple announced that a corrective patch would be available next week. Google, which controls only half the Android ecosystem, has already developed a patch, but it will be for partners to deploy it.