Even the researcher who reported this doesn’t go as far as this headline.
“I am an admin, should I drop everything and fix this?”
Probably not.
The attack requires an active Man-in-the-Middle attacker that can intercept and modify the connection’s traffic at the TCP/IP layer. Additionally, we require the negotiation of either ChaCha20-Poly1305, or any CBC cipher in combination with Encrypt-then-MAC as the connection’s encryption mode.
[…]
“So how practical is the attack?”
The Terrapin attack requires an active Man-in-the-Middle attacker, that means some way for an attacker to intercept and modify the data sent from the client or server to the remote peer. This is difficult on the Internet, but can be a plausible attacker model on the local network.
If someone can gain physical access to your network, you’re already fucked.
If your threat model excludes attackers able to do MitM attacks, then why use encryption at all? The whole point of all this encryption stuff is that it prevents exactly this. And I’d say nowadays an honest assumption about IT security is not that there’s no attacker who doesn’t have access to what’s going over the wire, but that there’s an attacker who has complete access to everything that leaves anything you can directly control and check.
Clickbaity title, I thought arstechnica was better than that .,.
