Experts warn of a serious security flaw that has apparently gone undetected for years. The flaw, dubbed FREAK, affects the Secure Sockets Layer protocol and its successor, Transport Layer Security. It can allow an attacker to intercept supposedly encrypted traffic as it moves between clients and servers. The problem stems from export restrictions imposed by the U.S. government in the early 1990s, which meant some companies shipped a version of their products with weaker encryption keys for use overseas. The weaker, 512-bit key can be revealed using today’s powerful computers and the data traffic can then be decrypted.”]