was developed by security researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong, who plan to present it next week at the Ekoparty security conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Rizzo and Duong revealed last week that CRIME abuses an optional feature present in all versions of TLS and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) -- the cryptographic protocols used by HTTPS. However, they declined to name the feature at that time.

On Saturday, Thomas Pornin, a cryptography architect from Quebec, Canada, that the feature abused by CRIME might be the SSL/TLS data compression. Pornin even proposed an attack that matched the general description of CRIME.

Rizzo confirmed Thursday via email that CRIME exploits that data compression feature of SSL and TLS. However, SPDY -- a networking protocol that uses a similar compression scheme -- is also vulnerable, he said.

The SPDY (pronounced speedy) protocol was developed by Google and uses techniques like compression, multiplexing and prioritization to reduce the latency of Web pages. It doesn't replace HTTP or HTTPS, but can be used to speed them up.