X.509 certificate error testing

X.509 Certificates are used by a wide range of technologies to verify identities, while the SSL protocol is used to provide a secure encrypted tunnel through which data can be sent over a public network. Combined both of these technologies provides the basis of the public key infrastructure (PKI). While the concept of PKI is a good idea, the different implementation of the technologies in different operating system and clients often lead to weaknesses. This paper proposes a methodology to automate the testing of SSL clients by generating both bogus and malformed certificates in order to evaluate the client’s response and identify potential threats to network infrastructures

Server Notaries: A Complementary Approach to the Web PKI Trust Model

SSL/TLS is the de facto protocol for providing secure communication over the Internet. It relies on the Web PKI model for authentication and secure key exchange. Despite its relatively successful past, the number of Web PKI incidents observed have increased recently. These incidents revealed the risks of forged certificates issued by certificate authorities without the consent of the domain owners. Several solutions have been proposed to solve this problem, but no solution has yet received widespread adaption due to complexity and deployability issues. In this paper, we propose a practical mechanism that enables servers to get their certificate views across the Internet, making detection of a certificate substitution attack possible. The origin of the certificate substitution attack can also be located by this mechanism. We have conducted simulation experiments and evaluated our proposal using publicly available, real-world BGP data. We have obtained promising results on the AS-level Internet topology

Improving security requirements adequacy: an interval type 2 fuzzy logic security assessment system

Organizations rely on security experts to improve the security of their systems. These professionals use background knowledge and experience to align known threats and vulnerabilities before selecting mitigation options. The substantial depth of expertise in any one area (e.g., databases, networks, operating systems) precludes the possibility that an expert would have complete knowledge about all threats and vulnerabilities. To begin addressing this problem of fragmented knowledge, we investigate the challenge of developing a security requirements rule base that mimics multi-human expert reasoning to enable new decision-support systems. In this paper, we show how to collect relevant information from cyber security experts to enable the generation of: (1) interval type-2 fuzzy sets that capture intra- and inter-expert uncertainty around vulnerability levels; and (2) fuzzy logic rules driving the decision-making process within the requirements analysis. The proposed method relies on comparative ratings of security requirements in the context of concrete vignettes, providing a novel, interdisciplinary approach to knowledge generation for fuzzy logic systems. The paper presents an initial evaluation of the proposed approach through 52 scenarios with 13 experts to compare their assessments to those of the fuzzy logic decision support system. The results show that the system provides reliable assessments to the security analysts, in particular, generating more conservative assessments in 19% of the test scenarios compared to the experts’ ratings