5 research outputs found
Analysing the Security of Google's implementation of OpenID Connect
Many millions of users routinely use their Google accounts to log in to
relying party (RP) websites supporting the Google OpenID Connect service.
OpenID Connect, a newly standardised single-sign-on protocol, builds an
identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol, which has itself been widely
adopted to support identity management services. It adds identity management
functionality to the OAuth 2.0 system and allows an RP to obtain assurances
regarding the authenticity of an end user. A number of authors have analysed
the security of the OAuth 2.0 protocol, but whether OpenID Connect is secure in
practice remains an open question. We report on a large-scale practical study
of Google's implementation of OpenID Connect, involving forensic examination of
103 RP websites which support its use for sign-in. Our study reveals serious
vulnerabilities of a number of types, all of which allow an attacker to log in
to an RP website as a victim user. Further examination suggests that these
vulnerabilities are caused by a combination of Google's design of its OpenID
Connect service and RP developers making design decisions which sacrifice
security for simplicity of implementation. We also give practical
recommendations for both RPs and OPs to help improve the security of real world
OpenID Connect systems
Set It and Forget It! Turnkey ECC for Instant Integration
Historically, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is an active field of applied
cryptography where recent focus is on high speed, constant time, and formally
verified implementations. While there are a handful of outliers where all these
concepts join and land in real-world deployments, these are generally on a
case-by-case basis: e.g.\ a library may feature such X25519 or P-256 code, but
not for all curves. In this work, we propose and implement a methodology that
fully automates the implementation, testing, and integration of ECC stacks with
the above properties. We demonstrate the flexibility and applicability of our
methodology by seamlessly integrating into three real-world projects: OpenSSL,
Mozilla's NSS, and the GOST OpenSSL Engine, achieving roughly 9.5x, 4.5x,
13.3x, and 3.7x speedup on any given curve for key generation, key agreement,
signing, and verifying, respectively. Furthermore, we showcase the efficacy of
our testing methodology by uncovering flaws and vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, and
a specification-level vulnerability in a Russian standard. Our work bridges the
gap between significant applied cryptography research results and deployed
software, fully automating the process
Improvements in Everlasting Privacy: Efficient and Secure Zero Knowledge Proofs
Verifiable electronic voting promises to ensure the correctness of elections even in the presence of a corrupt authority, while providing strong privacy guarantees. However, few practical systems with end-to-end verifiability are expected to offer long term privacy, let alone guarantee it. Since good guarantees of privacy are essential to the democratic process, good guarantees of everlasting privacy must be a major goal of secure online voting systems.
Various currently proposed solutions rely on unusual constructions whose security has not been established. Further, the cost of verifying the zero knowledge proofs of other solutions has only been partially analysed. Our work builds upon Moran and Naor\u27s solution---and its extensions, applications and generalisations---to present a scheme which is additively homomorphic, efficient to verify, and rests upon well studied assumptions
EM Side Channel Analysis on Complex SoC architectures
The EM side channel analysis is a very effective technique to attack cryptographic systems due to its non invasive nature and capability to launch an attack even with limited resources. The EM leakage from devices can give information about computations on the processor, which can in turn reveal the internal state of the algorithm. For security sensitive algorithms, these EM radiations can be exploited by the adversary to extract secret key dependent operations hence EM side channel must be studied for evaluating the security of these algorithms. Modern embedded devices composed of System-on-Chip architectures are considered hard targets for EM side channel analysis mainly due to their complex architecture. This thesis explores the viability of EM side channel attacks on such targets. There is a comprehensive literature overview of EM side channel analysis followed by a practical side channel attack on a SoC device using well know cryptographic library OpenSSL. The attack successfully extracts the secret key dependent operation which can be used to retrieve the private key in security protocols such as TLS and SSH. The thesis concludes, with practical single trace attacks, that cryptographic implementations can still be broken using EM side channel analysis, and a complex nature of the device have no significant effect when combined with signal processing methods for extracting side channel information, hence the cryptographic software implementations must address these issues