3 research outputs found
Analyzing the BrowserID SSO System with Primary Identity Providers Using an Expressive Model of the Web
BrowserID is a complex, real-world Single Sign-On (SSO) System for web
applications recently developed by Mozilla. It employs new HTML5 features (such
as web messaging and web storage) and cryptographic assertions to provide
decentralized login, with the intent to respect users' privacy. It can operate
in a primary and a secondary identity provider mode. While in the primary mode
BrowserID runs with arbitrary identity providers (IdPs), in the secondary mode
there is one IdP only, namely Mozilla's default IdP.
We recently proposed an expressive general model for the web infrastructure
and, based on this web model, analyzed the security of the secondary IdP mode
of BrowserID. The analysis revealed several severe vulnerabilities.
In this paper, we complement our prior work by analyzing the even more
complex primary IdP mode of BrowserID. We do not only study authentication
properties as before, but also privacy properties. During our analysis we
discovered new and practical attacks that do not apply to the secondary mode:
an identity injection attack, which violates a central authentication property
of SSO systems, and attacks that break an important privacy promise of
BrowserID and which do not seem to be fixable without a major redesign of the
system. Some of our attacks on privacy make use of a browser side channel that
has not gained a lot of attention so far.
For the authentication bug, we propose a fix and formally prove in a slight
extension of our general web model that the fixed system satisfies all the
requirements we consider. This constitutes the most complex formal analysis of
a web application based on an expressive model of the web infrastructure so
far.
As another contribution, we identify and prove important security properties
of generic web features in the extended web model to facilitate future analysis
efforts of web standards and web applications.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1403.186