Over-bureaucratisation in public procurement: purposes and results

Most countries spend large sums of money (10 to 15% of their GDP) to procure goods, services and other work from private suppliers. Given this large public procurement market, it is clear that poor procurement practices might hinder sustainable development and negatively impact public finances and economic growth. This article uses data from the Czech Republic and Slovakia to show that these countries’ procurement systems are over-bureaucratised, and tries to identify the causes and results of such a situation. Our findings confirm that the systems investigated are characterised by legislation that is both too detailed and frequently amended, and an administrative culture that prefers compliance to performance. With over-bureaucratisation, procurement officials opt for a Rechtsstaat administrative culture of “bureaucratic safety” that generates excessive levels of passive waste of public resources

Postcards from the post-HTTP world: Amplification of HTTPS vulnerabilities in the web ecosystem

HTTPS aims at securing communication over the Web by providing a cryptographic protection layer that ensures the confidentiality and integrity of communication and enables client/server authentication. However, HTTPS is based on the SSL/TLS protocol suites that have been shown to be vulnerable to various attacks in the years. This has required fixes and mitigations both in the servers and in the browsers, producing a complicated mixture of protocol versions and implementations in the wild, which makes it unclear which attacks are still effective on the modern Web and what is their import on web application security. In this paper, we present the first systematic quantitative evaluation of web application insecurity due to cryptographic vulnerabilities. We specify attack conditions against TLS using attack trees and we crawl the Alexa Top 10k to assess the import of these issues on page integrity, authentication credentials and web tracking. Our results show that the security of a consistent number of websites is severely harmed by cryptographic weaknesses that, in many cases, are due to external or related-domain hosts. This empirically, yet systematically demonstrates how a relatively limited number of exploitable HTTPS vulnerabilities are amplified by the complexity of the web ecosystem

On competition and transparency in public procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic in the European Union

Government expenditures on acquiring services, goods, and work through public procurement represent a substantial proportion of the EU’s GDP. Competitive and transparent tendering procedures are generally believed to promote achieving the primary goals of public procurement: maximising value for money and reducing corruption. However, during the crisis, procurement rules allow a temporary departure from transparency standards toward fast and more discretionary procurement procedures justified by force majeure, possibly restricting competitiveness and information availability in the whole procurement process. The presented paper examines emergency response procurement measures by EU countries in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak in the spring of 2020 and their impact on competition. Using an extensive dataset of contracts for medical supplies and PPE obtained from Tenders Electronic Daily, we document the rapid increase of direct and negotiated contracts in the first two months of the pandemic outbreak. We found that firms, in general, were more likely to participate in procurement procedures with a prior call for tenders, such as open procedure and restricted procedure. On the other hand, the significant share of contracts obtained by small and medium enterprises without competition, hence by single bid procurement, suggests that public authorities tend to use their discretion in favour of SMEs. Moreover, overall emergency procurement setting and its effects on competition vary across countries regardless of how intensely the pandemic hit, indicating an institutional context for the increased discretion effects on procurement outcome

The Million-Key Question - Investigating the Origins of RSA Public Keys

Can bits of an RSA public key leak information about design and implementation choices such as the prime generation algorithm? We analysed over 60 million freshly generated key pairs from 22 open-and closed-source libraries and from 16 different smartcards, revealing significant leakage. The bias introduced by different choices is sufficiently large to classify a probable library or smartcard with high accuracy based only on the values of public keys. Such a classification can be used to decrease the anonymity set of users of anonymous mailers or operators of linked Tor hidden services, to quickly detect keys from the same vulnerable library or to verify a claim of use of secure hardware by a remote party. The classification of the key origins of more than 10 million RSA-based IPv4 TLS keys and 1.4 million PGP keys also provides an independent estimation of the libraries that are most commonly used to generate the keys found on the Internet.Our broad inspection provides a sanity check and deep insight regarding which of the recommendations for RSA key pair generation are followed in practice, including closed-source libraries and smartcards

On competition and transparency in public procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic in the European Union

Government expenditures on acquiring services, goods, and work through public procurement represent a substantial proportion of the EU’s GDP. Competitive and transparent tendering procedures are generally believed to promote achieving the primary goals of public procurement: maximising value for money and reducing corruption. However, during the crisis, procurement rules allow a temporary departure from transparency standards toward fast and more discretionary procurement procedures justified by force majeure, possibly restricting competitiveness and information availability in the whole procurement process. The presented paper examines emergency response procurement measures by EU countries in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak in the spring of 2020 and their impact on competition. Using an extensive dataset of contracts for medical supplies and PPE obtained from Tenders Electronic Daily, we document the rapid increase of direct and negotiated contracts in the first two months of the pandemic outbreak. We found that firms, in general, were more likely to participate in procurement procedures with a prior call for tenders, such as open procedure and restricted procedure. On the other hand, the significant share of contracts obtained by small and medium enterprises without competition, hence by single bid procurement, suggests that public authorities tend to use their discretion in favour of SMEs. Moreover, overall emergency procurement setting and its effects on competition vary across countries regardless of how intensely the pandemic hit, indicating an institutional context for the increased discretion effects on procurement outcome

Factors Determining the Efficiency of Slovak Public Procurement

Many studies analyse factors (such as corruption, competitiveness, transaction costs), which are influencing public procurement efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to find out, what the main factors are in Slovakia that are influencing public procurement efficiency, and based on our analysis, we will also estimate what is the impact of each factor on the efficiency of public procurement in Slovakia

Measuring Popularity of Cryptographic Libraries in Internet-Wide Scans

We measure the popularity of cryptographic libraries in large datasets of RSA public keys. We do so by improving a recently proposed method based on biases introduced by alternative implementations of prime selection in different cryptographic libraries. We extend the previous work by applying statistical inference to approximate a share of libraries matching an observed distribution of RSA keys in an inspected dataset (e.g., Internet-wide scan of TLS handshakes). The sensitivity of our method is sufficient to detect transient events such as a periodic insertion of keys from a specific library into Certificate Transparency logs and inconsistencies in archived datasets. We apply the method on keys from multiple Internet-wide scans collected in years 2010 through 2017, on Certificate Transparency logs and on separate datasets for PGP keys and SSH keys. The results quantify a strong dominance of OpenSSL with more than 84% TLS keys for Alexa 1M domains, steadily increasing since the first measurement. OpenSSL is even more popular for GitHub client-side SSH keys, with a share larger than 96%. Surprisingly, new certificates inserted in Certificate Transparency logs on certain days contain more than 20% keys most likely originating from Java libraries, while TLS scans contain less than 5% of such keys. Since the ground truth is not known, we compared our measurements with other estimates and simulated different scenarios to evaluate the accuracy of our method. To our best knowledge, this is the first accurate measurement of the popularity of cryptographic libraries not based on proxy information like web server fingerprinting, but directly on the number of observed unique keys

The Return of Coppersmith's Attack: Practical Factorization of Widely Used RSA Moduli

We report on our discovery of an algorithmic flaw in the construction of primes for RSA key generation in a widely-used library of a major manufacturer of cryptographic hardware. The primes generated by the library suffer from a significant loss of entropy. We propose a practical factorization method for various key lengths including 1024 and 2048 bits. Our method requires no additional information except for the value of the public modulus and does not depend on a weak or a faulty random number generator. We devised an extension of Coppersmith's factorization attack utilizing an alternative form of the primes in question. The library in question is found in NIST FIPS 140-2 and CC EAL 5+ certified devices used for a wide range of real-world applications, including identity cards, passports, Trusted Platform Modules, PGP and tokens for authentication or software signing. As the relevant library code was introduced in 2012 at the latest (and probably earlier), the impacted devices are now widespread. Tens of thousands of such keys were directly identified, many with significant impacts, especially for electronic identity documents, software signing, Trusted Computing and PGP. We estimate the number of affected devices to be in the order of at least tens of millions. The worst cases for the factorization of 1024 and 2048-bit keys are less than 3 CPU-months and 100 CPU-years on single core of common recent CPUs, respectively, while the expected time is half of that of the worst case. The attack can be parallelized on multiple CPUs. Worse still, all susceptible keys contain a strong fingerprint that is verifiable in microseconds on an ordinary laptop -- meaning that all vulnerable keys can be quickly identified, even in very large datasets

Biased RSA private keys: Origin attribution of GCD-factorable keys

In 2016, Svenda et al. (USENIX 2016, The Million-key Question) reported that the implementation choices in cryptographic libraries allow for qualified guessing about the origin of public RSA keys. We extend the technique to two new scenarios when not only public but also private keys are available for the origin attribution - analysis of a source of GCD-factorable keys in IPv4-wide TLS scans and forensic investigation of an unknown source. We learn several representatives of the bias from the private keys to train a model on more than 150 million keys collected from 70 cryptographic libraries, hardware security modules and cryptographic smartcards. Our model not only doubles the number of distinguishable groups of libraries (compared to public keys from Svenda et al.) but also improves more than twice in accuracy w.r.t. random guessing when a single key is classified. For a forensic scenario where at least 10 keys from the same source are available, the correct origin library is correctly identified with average accuracy of 89% compared to 4% accuracy of a random guess. The technique was also used to identify libraries producing GCD-factorable TLS keys, showing that only three groups are the probable suspects

Changing of the Guards: Certificate and Public Key Management on the Internet

Certificates are the foundation of secure communication over the internet. However, not all certificates are created and managed in a consistent manner and the certificate authorities (CAs) issuing certificates achieve different levels of trust. Furthermore, user trust in public keys, certificates, and CAs can quickly change. Combined with the expectation of 24/7 encrypted access to websites, this quickly evolving landscape has made careful certificate management both an important and challenging problem. In this paper, we first present a novel server-side characterization of the certificate replacement (CR) relationships in the wild, including the reuse of public keys. Our data-driven CR analysis captures management biases, highlights a lack of industry standards for replacement policies, and features successful example cases and trends. Based on the characterization results we then propose an efficient solution to an important revocation problem that currently leaves web users vulnerable long after a certificate has been revoked.Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council (VR)Swedish Research Council; Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP) - Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation</p