Hi Thierry,
On 14/10/12 01:21 AM, Thierry Moreau wrote:
ianG wrote:
On 10/10/12 23:44 PM, Guido Witmond wrote:
2. Use SSL client certificates instead;
Yes, it works. My observations/evidence suggests it works far better
than passwords because it cuts out the disaster known as "I lost my
password...."
It is what we do over at CAcert, [...]
Sorry for the long digression below, the overall concern bugs me somehow.
There is no doubts that the CAcert usage of client certificates is an
interesting experiment/deployment.
However, the limited value (of the CAcert activities enabled by a valid
client certificate) for attackers reduces the conclusions that can be
drawn from the deployment.
When reviewing a security scheme design for a client organization, I had
to ask myself what a potential attacker would attempt if the system was
protecting million dollar transactions.
Yes. We have to first figure out the business model. Then extract from
that a model of threats, and finally come up with a security model to
mitigate the threats while advancing the business model.
If your business is dealing with million dollar transactions, can I ask
if you are using browsers at all in that scenario? If so, isn't there
something wrong with this scenario?
In the alternate, if we are protecting lesser sums, and *we have assumed
browsers as the client side tool* then I'd say off-the-cuff that client
certificates do a better job overall than passwords. Circumstances may
change this, of course.
Currently, one US bank usage of client certificates is attacked
(http://www.adp.com/about-us/trust-center/security-alerts.aspx,
"Fraudulent Emails Appearing to Come from ADP with Subject Line: ADP
Generated Message: First Notice - Digital Certificate Expiration").
I have serious reservations about the vulnerability of "client
certificate" usage to such social engineering attacks. Here are some of
the questions.
Yes - this is phishing. This is why I question the use of the browser
at all. Phishing first started up in 2003 and gradually evolved as an
industrial-scale parasite on all of online banking.
The question isn't really whether client certificates can or can't be
phished -- of course they can be because they are browser oriented.
Rather, the question is why the banks did not deal with phishing at the
browser level? If they had, then they'd find it easy to deal with
client cert social engineering.
If we teach the user a long story about the *certificate* rules, how can
we expect him/her to pay attention to the *private*key*?
Can't the user become confused as to PK data elements (certificate,
private key, public key, local decryption password, key pair, digital
signatures), their respective origin, their look-and-feel in the user
dialogs?
Given this unavoidable state of confusion, how can the user defend
himself/herself against ill-intentioned guidance?
Right, we can't. Same with passwords - education has failed to stop
users entering passwords into the wrong site.
If the user is given a genuine certificate containing privacy sensitive
subject name data, how do you expect him/her to react to the information
that the basic Internet protocol (TLS) exposes such data in the clear to
eavesdroppers? How can you expect him/her to protect the private key
once the certificate privacy lesson has been found bogus?
Why are you putting that detail into the certificate? The certificate
works regardless of the contents - it's just an enrollment process like
any other, something that a bank is well familiar with.
Perhaps I should underscore a point here - the use of a CA-signed
certificate is completely unrequired here. Indeed I'm not sure it can
be accepted or mandated at all, because the semantics and availability
of a CA-signed certificate mitigate against security in this context.
Instead, we should see the client-certificate system as an available,
in-browser cryptographic handshake. It's all in there, waiting to be
used. Use whatever cert you want to get it up and going.
And think about the proper cert rollover procedure. Indeed, an
assumption that can be challenged is whether the cert expires at all?
Whether the user is in control of the cert at all? Why can't the
enrollment site trigger the creation of the cert, and enroll that single
cert, all at once?
If the user is given a certificate devoid of privacy sensitive subject
name data (e.g. self-signed, auto-issued, or obtained from
https://www.ecca.wtmnd.nl/ -- the proof of concept in the original
post), how do you expect him/her to pay any attention to protecting
anything?
Indeed. But the comparison is with passwords - not in isolation.
Can anyone tell me (I am the user now) which software component and
which computing environment I need to trust to be confident about the
strength of the RSA key generated for me when I got a certificate from
https://www.ecca.wtmnd.nl/? Actually I would like to know how could I
learn by myself how the RSA key was generated for me? What is
security-critical in this certificate granting process?
No - long experience has taught us that we should not involve the user
in any such details. We should instead move the system to a point where
there is only one mode, and it is secure. Details are for technical
people to worry about.
This is how it is already done in the browser world with certificates.
Every root-signed certificate that is seen by the browser is accepted,
regardless. The browser works hard to hide the details, because any
time such details pop up, the confusion outweighs any plastic security
claims. And now that we are moving to HTTPS-everywhere, it is becoming
more essential - if you've got one of those plugins that check and
verify certs with the user directly, you'll know that connecting to a
google site causes a barrage of popups for outrageously silly names...
The starting point of a strong system -- the goal -- is that the user
does not participate in the security model at all. Better known by
Kherckhoffs' 6th principle,
"Finally, it is necessary, given the circumstances that command its
application, that the system be easy to use, requiring neither mental
strain nor the knowledge of a long series of rules to observe."
Given that I exported the certificate obtained from
https://www.ecca.wtmnd.nl/ and I used openssl pkcs12 and open pkcs8
utilities to "look under the hood" of the RSA private key, at which
point in the enrollment process should I have been warned against these
steps (or equivalent actions suggested in a social engineering attack)?
No, never, please :) You shouldn't even be able to do that. The user
should be told that the enrolment process is with the bank, the bank
sorts it all out.
What you're now likely to question is whether the browser is a secure
enough container to stop attacks from other vectors? It's not. Which
is why browsers shouldn't be used for online payments of significant
value. At all. But it is the browser that is at fault here, and its
failure to protect the user is orthogonal to the question of passwords
versus client-certs.
As a concluding remark, I am nonetheless confident about the public key
techniques potential for improvements over the password-based
authentication paradigm. But I have difficulty with this widespread
abuse of language that equates client certificates with client
public-private key pairs. I'm afraid many security experts would even
have difficulty in clarifying the two notions. The fact that the
PKCS#12 format encryption covers both the private key and the
certificate does not help (you need to enter the private key access
password for accessing the certificate or even just the public key in a
PKCS#12 file).
Oh absolutely agreed! The language of PKI is designed to spread a
particular architectural view. But we can easily deal with that; PKI
won't work for this application. Instead, client certs should simply be
seen as overly-complicated containers which contain the ability to do
private key secured logins. Ignore all the container issues, and ignore
all the business about language.
Thanks in advance for sharing your views.
iang
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