Category Archives: System security

On the Trust of Trusted Computing in the Post-Snowden Age

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At the 8th CSF Workshop on Analysis of Security API (13 July, 2015), I presented a talk entitled “on the Trusted of Trusted Computing in the Post-Snowden Age”. The workshop produces no formal proceedings, but you can find the abstract here. My slides are available here.

In the field of Trusted Computing (TC),  people often take “trust” for granted. When secrets and software are encapsulated within a tamper resistant device, users are always educated to trust the device. The level of trust is sometimes boosted by the acquisition of a certificate (based on common criteria or FIPS).

However, such “trust” can be easily misused to break security. In the talk, I used TPM as an example. Suppose TPM is used to implement secure data encryption/decryption. A standard-compliant implementation will be trivially subject to the following attack, which I call the “trap-door attack”. The TPM first compresses the data before encryption, so that it can use the saved space to insert a trap-door block in the ciphertext. The trap-door block contains the decryption key wrapped by the attacker’s key. The existence of such a trap-door is totally undetectable so long as the encryption algorithms are semantically secure (and they should be).

trapdoor_encTo the best of my knowledge, no one has mentioned this kind of attack in the literature. But if I were NSA, this would be the sort attack that I would consider first. It is much more cost-effective than investing on quantum computers or parallel search machines. With the backing of the state, NSA could coerce (and bribe) the manufacturer to implant this in the TPM. No one will be able to find out since the software is encapsulated within the hardware and protected by the tamper resistance. In return, NSA would have the exclusive power to read all encrypted data at a mass scale with trivial efforts in decrypting data.

Is this attack realistic? I would argue yes. In fact, according to Snowden revelations, NSA has already done a similar trick by implanting an insecure random number generator in the RSA products (NSA reportedly paid RSA US$10m). What I have described is a different trick, and there may well be many more similar ones.

This attack highlights the importance of taking into account the threat of a state-funded adversary in the design of a Trusted Computing system in the post-Snowden age. The essence of my presentation is a proposal to change the (universally held) assumption of “trust” in Trusted Computing to “trust-but-verify”. I gave a concrete solution in my talk to show that this proposal is not just a theoretical concept, but is practically feasible. As highlighted in my talk, my proposal constitutes only a small step in a long journey – but it is an important step in the right direction I believe.

Topics about NSA and mass surveillance are always heavy and depressing. So while in Verona (where the CSF workshop was held), I took the opportunity to tour around the city. It was a pleasant walk with views of well-preserved ancient buildings, the sunny weather (yes, a luxury for someone coming from the UK) and familiar sound of cicadas (which I used to hear every summer during my childhood in China).

The Verona Arena is the area that attracts most of the tourists. The conference organizers highly recommended us to attend one of the operas, but I was eventually deterred by the thought of having to sit for 4 hours and listen to a language that I couldn’t understand. So I decided to wander freely. As I entered a second floor of a shop that sold hand-made sewing items, my attention was suddenly drawn by someone who passionately shouted while pointing figures toward outside the window, “Look, that’s the balcony where Juliet and Romeo used to date!” Wow, I was infected by the excitement and quickly took a photo. In the photo below, you can see the Juliet Statue next to the balcony. (Of course a logical mind will question how this dating is possible given that the two people are just fictional figures, but why should anyone care? It was in Verona, a city of legends.)

Julie

On the privacy of private browsing – A forensic approach

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Most readers should already be familiar with the concept of Private Browsing (also known as the Incognito mode in Google Chrome and Inprivate Browsing in IE). This post is about our newly published paper in “Journal of Information Security and Applications” (Vol. 19, No. 1, 2014), which investigates the privacy issues of Private Browsing among four mainstream browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Our work is motivated by an apparent lack of research on the subject, despite that millions of users have been using private browsing to protect their privacy on the daily basis. In USENIX Security’08, Agrawal et al. studied the security of then-newly introduced private browsing feature in modern browsers and discovered several security issues. Their experiments were mainly focused on Firefox (in particular, Firefox V3.6). A year later, Said et al. extended the earlier work into analyzing the computer memory and they found traces of private browsing data in memory and cache after the browser is closed. Recently, in ESORICS’13, Lerner et al. presented a software tool that allows automatic verification of the browser extensions’ compliance with the private mode. The tool was mainly tested on Firefox extensions. Apart from these papers, the subject of private browsing seems to have received little attention from the security community.

In our paper, we conducted a systematic approach to investigate the privacy of private browsing across four main browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, and from various angles: not just in memory, but also in local database and web traffic. Our work constitutes an independent evaluation of the private browsing feature provided by mainstream web browsers. It presents the latest understanding on the security of private browsing as of February, 2014.

Our threat model is defined in terms of the attacker’s goals and capabilities. We divide the attacks into two categories: local and remote attacks. Local attacks mean the attacker has physical access to the user’s computer and has full control over it after the target user has exited the private browsing session (i.e., “after the fact” forensic). Remote attacks assume that the attacker is engaged with the user through HTTP(S) and wants to find out if the user is currently in the private browsing mode. Typically, this happens when the target user is visiting a web site controlled by the attacker. We have assessed different attacks in each category. A summary of all the attacks is presented in the following table. Those marked with * contain new results discovered by our study, while others correspond to attacks that have been previously known but validated again by our study. Full details about the attacks can be found in our paper. All the source codes for extensions and timing attacks are freely available here. We welcome any comments.

Firefox  Chrome  IE  Safari  Information leakage
Domain name system √ √ √ √ Browsing history
Memory inspection √ √ √ √ Browsing history, passwords, cookies
File timestamp − √ − √ When private mode was last used
Index.dat* N/A N/A √ N/A When private mode was last used
SQLite database crash* √ √ N/A √ Minor to serious depending on browsers
SQLite added bookmark* √ √ N/A √ Minor to serious depending on browsers
Extension* √ √ − √ Browsing history
Cross-mode Interference* N/A √ N/A N/A User activities in private mode
Hyperlink attack √ √ √ √ If the user is in private mode
Timing attack* √ √ − √ If the user is in private mode

Acknowledgements: This paper is based on an MSc dissertation titled “Is private browsing private?” by Kiavash Satvat.The authors of the paper are Kiavash Satvat, Matthew Forshaw, Feng Hao and Ehsan Toreini.