Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/275

The Potential of Individualized Trusted Root Stores: Minimizing the Attack Surface in the Light of CA Failures

Johannes Braun and Gregor Rynkowski

Abstract: The security of most Internet applications relies on underlying public key infrastructures (PKIs) and thus on an ecosystem of certification authorities (CAs). The pool of PKIs responsible for the issuance and the maintenance of SSL certificates, called the Web PKI, has grown extremely large and complex. Herein, each CA is a single point of failure for the security, leading to an attack surface, the size of which is hardly assessable. This paper approaches the issue if and how the attack surface can be reduced in order to reduce the risk of relying on a malicious certificate. In particular we consider the individualization of the set of trusted CAs. We present a tool called Rootopia, which allows to assess the respective part of the Web PKI relevant for a user. Our analysis of browser histories of 22 Internet users reveals, that the major part of the PKI is completely irrelevant to a single user. The attack surface can be reduced by more than 90%, which shows the potential of the individualization of the set of trusted CAs. Furthermore, all the relevant CAs reside within a small set of countries. Our findings confirm, that we unnecessarily trust in a huge number of CAs, exposing ourselves to unnecessary risks.

Category / Keywords: public-key cryptography / Web PKI, Internet security, CA compromise, SSL/TLS

Date: received 13 May 2013

Contact author: jbraun at cdc informatik tu-darmstadt de

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Version: 20130516:130450 (All versions of this report)

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