1 B-CRAM: A Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant Challenge-Response Authentication Mechanism Akshay Agrawal, Robert Gasparyan, Jongho Shin
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[email protected] Abstract—B-CRAM is an authentication protocol that the TTP is a single point of failure – if it were to fail, all enables applications to consult a distributed trusted third- authentication would come to a halt. We can alleviate this party (TTP) in order to validate end-user identities. shortcoming by distributing the KDC and maintaining Short for Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant Challenge-Response its state with a replication algorithm; indeed WebAuth, Authentication Mechanism, B-CRAM’s novelty lies in its Stanford’s own authentication system, does just that [16]. resilience to node failures, malicious or otherwise. The TTP layer, which stores end-user credentials, implements While replication increases redundancy, it does little the BFT2F replication algorithm. In particular, given a to guard against byzantine failures. In the context of TTP distributed 3f + 1 ways, our system guarantees both authentication, fault-tolerance to malicious attacks on safety and liveness when no more than f nodes fail; the TTPs is particularly important – a compromised moreover, we bound the space of possible attacks when no system could falsely authenticate imposters. None of the more than 2f nodes fail. B-CRAM prevents adversaries WebAuth, OpenID, or OAuth protocols require that their from obtaining sensitive end-user information, no matter TTPs survive byzantine faults [16], [8], [6]. Even if the how many TTPs they compromise: Unlike many other protocols did replicate their data using PBFT [2], security authentication protocols, B-CRAM ensures that TTPs do vulnerabilities would remain.