Using Frankencerts for Automated Adversarial Testing of Certificate
Using Frankencerts for Automated Adversarial Testing of Certificate Validation in SSL/TLS Implementations Chad Brubaker ∗ y Suman Janay Baishakhi Rayz Sarfraz Khurshidy Vitaly Shmatikovy ∗Google yThe University of Texas at Austin zUniversity of California, Davis Abstract—Modern network security rests on the Secure Sock- many open-source implementations of SSL/TLS are available ets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols. for developers who need to incorporate SSL/TLS into their Distributed systems, mobile and desktop applications, embedded software: OpenSSL, NSS, GnuTLS, CyaSSL, PolarSSL, Ma- devices, and all of secure Web rely on SSL/TLS for protection trixSSL, cryptlib, and several others. Several Web browsers against network attacks. This protection critically depends on include their own, proprietary implementations. whether SSL/TLS clients correctly validate X.509 certificates presented by servers during the SSL/TLS handshake protocol. In this paper, we focus on server authentication, which We design, implement, and apply the first methodology for is the only protection against man-in-the-middle and other large-scale testing of certificate validation logic in SSL/TLS server impersonation attacks, and thus essential for HTTPS implementations. Our first ingredient is “frankencerts,” synthetic and virtually any other application of SSL/TLS. Server authen- certificates that are randomly mutated from parts of real cer- tication in SSL/TLS depends entirely on a single step in the tificates and thus include unusual combinations of extensions handshake protocol. As part of its “Server Hello” message, and constraints. Our second ingredient is differential testing: if the server presents an X.509 certificate with its public key.
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