On the (In)security of Google Safe Browsing Thomas Gerbet1, Amrit Kumar2, and C´edricLauradoux2 1 Universit´eJoseph Fourier, France
[email protected] 2 INRIA, France famrit.kumar,
[email protected] Abstract. Phishing and malware websites are still duping unwary tar- gets by infecting private computers or by committing cybercrimes. In order to safeguard users against these threats, Google provides the Safe Browsing service, which identifies unsafe websites and notifies users in real-time of any potential harm of visiting a URL. In this work, we study the Google Safe Browsing architecture through a security point of view. We propose several denial-of-service attacks that increase the traffic between Safe Browsing servers and their clients. Our attacks lever- age the false positive probability of the data structure deployed to store the blacklists on the client's side and the possibility for an adversary to generate (second) pre-images for a 32-bit digest. As a consequence of the attacks, an adversary is able to considerably increase the frequency with which the distant server is contacted and the amount of data sent by the servers to its clients. Keywords: Safe Browsing, Phishing, Malware, Hashing, Security 1 Introduction Internet users often become victims of phishing and malware attacks, where dangerously convincing websites either attempt to steal personal information or install harmful piece of software. Phishing and web-based malwares have become popular among attackers to a large degree since it has become easier to setup and deploy websites, and inject malicious code through JavaScript and iFrames. In order to safeguard users from these malicious URLs, Google has put in place a service-oriented architecture called Safe Browsing [11] at the HTTP pro- tocol level.