AUTHSCAN: Automatic Extraction of Web Authentication Protocols from Implementations∗
AUTHSCAN: Automatic Extraction of Web Authentication Protocols from Implementations∗ Guangdong Bai?, Jike Lei?, Guozhu Meng?, Sai Sathyanarayan Venkatraman?, Prateek Saxena?, Jun Suny, Yang Liuz, and Jin Song Dong? ∗National University of Singapore ySingapore University of Technology and Design zNanyang Technological University Abstract than 250 million people reportedly use it every month as of 2011 [7]. Ideally, authentication protocols should be for- Ideally, security protocol implementations should be for- mally verified prior to their implementations. However, mally verified before they are deployed. However, this is majority of web sites do not follow this principle. Au- not true in practice. Numerous high-profile vulnerabilities thentication protocols have historically been hard to design have been found in web authentication protocol implemen- correctly and implementations have been found susceptible tations, especially in single-sign on (SSO) protocols imple- to logical flaws [31, 41]. Web authentication protocols are mentations recently. Much of the prior work on authentica- no exception—several of these implementations have been tion protocol verification has focused on theoretical foun- found insecure in post-deployment analysis [16, 29, 39, 42]. dations and building scalable verification tools for checking There are three key challenges in ensuring that appli- manually-crafted specifications [17, 18, 44]. cations authenticate and federate user identities securely. In this paper, we address a complementary prob- First, most prior protocol verification work has focused on lem of automatically extracting specifications from im- checking the high-level protocol specifications, not their plementations. We propose AUTHSCAN, an end-to-end implementations [13,21,44]. In practice, however, checking platform to automatically recover authentication protocol implementations is difficult due to lack of complete infor- specifications from their implementations.
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