[ISN] Creating a rogue CA certificate

http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

December 30, 2008

MD5 considered harmful today
Creating a rogue CA certificate

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Alexander Sotirov, Marc Stevens,
Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra,
David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik,
Benne de Weger

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Summary

We have identified a vulnerability in the Internet Public Key Infrastructure
(PKI) used to issue digital certificates for secure websites. As a proof of
concept we executed a practical attack scenario and successfully created a rogue
Certification Authority (CA) certificate trusted by all common web browsers.
This certificate allows us to impersonate any website on the Internet, including
banking and e-commerce sites secured using the HTTPS protocol.

Our attack takes advantage of a weakness in the MD5 cryptographic hash function
that allows the construction of different messages with the same MD5 hash. This
is known as an MD5 "collision". Previous work on MD5 collisions between 2004 and
2007 showed that the use of this hash function in digital signatures can lead to
theoretical attack scenarios. Our current work proves that at least one attack
scenario can be exploited in practice, thus exposing the security infrastructure
of the web to realistic threats.

As a result of this successfull attack, we are currently in possession of a
rogue Certification Authority certificate. This certificate will be accepted as
valid and trusted by all common browsers, because it appears to be signed by one
of the root CAs that browsers trust by default. In turn, any website certificate
signed by our rogue CA will be trusted as well. If an unsuspecting user is a
victim of a man-in- the-middle attack using such a certificate, they will be
assured that the connection is secure through all common security indicators: a
"https:// " url in the address bar, a closed padlock and messages such as "This
certificate is OK" if they chose to inspect the certificate.

This successful proof of concept shows that the certificate validation performed
by browsers can be subverted and malicious attackers might be able to monitor or
tamper with data sent to secure websites. Banking and e-commerce sites are
particularly at risk because of the high value of the information secured with
HTTPS on those sites. With a rogue CA certificate, attackers would be able to
execute practically undetectable phishing attacks against such sites.

The infrastructure of Certification Authorities is meant to prevent exactly this
type of attack. Our work shows that known weaknesses in the MD5 hash function
can be exploited in realistic attack, due to the fact that even after years of
warnings about the lack of security of MD5, some root CAs are still using this
broken hash function.

The vulnerability we expose is not in the SSL protocol or the web servers and
browsers that implement it, but in the Public Key Infrastructure. This
infrastructure has applications in other areas than the web, but we have not
investigated all other possible attack scenarios. So other attack scenarios
beyond the web are conceivable, such as in the areas of code signing, e-mail
security, and in other areas that use certificates for enabling digital
signatures or public key encryption.

The rest of this document will explain our work and its implications in a fair
amount of detail. In the interest of protecting the Internet against malicious
attacks using our technique, we have omitted the critical details of our
sophisticated and highly optimized method for computing MD5 collisions. A
scientific paper about our method is in preparation and will be released after a
few months, so that the affected Certification Authorities have had some time to
remedy this vulnerability.

[...]

http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/


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