Systematically breaking and fixing OpenID security

Do you use OpenID? I bet you do, even if you don’t know this. OpenID 2.0 is a user-centric Web single sign-on protocol with over one billion OpenID-enabled user accounts, and tens of thousands of supporting websites. Well, the security of this protocol is clearly critical! Yet, its security analysis has only been done so far  in a partial and ad-hoc manner. LERSSE Ph.D. candidate San-Tsai Sun performed a systematic analysis of the protocol using both formal model checking and an empirical evaluation of 132 popular websites that support OpenID.Our formal analysis revealed that the protocol does not guarantee the authenticity and integrity of the authentication request, and it lacks contextual bindings among the protocol messages and the browser. The results of our empirical evaluation suggest that many OpenID-enabled websites are vulnerable to a series of cross-site request forgery attacks (CSRF) that either allow an attacker to stealthily force a victim user to sign into the OpenID supporting website and launch subsequent CSRF attacks (81%), or force a victim to sign in as the attacker in order to spoof the victim’s personal information (77%). With additional capabilities (e.g., controlling a wireless access point), the adversary can impersonate the victim on 80% of the evaluated websites, and manipulate the victim’s profile attributes by forging the extension parameters on 45% of those sites. Based on the insights from this analysis, we propose and evaluate a simple and scalable mitigation technique for OpenID-enabled websites, and an alternative man-in-the-middle defense mechanism for deployments of OpenID without SSL.
Read more in the paper.

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