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Measuring the Security Harm of TLS Crypto Shortcuts

Published: 14 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

TLS has the potential to provide strong protection against network-based attackers and mass surveillance, but many implementations take security shortcuts in order to reduce the costs of cryptographic computations and network round trips. We report the results of a nine-week study that measures the use and security impact of these shortcuts for HTTPS sites among Alexa Top Million domains. We find widespread deployment of DHE and ECDHE private value reuse, TLS session resumption, and TLS session tickets. These practices greatly reduce the protection afforded by forward secrecy: connections to 38% of Top Million HTTPS sites are vulnerable to decryption if the server is compromised up to 24 hours later, and 10% up to 30 days later, regardless of the selected cipher suite. We also investigate the practice of TLS secrets and session state being shared across domains, finding that in some cases, the theft of a single secret value can compromise connections to tens of thousands of sites. These results suggest that site operators need to better understand the tradeoffs between optimizing TLS performance and providing strong security, particularly when faced with nation-state attackers with a history of aggressive, large-scale surveillance.

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                                IMC '16: Proceedings of the 2016 Internet Measurement Conference
                                November 2016
                                570 pages
                                ISBN:9781450345262
                                DOI:10.1145/2987443
                                Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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                                Publication History

                                Published: 14 November 2016

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                                Author Tags

                                1. edward snowden
                                2. gchq
                                3. government surveillance
                                4. nation state attacker
                                5. nsa
                                6. secure socket layer
                                7. session resumption
                                8. ssl
                                9. tls
                                10. transport layer security

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                                IMC 2016: Internet Measurement Conference
                                November 14 - 16, 2016
                                California, Santa Monica, USA

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                                IMC '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 48 of 184 submissions, 26%;
                                Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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