The Broken Shield: Measuring Revocation Effectiveness in the Windows Code-Signing PKI

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216224%3A14330%2F18%3A00103415" target="_blank" >RIV/00216224:14330/18:00103415 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

—

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

—

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

The Broken Shield: Measuring Revocation Effectiveness in the Windows Code-Signing PKI

Original language description

Recent measurement studies have highlighted security threats against the code-signing public key infrastructure (PKI), such as certificates that had been compromised or issued directly to the malware authors. The primary mechanism for mitigating these threats is to revoke the abusive certificates. However, the distributed yet closed nature of the code signing PKI makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of revocations in this ecosystem. In consequence, the magnitude of signed malware threat is not fully understood. In this paper, we collect seven datasets, including the largest corpus of code-signing certificates, and we combine them to analyze the revocation process from end to end. Effective revocations rely on three roles: (1) discovering the abusive certificates, (2) revoking the certificates effectively, and (3) disseminating the revocation information for clients. We assess the challenge for discovering compromised certificates and the subsequent revocation delays. We show that erroneously setting revocation dates causes signed malware to remain valid even after the certificate has been revoked. We also report failures in disseminating the revocations, leading clients to continue trusting the revoked certificates.

Czech name

—

Czech description

—

Type

D - Article in proceedings

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

—

Continuities

S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach

Publication year

2018

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Article name in the collection

27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 18)

ISBN

9781931971461

ISSN

—

e-ISSN

—

Number of pages

18

Pages from-to

851-868

Publisher name

USENIX Association

Place of publication

Baltimore, MD

Event location

Baltimore, MD

Event date

Jan 1, 2018

Type of event by nationality

CST - Celostátní akce

UT code for WoS article

000485139900050