Biblio

On the Internet, trust is difficult to obtain. With the rise of the possibility of obtaining gratis x509 certificates in an automated fashion, the use of TLS for establishing secure connections has significantly increased. However, other use cases, such as end-to-end encrypted messaging, do not yet have an easy method of managing trust in the public keys. This is particularly true for personal communication where two people want to securely exchange messages. While centralised solutions, such as Signal, exist, decentralised and federated protocols lack a way of conveniently and securely exchanging personal certificates. This paper presents a protocol and an implementation for certifying OpenPGP certificates. By offering multiple means of data transport protocols, it achieves robust and resilient certificate exchange between an attestee, the party whose key certificate is to be certified, and an attestor, the party who will express trust in the certificate once seen. The data can be transferred either via the Internet or via proximity-based technologies, i.e. Bluetooth or link-local networking. The former presents a challenge when the parties interested in exchanging certificates are not physically close, because an attacker may tamper with the connection. Our evaluation shows that a passive attacker learns nothing except the publicly visible metadata, e.g. the timings of the transfer while an active attacker can either have success with a very low probability or be detected by the user.

Most Web sites rely on resources hosted by third parties such as CDNs. Third parties may be compromised or coerced into misbehaving, e.g. delivering a malicious script or stylesheet. Unexpected changes to resources hosted by third parties can be detected with the Subresource Integrity (SRI) mechanism. The focus of SRI is on scripts and stylesheets. Web fonts cannot be secured with that mechanism under all circumstances. The first contribution of this paper is to evaluates the potential for attacks using malicious fonts. With an instrumented browser we find that (1) more than 95% of the top 50,000 Web sites of the Tranco top list rely on resources hosted by third parties and that (2) only a small fraction employs SRI. Moreover, we find that more than 60% of the sites in our sample use fonts hosted by third parties, most of which are being served by Google. The second contribution of the paper is a proof of concept of a malicious font as well as a tool for automatically generating such a font, which targets security-conscious users who are used to verifying cryptographic fingerprints. Software vendors publish such fingerprints along with their software packages to allow users to verify their integrity. Due to incomplete SRI support for Web fonts, a third party could force a browser to load our malicious font. The font targets a particular cryptographic fingerprint and renders it as a desired different fingerprint. This allows attackers to fool users into believing that they download a genuine software package although they are actually downloading a maliciously modified version. Finally, we propose countermeasures that could be deployed to protect the integrity of Web fonts.