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The power of recognition: secure single sign-on using TLS channel bindings

Published: 21 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Today, entity authentication in the TLS protocol involves at least three complex and partly insecure systems: the Domain Name System (DNS), Public Key Infrastructures (PKI), and human users, bound together by the Same Origin Policy (SOP). To solve the security threats resulting from this construction, a new concept was introduced at CCS '07: the strong locked same origin policy (SLSOP). The basic idea behind the SLSOP is to strengthen the identification of web servers through domain names, certificates and browser security warnings by a recognition of public keys to authenticate servers. Many weaknesses of current protocols emerging from an insecure PKI or DNS can thus be handled, even without involving the user. This concept has also been adapted by the IETF in RFC 5929.
The contribution of this paper is as follows: First we present a new SLSOP-based login protocol and use it to design a secure Single Sign-On (SSO) protocol. Second we provide a first full proof-of-concept of such a protocol and also the first implementation of the channel binding described in RFC 5929, implementing a cross-domain SLSOP both for a new type of authentication cookies, as well as for the HTML-based POST and Redirect bindings. Finally we evaluate the security of this protocol and describe, how our protocol copes with modern attack vectors.

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Cited By

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  • (2016)Efficient Attribute Management in a Federated Identity Management Infrastructure2016 24th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing (PDP)10.1109/PDP.2016.102(590-595)Online publication date: Feb-2016
  • (2013)Options for integrating eID and SAMLProceedings of the 2013 ACM workshop on Digital identity management10.1145/2517881.2517892(85-96)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2013

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cover image ACM Conferences
DIM '11: Proceedings of the 7th ACM workshop on Digital identity management
October 2011
102 pages
ISBN:9781450310062
DOI:10.1145/2046642
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 21 October 2011

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Author Tags

  1. identity management
  2. single sign-on

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View all
  • (2016)Efficient Attribute Management in a Federated Identity Management Infrastructure2016 24th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing (PDP)10.1109/PDP.2016.102(590-595)Online publication date: Feb-2016
  • (2013)Options for integrating eID and SAMLProceedings of the 2013 ACM workshop on Digital identity management10.1145/2517881.2517892(85-96)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2013

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