dual-use digital signature vulnerability

Sean Smith sws at cs.dartmouth.edu
Sun Jul 18 12:36:21 EDT 2004


> at the NIST PKI workshop a couple months ago .... there were a number
> of infrastructure presentations where various entities in the
> infrastructure were ...signing random data as part of authentication 
> protocol


I believe our paper may have been one of those that Lynn objected to.  
We used the same key for client-side TLS as well as for signing a 
delegation certificate.  However (as we made sure to clarify in the 
revised paper for the final proceedings):

In SSL and TLS, the client isn't signing random data provided by the 
adversary.  Rather, the client is signing a value derived from data 
both the client and server provide as part of the handshake.  I do not 
believe it is feasible for a malicious server to choose its nonces so 
that the resulting signature be coincide with a valid signature on a 
delegation cert the client might have constructed.

(On the other hand, if we're wrong, I'm sure that will be pointed out 
repeatedly here in the next day or two :)

--Sean


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