Fw: [saag] Further MD5 breaks: Creating a rogue CA certificate
Steven M. Bellovin
smb at cs.columbia.edu
Tue Dec 30 11:27:24 EST 2008
Begin forwarded message:
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:05:28 -0500
From: Russ Housley <housley at vigilsec.com>
To: ietf-pkix at imc.org, ietf-smime at imc.org, saag at ietf.org, cfrg at irtf.org
Subject: [saag] Further MD5 breaks: Creating a rogue CA certificate
http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/
MD5 considered harmful today
Creating a rogue CA certificate
December 30, 2008
Alexander Sotirov, Marc Stevens,
Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, Benne de
Weger
We have identified a vulnerability in the Internet Public Key
Infrastructure (PKI) used to issue digital certificates for secure
websites. As a proof of concept we executed a practical attack
scenario and successfully created a rogue Certification Authority
(CA) certificate trusted by all common web browsers. This certificate
allows us to impersonate any website on the Internet, including
banking and e-commerce sites secured using the HTTPS protocol.
Our attack takes advantage of a weakness in the MD5 cryptographic
hash function that allows the construction of different messages with
the same MD5 hash. This is known as an MD5 "collision". Previous work
on MD5 collisions between 2004 and 2007 showed that the use of this
hash function in digital signatures can lead to theoretical attack
scenarios. Our current work proves that at least one attack scenario
can be exploited in practice, thus exposing the security
infrastructure of the web to realistic threats.
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--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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