Enforcing User-Aware Browser-Based Mutual Authentication with Strong Locked Same Origin Policy

  • Authors:
  • Sebastian Gajek;Mark Manulis;Jörg Schwenk

  • Affiliations:
  • Horst Görtz Institute for IT-Security, Germany;UCL Crypto Group, Belgium;Horst Görtz Institute for IT-Security, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ACISP '08 Proceedings of the 13th Australasian conference on Information Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

The standard solution for mutual authentication between human users and servers on the Internet is to execute a TLS handshake during which the server authenticates using a X.509 certificate followed by the authentication of the user either with own password or with some cookie stored within the user's browser. Unfortunately, this solution is susceptible to various impersonation attacks such as phishing as it turned out that average Internet users are unable to authenticate servers based on their certificates.In this paper we address security of cookie-based authenticationusing the concept of strong locked same originpolicy for browsers introduced at ACM CCS'07. We describe a cookie-based authentication protocol between human users and TLS-servers and prove its security in the extended formal model for browser-based mutual authenticationintroduced at ACM ASIACCS'08. It turns out that the small modification of the browser's security policy is sufficient to achieve provably secure cookie-based authentication protocols considering the ability of users to recognize images, video, or audio sequences.