Installing fake root keys in a PC

  • Authors:
  • Adil Alsaid;Chris J. Mitchell

  • Affiliations:
  • Information Security Group, Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, Surrey;Information Security Group, Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, Surrey

  • Venue:
  • EuroPKI'05 Proceedings of the Second European conference on Public Key Infrastructure
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

If a malicious party can insert a self-issued CA public key into the list of root public keys stored in a PC, then this party could potentially do considerable harm to that PC . In this paper, we present a way to achieve such an attack for the Internet Explorer web browser root key store, which avoids attracting the user's attention. A realisation of this attack is also described. Finally, countermeasures that can be deployed to prevent such an attack are outlined.