The most dangerous code in the world: validating SSL certificates in non-browser software

  • Authors:

  • Martin Georgiev;Subodh Iyengar;Suman Jana;Rishita Anubhai;Dan Boneh;Vitaly Shmatikov

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the de facto standard for secure Internet communications. Security of SSL connections against an active network attacker depends on correctly validating public-key certificates presented when the connection is established. We demonstrate that SSL certificate validation is completely broken in many security-critical applications and libraries. Vulnerable software includes Amazon's EC2 Java library and all cloud clients based on it; Amazon's and PayPal's merchant SDKs responsible for transmitting payment details from e-commerce sites to payment gateways; integrated shopping carts such as osCommerce, ZenCart, Ubercart, and PrestaShop; AdMob code used by mobile websites; Chase mobile banking and several other Android apps and libraries; Java Web-services middleware including Apache Axis, Axis 2, Codehaus XFire, and Pusher library for Android and all applications employing this middleware. Any SSL connection from any of these programs is insecure against a man-in-the-middle attack. The root causes of these vulnerabilities are badly designed APIs of SSL implementations (such as JSSE, OpenSSL, and GnuTLS) and data-transport libraries (such as cURL) which present developers with a confusing array of settings and options. We analyze perils and pitfalls of SSL certificate validation in software based on these APIs and present our recommendations.