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

By Martin Georgiev, S. Iyengar, Suman Sekhar Jana, Rishita Anubhai, Dan Boneh, Vitaly Shmatikov. Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2012

518 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e5e18c4a1f5fa362448dca35bc381c04c4a863c1

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Citations in the corpus

NEZHA: Efficient Domain-Independent Differential Testing (2017, background): “509 certificates according to the appropriate protocol specifications for setting up a secure connection in the presence of network attackers [24], [33].”
Build It, Break It, Fix It: Contesting Secure Development (2016, background): “evelopers who do not understand the threat model, security APIs with confusing options and poorly chosen defaults, and “temporary" test configurations that were not corrected prior to deployment [26, 27, 29]. Interview studies with developers suggest that security is often perceived as someone ”
Understanding security mistakes developers make: Qualitative analysis from Build It, Break It, Fix It (2020, methodology): “Other researchers used fuzzing and static analysis to identify problems with SSL/TLS implementations in libraries and in Android apps [28,33].”
HVLearn: Automated Black-Box Analysis of Hostname Verification in SSL/TLS Implementations (2017, background): “Once a model is inferred for a certificate template, HVLearn checks the model for bugs by finding discrepancies with the inferred models from other implementations or by checking against regular-expression-based rules derived from the specification.”
A Survey of Man In The Middle Attacks (2016, background): “Georgiev et al. [138] presented an in-depth study of SSL connection authentication in non-browser software, and concluded that SSL certiﬁcate validation is completely broken in many critical software applications and libraries.”
Towards secure and dependable software-defined networks (2013, background): “For instance, there are many man-inthe-middle vulnerable implementations of SSL being used in world-wide critical systems [14].”
Stack Overflow Considered Harmful? The Impact of Copy&Paste on Android Application Security (2017, background): “[47], showing that developers were confused by the many parameters, options and defaults of TLS APIs.”
Using Frankencerts for Automated Adversarial Testing of Certificate Validation in SSL/TLS Implementations (2014, methodology): “…execution [12, 35, 45, 47, 74], and genetic algorithms [7] provide automated generation of inputs for blackbox and white-box testing, while techniques using correctness specifications [15], differential testing [59], and metamorphic testing [14] provide automated validation of program outputs.”
Guided differential testing of certificate validation in SSL/TLS implementations (2015, methodology): “Indeed, certificate validation has been completely broken in many security-critical applications and libraries [28, 31]; defects can be embedded into certificate validation code, making SSL/TLS connections completely vulnerable or insecure.”
Lucky Thirteen: Breaking the TLS and DTLS Record Protocols (2013, background): “Other recent work on the security of TLS implementations includes [16, 17, 30].”