Server Location Verification (SLV) and Server Location Pinning: Augmenting TLS Authentication

Abstract

We introduce the first known mechanism providing realtime server location verification. Its uses include enhancing server authentication by enabling browsers to automatically interpret server location information. We describe the design of this new measurement-based technique, Server Location Verification (SLV), and evaluate it using PlanetLab. We explain how SLV is compatible with the increasing trends of geographically distributed content dissemination over the Internet, without causing any new interoperability conflicts. Additionally, we introduce the notion of (verifiable) server location pinning (conceptually similar to certificate pinning) to support SLV, and evaluate their combined impact using a server-authentication evaluation framework. The results affirm the addition of new security benefits to the existing TLS-based authentication mechanisms. We implement SLV through a location verification service, the simplest version of which requires no server-side changes. We also implement a simple browser extension that interacts seamlessly with the verification infrastructure to obtain realtime server location-verification results.

References

1. 3GPP. TS 23.271. 2015. Functional Stage 2 Description of Location Services (LCS). Retrieved from http://www.3gpp.org/dynareport/23271.htm.
2. AbdelRahman M. Abdou, Ashraf Matrawy, and Paul C. van Oorschot. 2017a. Accurate Manipulation of delay-based Internet geolocation. In ACM AsiaCCS. 887--898.
3. AbdelRahman M. Abdou, Ashraf Matrawy, and Paul C. van Oorschot. 2017b. CPV: Delay-based location verification for the Internet. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 14, 2 (2017), 130--144.
4. Andre Adelsbach, Sebastian Gajek, and Jörg Schwenk. 2005. Visual spoofing of SSL protected web sites and effective countermeasures. LNCS Information Security Practice and Experience 3439 (2005), 204.
5. Ilka Agricola and Thomas Friedrich. 2008. Elementary Geometry (1st ed.). Vol. 43. American Mathematical Society.
6. Akamai. 2015. Facts 8 Figures. Retrieved from https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/facts-figures.jsp.
7. M. J. Arif, S. Karunasekera, and S. Kulkarni. 2010. GeoWeight: Internet host geolocation based on a probability model for latency measurements. In Australian Computer Society ACSC. 89--98.
8. Brice Augustin, Xavier Cuvellier, Benjamin Orgogozo, Fabien Viger, Timur Friedman, Matthieu Latapy, Clémence Magnien, and Renata Teixeira. 2006. Avoiding traceroute anomalies with Paris Traceroute. In ACM IMC. 153--158.
9. Adam Bates, Joe Pletcher, Tyler Nichols, Braden Hollembaek, and Kevin R. B. Butler. 2014. Forced perspectives: Evaluating an SSL trust enhancement at scale. In ACM IMC. 503--510.
10. Claude Castelluccia, Mohamed Ali Kaafar, Pere Manils, and Daniele Perito. 2009. Geolocalization of proxied services and its application to fast-flux hidden servers. In ACM IMC. 184--189.
11. Brent Chun, David Culler, Timothy Roscoe, Andy Bavier, Larry Peterson, Mike Wawrzoniak, and Mic Bowman. 2003. PlanetLab: An Overlay Testbed for Broad-coverage Services. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 33 (2003), 3--12.
12. Jeremy Clark and Paul C. van Oorschot. 2013. SoK: SSL and HTTPS: Revisiting past challenges and evaluating certificate trust model enhancements. In IEEE Symposium on Security 8 Privacy. 511--525.
13. Christopher Davis, Ian Dickinson, Tim Goodwin, and Paul Vixie. 1996. A means for expressing location information in the domain name system. RFC 1876 (Experimental). IETF. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1876.txt.
14. Rachna Dhamija, J. Doug Tygar, and Marti Hearst. 2006. Why phishing works. In ACM CHI. 581--590.
15. Ziqian Dong, Rohan D. W. Perera, Rajarathnam Chandramouli, and K. P. Subbalakshmi. 2012. Network measurement based modeling and optimization for IP geolocation. Elsevier Computer Networks 56 (2012), 85--98.
16. V. Dukhovni and W. Hardaker. 2015. The DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) Protocol: Updates and operational guidance. RFC 7671 (Proposed Standard). IETF. http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7671.txt.
17. Brian Eriksson, Paul Barford, Joel Sommers, and Robert Nowak. 2010. A Learning-Based Approach for IP Geolocation. In Springer PAM. 171--180.
18. C. Evans, C. Palmer, and R. Sleevi. 2015. Public Key Pinning Extension for HTTP. RFC 7469 (Proposed Standard). IETF. http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7469.txt.
19. Phillipa Gill, Yashar Ganjali, Bernard Wong, and David Lie. 2010. Dude, where’s that IP? Circumventing measurement-based IP geolocation. In USENIX Security. 241--256.
20. Sharon Goldberg. 2014. Why is it taking so long to secure Internet routing? Communications of the ACM 57, 10 (2014), 56--63.
21. Bamba Gueye, Artur Ziviani, Mark Crovella, and Serge Fdida. 2006. Constraint-based geolocation of Internet hosts. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 14 (2006), 1219--1232.
22. Nadia Heninger, Zakir Durumeric, Eric Wustrow, and J. Alex Halderman. 2012. Mining your Ps and Qs: Detection of widespread weak keys in network devices. In USENIX Security. 205--220.
23. Rahul Hiran, Niklas Carlsson, and Phillipa Gill. 2013. Characterizing large-scale routing anomalies: A case study of the China telecom incident. In Springer PAM. 229--238.
24. Ralph Holz, Lothar Braun, Nils Kammenhuber, and Georg Carle. 2011. The SSL landscape: a thorough analysis of the X. 509 PKI using active and passive measurements. In ACM IMC. 427--444.
25. Bradley Huffaker, Marina Fomenkov, and K. Claffy. 2011. Geocompare: A comparison of Public and Commercial Geolocation Databases. Technical Report. CAIDA.
26. Chris Karlof, Umesh Shankar, J. Doug Tygar, and David Wagner. 2007. Dynamic pharming attacks and locked same-origin policies for web browsers. In ACM CCS. 58--71.
27. H. Kim and J. H. Huh. 2011. Detecting DNS-poisoning-based phishing attacks from their network performance characteristics. Electronics Letters 47, 11 (2011), 656--658.
28. Tiffany Hyun-Jin Kim, Virgil Gligor, and Adrian Perrig. 2013. GeoPKI: Converting Spatial Trust into Certificate Trust. In Springer EuroPKI. 128--144.
29. Timo Kiravuo, Mikko Sarela, and Jukka Manner. 2013. A survey of Ethernet LAN security. IEEE Communications Surveys 8 Tutorials 15, 3 (2013), 1477--1491.
30. Michael Kranch and Joseph Bonneau. 2015. Upgrading HTTPS in mid-air: An empirical study of strict transport security and key pinning. In NDSS. Internet Society.
31. Sándor Laki, Péter Mátray, Péter Hága, Tamás Sebók, István Csabai, and Gábor Vattay. 2011. Spotter: A model based active geolocation service. In IEEE INFOCOM. 3173--3181.
32. Raúl Landa, Joao Taveira Araújo, Richael G. Clegg, Eleni Mykoniati, David Griffin, and Miguel Rio. 2013a. The large-scale geography of Internet round trip times. In IFIP Networking. 1--9.
33. Raul Landa, Richard G. Clegg, Joao Taveira Araújo, Eleni Mykoniati, David Griffin, and Miguel Rio. 2013b. Measuring the relationships between Internet geography and RTT. In IEEE ICCCN. 1--7.
34. Ben Laurie. 2014. Certificate transparency. Communications of the ACM 57, 10 (2014), 40--46.
35. Yuancheng Li, Shengnan Chu, and Rui Xiao. 2015. A pharming attack hybrid detection model based on IP addresses and web content. Optik-International Journal for Light and Electron Optics 126, 2 (2015), 234--239.
36. Jinjin Liang, Jian Jiang, Haixin Duan, Kang Li, Tao Wan, and Jianping Wu. 2014. When HTTPS meets CDN: A case of authentication in delegated service. In IEEE Symposium on Security 8 Privacy. 67--82.
37. Moxie Marlinspike. 2009. More tricks for defeating SSL in practice. Black Hat USA.
38. Declan McCullagh. 2008. How Pakistan Knocked YouTube Offline. Retrieved from http://www.cnet.com/news/how-pakistan-knocked-youtube-offline-and-how-to-make-sure-it-never-happens-again/.
39. James A. Muir and Paul C. van Oorschot. 2009. Internet geolocation: Evasion and counterevasion. ACM Computing Surveys 42 (2009), 4:1--4:23.
40. Alberto Ornaghi and Marco Valleri. 2003. Man in the middle attacks. In Blackhat Conference Europe.
41. Venkata N. Padmanabhan and Lakshminarayanan Subramanian. 2001. An investigation of geographic mapping techniques for Internet hosts. In ACM SIGCOMM. 173--185.
42. Roberto Percacci and Alessandro Vespignani. 2003. Scale-free behavior of the Internet global performance. Springer EPJ B—Condensed Matter and Complex Systems 32 (2003), 411--414.
43. Zachary N. J. Peterson, Mark Gondree, and Robert Beverly. 2011. A position paper on data sovereignty: The importance of geolocating data in the cloud. In USENIX HotCloud.
44. S. Fahl et al. 2012. Why Eve and Mallory love Android: An analysis of Android SSL (in)security. In ACM CCS. 50--61.
45. Nuno Santos, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Stefan Saroiu. 2012. Policy-sealed data: A new abstraction for building trusted cloud services. In USENIX Security. 175--188.
46. S. S. Siwpersad, Bamba Gueye, and Steve Uhlig. 2008. Assessing the Geographic Resolution of Exhaustive Tabulation for Geolocating Internet Hosts. In Springer PAM. 11--20.
47. IEEE Computer Society. 2004. IEEE Std. 802.1D. Media access control (MAC) Bridges. http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.1D-2004.pdf.
48. Matthijs van Polen, Giovane Moura, and Aiko Pras. 2011. Finding and Analyzing Evil Cities on the Internet. In Springer Autonomous Infrastructure, Management, and Security. 38--48.
49. Nevena Vratonjic, Julien Freudiger, Vincent Bindschaedler, and Jean-Pierre Hubaux. 2013. The inconvenient truth about web certificates. In Economics of Information Security and Privacy III. Springer, 79--117.
50. Yong Wang, Daniel Burgener, Marcel Flores, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, and Cheng Huang. 2011. Towards street-level client-independent IP geolocation. In USENIX NSDI.
51. Dan Wendlandt, David G. Andersen, and Adrian Perrig. 2008. Perspectives: Improving SSH-style host authentication with multi-path probing. In USENIX ATC.
52. Wired. 2005. How to Detect Sneaky NSA “Quantum Insert” Attacks. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2015/04/researchers-uncover-method-detect-nsa-quantum-insert-hacks/, 2015.
53. Bernard Wong, Ivan Stoyanov, and Emin Gün Sirer. 2007. Octant: A Comprehensive Framework for the Geolocalization of Internet Hosts. In USENIX NSDI.
54. Der-Yeuan Yu, Aanjhan Ranganathan, Ramya Jayaram Masti, Claudio Soriente, and Srdjan Capkun. 2016a. SALVE: Server authentication with location verification. In ACM MobiCom. 401--414.
55. Der-Yeuan Yu, Elizabeth Stobert, David Basin, and Srdjan Capkun. 2016b. Exploring Website Location as a Security Indicator. arXiv:1610.03647 (2016).
56. Yifei Zhang and Hongli Zhang. 2012. Triangulation Inequality Violation in Internet Delay Space. In Advances in Computer Science and Information Engineering, Vol. 169. Springer, 331--337.

Index Terms

• Security and privacy

  • Network security

    • Security protocols

    • Web protocol security

  • Security services

    • Authentication

  • Systems security

    • Browser security