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OpenPGP and S/MIME are the two major standards to en-crypt and digitally sign emails. Digital signatures are sup-posed to guarantee authenticity and integrity of messages. Inthis work we show practical forgery attacks against variousimplementations of OpenPGP and S/MIME email signatureverification in five attack classes: (1) We analyze edge casesin S/MIME’s container format. (2) We exploit in-band sig-naling in the GnuPG API, the most widely used OpenPGPimplementation. (3) We apply MIME wrapping attacks thatabuse the email clients’ handling of partially signed mes-sages. (4) We analyze weaknesses in the binding of signedmessages to the sender identity. (5) We systematically testemail clients for UI redressing attacks.Our attacks allow the spoofing of digital signatures for ar-bitrary messages in 14 out of 20 tested OpenPGP-capableemail clients and 15 out of 22 email clients supportingS/MIME signatures. While the attacks do not target the un-derlying cryptographic primitives of digital signatures, theyraise concerns about the actual security of OpenPGP andS/MIME email applications. Finally, we propose mitigationstrategies to counter these attacks.
We show practical attacks against OpenPGP and S/MIMEencryption and digital signatures in the context of email. Instead of tar-geting the underlying cryptographic primitives, our attacks abuse legiti-mate features of the MIME standard and HTML, as supported by emailclients, to deceive the user regarding the actual message content. Wedemonstrate how the attacker can unknowingly abuse the user as a de-cryption oracle by replying to an unsuspicious looking email. Using thistechnique, the plaintext of hundreds of encrypted emails can be leakedat once. Furthermore, we show how users could be tricked into signingarbitrary text by replying to emails containing CSS conditional rules.An evaluation shows that "out of" OpenPGP-capable email clients,as well as "out of" clients supporting S/MIME, are vulnerable to atleast one attack. We provide different countermeasures and discuss theiradvantages and disadvantages.
The Portable Document Format, better known as PDF, is one of themost widely used document formats worldwide, and in order to en-sure information confidentiality, this file format supports documentencryption. In this paper, we analyze PDF encryption and showtwo novel techniques for breaking the confidentiality of encrypteddocuments. First, we abuse the PDF feature ofpartially encrypteddocuments to wrap the encrypted part of the document withinattacker-controlled content and therefore, exfiltrate the plaintextonce the document is opened by a legitimate user. Second, we abusea flaw in the PDF encryption specification to arbitrarily manipulateencrypted content. The only requirement is that a single block ofknown plaintext is needed, and we show that this is fulfilled bydesign. Our attacks allow the recovery of the entire plaintext of en-crypted documents by using exfiltration channels which are basedon standard compliant PDF properties.We evaluated our attacks on 27 widely used PDF viewers andfound all of them to be vulnerable. We responsibly disclosed thevulnerabilities and supported the vendors in fixing the issue
OOXML and ODF are the de facto standard data formats for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. Both are XML-based, feature-rich container formats dating back to the early 2000s. In this work, we present a systematic analysis of the capabilities of malicious office documents. Instead of focusing on implementation bugs, we abuse legitimate features of the OOXML and ODF specifications. We categorize our attacks into five classes: (1) Denial-of-Service attacks affecting the host on which the document is processed. (2) Invasion of privacy attacks that track the usage of the document. (3) Information disclosure attacks exfiltrating personal data out of the victim's computer. (4) Data manipulation on the victim's system. (5) Code execution on the victim's machine. We evaluated the reference implementations – Microsoft Office and LibreOffice – and found both of them to be vulnerable to each tested class of attacks. Finally, we propose mitigation strategies to counter these attacks.
Smart wearable devices become more and more prevalent in the age of the Internet of Things. While people wear them as fitness trackers or full-fledged smartphones, they also come in unique versions as smartwatches for children. These watches allow parents to track the location of their children in real-time and offer a communication channel between parent and child.
In this paper, we analyzed six smartwatches for children and the corresponding backend platforms and applications for security and privacy concerns. We structure our analysis in distinct attacker scenarios and collect and describe related literature outside academic publications. Using a cellular network Man-in-the-Middle setup, reverse engineering, and dynamic analysis, we found several severe security issues, allowing for sensitive data disclosure, complete watch takeover, and illegal remote monitoring functionality.
Background: Modern healthcare devices can be connected to computer networks and many western healthcareinstitutions run those devices in networks. At the same time, cyber attacks are on the rise and there is evidence thatcybercriminals do not spare critical infrastructure such as major hospitals, even if they endanger patients. Intuitively,the more and closer connected healthcare devices are to public networks, the higher the risk of getting attacked.
Methods: To asses the current connectivity status of healthcare devices, we surveyed the field of German hospitalsand especially University Medical Center UMCs.
Results: The results show a strong correlation between the networking degree and the number of medical devices.The average number of medical devices is 25.150, with a median of networked medical devices of 3.600. Actual keyusers of networked medical devices are the departments Radiology, Intensive Care, Radio-Oncology RO, NuclearMedicine NUC, and Anaesthesiology in the group of UMCs. In the next five years, the usage of networked medicaldevices will increase significantly in the departments of Surgery, Intensive Care, and Radiology. We detected a strongcorrelation between the degree of connectivity and the likelihood of being attacked.The survey answers regarding the cyber security status reveal a lack of security basics in some of the inquiredhospitals. We did discover successful attacks in hospitals with separated or subsidiary departments. A fusion ofcompetencies on an organizational level facilitates the right behavior here. Most hospitals rated themselvespredominantly positively in the self-assessment but also stated the usefulness of IT security insurance.Conclusions:Concluding our results, hospitals are already facing the consequences of omitted measures within theirgrowing pool of medical devices. Continuously relying on historically grown structures without adaption and trustingmanufactures to solve vectors is a critical behavior that could seriously endanger patients.
Vulnerabilities in private networks are difficult to detect for attackers outside of the network. While there are known methods for port scanning internal hosts that work by luring unwitting internal users to an external web page that hosts malicious JavaScript code, no such method for detailed and precise service identification is known. The reason is that the Same Origin Policy (SOP) prevents access to HTTP responses of other origins by default. We perform a structured analysis of loopholes in the SOP that can be used to identify web applications across network boundaries. For this, we analyze HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript features of standard-compliant web browsers that may leak sensitive information about cross-origin content. The results reveal several novel techniques, including leaking JavaScript function names or styles of cross-origin requests that are available in all common browsers. We implement and test these techniques in a tool called CORSICA. It can successfully identify 31 of 42 (74%) of web services running on different IoT devices as well as the version numbers of the four most widely used content management systems WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and TYPO3. CORSICA can also determine the patch level on average down to three versions (WordPress), six versions (Drupal), two versions (Joomla), and four versions (TYPO3) with only ten requests on average. Furthermore, CORSICA is able to identify 48 WordPress plugins containing 65 vulnerabilities. Finally, we analyze mitigation strategies and show that the proposed but not yet implemented strategies Cross-Origin Resource Policy (CORP)} and Sec-Metadata would prevent our identification techniques.
OpenPGP and S/MIME are the two major standards for email end-to-end encryption. We show practical attacks against both encryption schemes in the context of email. First, we present a design flaw in the key update mechanism, allowing a third party to deploy a new key to the communication partners. Second, we show how email clients can be tricked into acting as an oracle for decryption or signing by exploiting their functionality to auto-save drafts. Third, we demonstrate how to exfiltrate the private key, based on proprietary mailto parameters implemented by various email clients. An evaluation shows that 8 out of 20 tested email clients are vulnerable to at least one attack. While our attacks do not target the underlying cryptographic primitives, they raise concerns about the practical security of OpenPGP and S/MIME email applications. Finally, we propose countermeasures and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.