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arXiv · 1812.04959

Systematic Parsing of X.509: Eradicating Security Issues with a Parse Tree

Alessandro Barenghi·Nicholas Mainardi·Gerardo Pelosi
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Abstract

X.509 certificate parsing and validation is a critical task which has shown consistent lack of effectiveness, with practical attacks being reported with a steady rate during the last 10 years. In this work we analyze the X.509 standard and provide a grammar description of it amenable to the automated generation of a parser with strong termination guarantees, providing unambiguous input parsing. We report the results of analyzing a 11M X.509 certificate dump of the HTTPS servers running on the entire IPv4 space, showing that 21.5% of the certificates in use are syntactically invalid. We compare the results of our parsing against 7 widely used TLS libraries showing that 631k to 1,156k syntactically incorrect certificates are deemed valid by them (5.7%--10.5%), including instances with security critical mis-parsings. We prove the criticality of such mis-parsing exploiting one of the syntactic flaws found in existing certificates to perform an impersonation attack.

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Alessandro Barenghi, Nicholas Mainardi, Gerardo Pelosi. 2018-12-12. Systematic Parsing of X.509: Eradicating Security Issues with a Parse Tree. https://doi.org/10.3233/jcs-171110

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