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Abstract

The security of Internet-based applications fundamentally relies on the trustwortiness of Certificate Authorities (CAs). We practically demonstrate for the first time that even a very weak attacker, namely, an off-path attacker, can effectively subvert the trustworthiness of popular commercially used CAs. Our attack targets CAs which use Domain Validation (DV) for authenticating domain ownership; collectively these CAs control 99% of the certificates market. The attack exploits DNS Cache Poisoning and tricks the CA into issuing fraudulent certificates for domains the attacker does not legitimately own -- namely certificates binding the attacker's public key to a victim domain.We discuss short and long term defences, but argue that they fall short of securing DV. To mitigate the threats we propose Domain Validation++ (DV++). DV++ replaces the need in cryptography through assumptions in distributed systems. While retaining the benefits of DV (automation, efficiency and low costs) DV++ is secure even against Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attackers. Deployment of DV++ is simple and does not require changing the existing infrastructure nor systems of the CAs. We demonstrate security of DV++ under realistic assumptions and provide open source access to our DV++ implementation.

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