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3.3.9 Are certifying authorities susceptible to attack?

  One can think of many attacks aimed at the certifying authority, which must be prepared against them.

Consider the following attack. Suppose Bob wishes to impersonate Alice. If Bob can convincingly sign messages as Alice, he can send a message to Alice's bank saying ``I wish to withdraw $10,000 from my account. Please send me the money.'' To carry out this attack, Bob generates a key pair and sends the public key to a certifying authority saying ``I'm Alice. Here is my public key. Please send me a certificate.'' If the CA is fooled and sends him such a certificate, he can then fool the bank, and his attack will succeed. In order to prevent such an attack the CA must verify that a certificate request did indeed come from its purported author, i.e., it must require sufficient evidence that it is actually Alice who is requesting the certificate. The CA may, for example, require Alice to appear in person and show a birth certificate. Some CAs may require very little identification, but the bank should not honor messages authenticated with such low-assurance certificates. Every CA must publicly state its identification requirements and policies; others can then attach an appropriate level of confidence to the certificates.

An attacker who discovers the private key of a certifying authority could then forge certificates. For this reason, a certifying authority must take extreme precautions to prevent illegitimate access to its private key. The private key should be kept in a high-security box, known as a Certificate Signing Unit, or CSU (see Question 3.3.8).

The certifying authority's public key might be the target of an extensive factoring attack. For this reason, CAs should use very long keys, preferably 1000 bits or longer, and should also change keys regularly. Top-level certifying authorities are exceptions: it may not be practical for them to change keys frequently because the key may be written into software used by a large number of verifiers.

In another attack, Alice bribes Bob, who works for the certifying authority, to issue to her a certificate in the name of Fred. Now Alice can send messages signed in Fred's name and anyone receiving such a message will believe it authentic because a full and verifiable certificate chain will accompany the message. This attack can be hindered by requiring the cooperation of two (or more) employees to generate a certificate; the attacker now has to bribe two employees rather than one. For example, in some of today's CSUs, three employees must each insert a data key containing secret information in order to authorize the CSU to generate certificates. Unfortunately, there may be other ways to generate a forged certificate by bribing only one employee. If each certificate request is checked by only one employee, that one employee can be bribed and slip a false request into a stack of real certificate requests. Note that a corrupt employee cannot reveal the certifying authority's private key, as long as it is properly stored.

Another attack involves forging old documents. Alice tries to factor the modulus of the certifying authority. It takes her 15 years, but she finally succeeds, and she now has the old private key of the certifying authority. The key has long since expired, but she can forge a certificate dated 15 years ago attesting to a phony public key of some other person, say Bob; she can now forge a document with a signature of Bob dated 15 year ago, perhaps a will leaving everything to Alice. The underlying issue raised by this attack is how to authenticate a signed document dated many years ago; this issue is discussed in Question 3.3.17.

Note that these attacks on certifying authorities do not threaten the privacy of messages between users, as might result from an attack on a secret-key distribution center.


next up previous
Next: 3.3.10 What if the Up: 3.3 Key Management Previous: 3.3.8 What is a
Denis Arnaud
12/19/1997