50 Ways to Defeat Your PKI and Other Cryptosystems

Richard Power called me at 4:07 PM and told me he wanted 50 ways to defeat your PKI and Other Cryptosystems - 50 ways - 53 minutes - no problem. After taking 10 minutes to chat with Patrice about the coming CSI conference, I started out.

• 1. Flood the PKI with fictitious user IDs and names. The net effect is that any typo gets the user one of your pre-positioned keys. You then decrypt their messages and forward them encrypted to the intended recipient.
• 2. Interrupt traffic every 10 or 20 packets by sending a 'reset' packet to the session. Since PKI uses private key encryption for high volume transmissions, it depends heavily on synchronization for its proper operation. Every time you descnchronize the private key system, new public key exchanges have to be make to get a new private key - at the overhead of lots of computer time and exchanged bits. The system will rapidly become unusable.
• 3. Buy a public key under a phoney name and start sending viruses with a signature that is traceable to the fictitious identity. Since key revocation works so poorly today, this will liekly be trusted for a long time to come.
• 4. Buy a new phoney public key every few hours and send viruses with them all.
• 5. Put a Trojan horse in a Word document to send out the users' private key file. Actually, this was done earlier in 1999, so it's not an original idea.
• 6. Put a virus in a Spread Sheet that sends out the users' private key file. See #5 above.
• 7. Break into the user's computer by exploiting some other weakness and forge their private key use.
• 8. Break into a user's system and listen to their keystrokes as they type in the password used to reveal their private key (for systems that protect the private key file with some other form of cryptography).
• 9. Guess the password on the 'locked' private key file stolen with one of those techniques above.
• 10. Use a Trojan horse to disable cryptography without telling the user about it, so that it looks like it is encrypting when it is not.
• 11. Revoke the key of a user who is still using their key. This will cause them to have to re-register again and again and confuse the whole system over time.
• 12. Get people to encrypt things you provide them, and use it to get their private key. This was demonstrated to work in the early 1980s.
• 13. Break into a server that stores public keys and change them to ones you specify.
• 14. Get into the Internet's DNS system and change the apparent location of the various key servers on the net. The whole PKI system will break down as no servers can be found anymore to verify anything.
• 15. Crash a few key servers that form the base of the PKI tree for the users' you want to defeat and they will be unable to communicate except in plaintext.
• 16. Observe the time taken to do encryption using peoples' private keys and analyze the time differentials for different things encrypted to derive the private key bits.
• 17. Use network time protocol forgeries to make some cryptosystems get desynchronized. The overall effect for many key servers is that they will no longer trust other servers and refuse to communicate with them.
• 18. As initial key distribution is done, place an attacking machine between the machines exchanging keys and do a man-in-the-middle attack to make each think you are the other. You will now be permanently in the middle of all their communication.
• 19. Use a van-Eck attack to observe the 'secret' messages before they are encrypted.
• 20. Use a van-Eck attack to observe the 'secret' messages after they are decrypted.
• 21. Use video-viewing to observe the keyboard of the user as they type in their keys.
• 22. Use video-viewing to observe the keyboard of the user as they type in their messages.
• 23. Put a fake keyboard adapter between their keyboard and computer and pick up the keys and messages as they are typed.
• 24. Break into the manufacturer of the PKI system and place a Trojan horse into their system. Nobody will ever find it.
• 25. Pay the companies to put in a Trojan horse.
• 26. Force people to use key escrow, and then break the escrow system through legal or extralegal means.
• 27. Limit key length to only a few hundred bits of key. The government exploited this one for a long time - and still does.
• 28. Create a false distribution of a PKI system and put it into the infrastructure as a replacement for the original. Then people will download the Trojan version and think they have the real thing. The 'self-authentication' will of course claim it is legitimate.
• 29. Create a clever new crypto-algorithm that has a real subtle backdoor and get lots of people to use it. You will be able to exploit it while everyone thinks it's secure.
• 30. Use a parallel processor to break keys of limited length. This has been successful against systems of current common key lengths.
• 31. Write a computer virus that implements a massively parallel cryptoanalysis engine for breaking private keys. Distribute via the Internet.
• 32. Modify the pseudo-random number generator used by the cryptosystem to generate keys so that they are relatively easy to guess. Previous systems had poor random number generators so that modification was not required.
• 33. Find a weakness in the random number generator used today by a popular system and guess lots of real keys in use today. It's a good bet you can do this if you are smart enough.
• 34. Cause the systems that generate the pseudo-random numbers to have less randomness than they are assumed to have. Then they will generate poor random numbers without having to do anything special.
• 35. Generate new private keys for users and plant Trojan horses in their system to have the new keys registered without their knowledge or consent. They you will have a copy of the private key.
• 36. Generate gobs and gobs of public key traffic and overload all the servers with requests so that the whole system grinds to a halt.
• 37. Generate millions of public keys (they don't even have to be legitimate) and push them into key servers to cause them to run out of space and become slow at finding keys.
• 38. Corrupt the private key distribution packets used to encrypt sessions so that private keys are wrong.
• 39. Disrupt the private key distribution process so that session keys cannot be distributed.
• 40. Replay private key distribution in place of interrupted distribution to force old keys to be reused, thus making these sessions easier to break.
• 41. Store sessions and break them over a long period of time. For most current systems, all of the content will be readable within a few years with parallel processors. For many you can read them today if you spend enough time and effort.
• 42. Bribe the person who is using the key to get access to the private key.
• 43. During the electronic distribution of the cryptosystem, corrupt a byte and watch the distribution fail. Do this again and again and the system will fall into disrepute.
• 44. Create a false update for the cryptosystem and send it out to users. When they load the update, it contains a Trojan horse that defeats the system.
• 45. Most data exchanged via encryption is stored in plaintext. Get access to the database where they store the information at either end and defeat the value of the cryptosystem in assuring the confidentiality and integrity of the underlying data.
• 46. Find one of the many flaws in the cryptographic protocol used to do key exchange and private key distribution and exploit it to defeat the cryptosystem. Current cryptographic protocols have been found to have many vulnerabilities.
• 47. Convince the user to misuse the cryptosystem - for example - to use a weaker cryptosystem because it's faster.
• 48. Corrupt the browser via a Trojan horse so that it makes it look like the cryptosystem is in use when it is not. For example, make the lock appear to be locked in Netscape.
• 49. Break into the certificate server and take the master certificate. Then you can subvert the whole system without anyone knowing about it.
• 50. Publish an article on 50 ways to defeat your PKI and cryptosystem, thus eroding public confidence in PKI and making the system less trusted from a public perception perspective. I think I have done that by now.

It's 4:57 - no problem - I even responded to a few unrelated emails along the way. Time to email it off to Richard and take the kids to soccer.