Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Dan Wendlandt, Dave Andersen, Adrian Perrig. " Perspectives: Improving SSH-style Host Authentication with Multi-path Network Probing". USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June, 2008.

Abstract
The popularity of ``Trust on first use''$~$(Tofu) authentication, used by SSH and HTTPS with self-signed certificates, demonstrates significant demand for host authentication that is low-cost and simple to deploy. While Tofu-based applications are a clear improvement over completely insecure protocols, they can leave users vulnerable to even simple network attacks. Our system, Perspectives, thwarts many of these attacks by using a collection of ``notary'' hosts that observes a server's public key via multiple network vantage points (detecting localized attacks) and keeps a record of the server's key over time (recognizing short-lived attacks). Clients can download these records on-demand and compare them against an unauthenticated key, detecting many common attacks. Perspectives explores a promising part of the host authentication design space: Trust on first use applications gain significant attack robustness without sacrificing their ease-of-use. We also analyze the security provided by Perspectives and describe our experience building and deploying a publicly available implementation.

Electronic downloads

• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~perspectives/perspectives_usenix08.pdf

• HTML

  Dan Wendlandt, Dave Andersen, Adrian Perrig. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/388.html">
  Perspectives: Improving SSH-style Host Authentication with
  Multi-path Network Probing</a>, USENIX Annual
  Technical Conference, June, 2008.

• Plain text

  Dan Wendlandt, Dave Andersen, Adrian Perrig. "
  Perspectives: Improving SSH-style Host Authentication with
  Multi-path Network Probing". USENIX Annual Technical
  Conference, June, 2008.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{WendlandtAndersenPerrig08_PerspectivesImprovingSSHstyleHostAuthenticationWith,
      author = {Dan Wendlandt and Dave Andersen and Adrian Perrig},
      title = { Perspectives: Improving SSH-style Host
                Authentication with Multi-path Network Probing},
      booktitle = {USENIX Annual Technical Conference},
      month = {June},
      year = {2008},
      abstract = {The popularity of ``Trust on first use''$~$(Tofu)
                authentication, used by SSH and HTTPS with
                self-signed certificates, demonstrates significant
                demand for host authentication that is low-cost
                and simple to deploy. While Tofu-based
                applications are a clear improvement over
                completely insecure protocols, they can leave
                users vulnerable to even simple network attacks.
                Our system, Perspectives, thwarts many of these
                attacks by using a collection of ``notary'' hosts
                that observes a server's public key via multiple
                network vantage points (detecting localized
                attacks) and keeps a record of the server's key
                over time (recognizing short-lived attacks).
                Clients can download these records on-demand and
                compare them against an unauthenticated key,
                detecting many common attacks. Perspectives
                explores a promising part of the host
                authentication design space: Trust on first use
                applications gain significant attack robustness
                without sacrificing their ease-of-use. We also
                analyze the security provided by Perspectives and
                describe our experience building and deploying a
                publicly available implementation.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/388.html}
  }
  

Posted by Adrian Perrig on 2 May 2008.
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