Internet-wide certificate gathering for cryptanalysis

Dissertant

Arakiah, Anas

Thesis advisor

Rushdi, Taj al-Din

University

Al Akhawayn University

Faculty

School of Science and Engineering

Department

Software Engineering

University Country

Morocco

Degree

Master

Degree Date

2015

English Abstract

In this project, we designed and implemented a system called (X5CA) that collects and analyzes X.509 certificates for the purpose of analysis of weakness in different public keys, such as collisions that are otherwise not possible without the availability of a pool of public keys.

Such effort which yield a global view on key vulnerabilities such as key collisions, among other things.

The X5CA is designed and implemented using best practices approaches to fluently achieve its key objectives which are, (1) The ability to perform large scale crawling of the entire (or part of) web for X509 certificates that are used for establishing TLS secure channels; (2) The ability for expert cryptanalysts to configure and perform various attacks on different X509 certificates; (3) The Ability to run as a high performance distributed system, and (4) The ability to easily allow extensions of the database of attacks.

Last but not least, (5) The ability to stop, start and resume all the component of the system in a synchronized way.

In addition to the previous major objectives, the X5CA was designed and implemented following a sound software development process (2-Tup) giving a great importance to the user requirements, especially user experience, which confers to it industry strength software feature and eases its maintainability.

X5CA was built as a synchronized multi-process multithreaded application in java, using various standard libraries among which libraries for connection to Maple software engine to run the attacks.

Currently X5CA handles attacks on RSA modulus and exponents.

The design and implementation details, together with the initial results are described in this report, and we hope that the time and effort invested in this project will result in a major enhancement of the Internet security.

It is worth mentioning that to validate the system only simple attacks involving pairs of RSA public keys have been executed on the pool of 1,000,000 certificates that were collected using X5CA

Main Subjects

Information Technology and Computer Science

No. of Pages

201

Table of Contents

• APA
• MLA
• AMA

Language

English

Data Type

Arab Theses

Record ID

BIM-775453