The Broken Shield: Measuring Revocation Effectiveness in the Windows Code-Signing PKI

Authors: 

Doowon Kim and Bum Jun Kwon, University of Maryland, College Park; Kristián Kozák, Masaryk University, Czech Republic; Christopher Gates, Symantec; Tudor Dumitraș, University of Maryland, College Park

Abstract: 

Recent measurement studies have highlighted security threats against the code-signing public key infrastructure (PKI), such as certificates that had been compromised or issued directly to the malware authors. The primary mechanism for mitigating these threats is to revoke the abusive certificates. However, the distributed yet closed nature of the code signing PKI makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of revocations in this ecosystem. In consequence, the magnitude of signed malware threat is not fully understood.

In this paper, we collect seven datasets, including the largest corpus of code-signing certificates, and we combine them to analyze the revocation process from end to end. Effective revocations rely on three roles: (1) discovering the abusive certificates, (2) revoking the certificates effectively, and (3) disseminating the revocation information for clients. We assess the challenge for discovering compromised certificates and the subsequent revocation delays. We show that erroneously setting revocation dates causes signed malware to remain valid even after the certificate has been revoked. We also report failures in disseminating the revocations, leading clients to continue trusting the revoked certificates.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {217460,
author = {Doowon Kim and Bum Jun Kwon and Kristi{\'a}n Koz{\'a}k and Christopher Gates and Tudor Dumitras},
title = {The Broken Shield: Measuring Revocation Effectiveness in the Windows {Code-Signing} {PKI}},
booktitle = {27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 18)},
year = {2018},
isbn = {978-1-939133-04-5},
address = {Baltimore, MD},
pages = {851--868},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/kim},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

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