Kapil Sachdeva's Blog - SmartCard Serenity

I have seen many architects worried about the fact that going for secure strong credential store like smart cards may result in carrying many tokens in their key chains or wallet full of plastics on account of each of us having multiple identities. And Kim Cameron raises this concern again

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If we don’t clearly make this distinction,, we’ll end up in a “fist full of dongles” nightmare that will even make Clint Eastwood run for the hills.

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Fortunately this is not true, smart cards run a variety of programmable frameworks such as Java and .NET which are fully capable of hosting multiple applications from multiple vendors (yes they are interoperable) with a firewall among them (to make this situation work securely). Smart card based Banking and Airline miles cards are an example of this. Not to mention that vanilla CSP or PKCS#11 based smart cards do not distinguish between certificates coming from different vendors.

While I am on this topic I fully agree that certificate selection from clients (os and applications) has never been as easy and natural for end users as CardSpace makes it. Thanks CardSpace for this. 

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Speaking of smart card credentials, one of the big problems in last-generation use of smartcards was that if a Trojan was running on your machine, it could use your smartcard and perform signatures without your knowledge. 

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Yes a Trojan may get a digital signature from the smart card with out user's knowledge if the smart card application was written without following best practices for writing a secure application. BTW the same applies to Windows apps as well. A typical smart card application must utilize end-to-end secure channels for communication and should authenticate the client applications it is talking to. Now there is a problem of authenticating the client applications ... can't put the shared keys in them.... so there are limitations but as we go further we address them or technologies vertical to us do.  NIM, which is the latest offering from Gemalto does that by validating the remote servers using PKI and I would show case in coming days how [traditional] smart cards could help in reducing the phishing attacks if not eliminate them for web based transactions.

The thing to note here is that smart cards alone are not capable to solve all security problems (phishing, impersonation, trojans) but their usage in smart environments such as that of CardSpace brings value to everybody. A complete secure technology would be a joint effort from different actors which compliment each other and I am sure we would see that happening. Amen.

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Meaning to put a link for this for a while.

Enjoy:

The attack was a Man-in-the-middle (MIM) attack where smart tactics were employed to even produce errors originally generated at citibank web site.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/07/citibank_phish_spoofs_2factor_1.html : "The site asks for your user name and password, as well as the token-generated key. If you visit the site and enter bogus information to test whether the site is legit -- a tactic used by some security-savvy people -- you might be fooled. That's because this site acts as the "man in the middle" -- it submits data provided by the user to the actual Citibusiness login site. If that data generates an error, so does the phishing site, thus making it look more real"

http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1478 : "Overall, two factor authentication will reduce the risk of attacks by raising the effort of the attacker to compromise the accounts, but it might not have the level of security enhancement that some people believed. In the man-in-the-middle attack, the flaw happens due to the lack of verification of the bank's website by the victim, the victim are simply tricked into yielding credentials to a web site without authentication. This is really outside of the protection zone of the extra authentication factor.

To further extend this, two factor authentication also does NOT protect the end host security, a malware (such as keylogger, BHO) could be installed on the client's machine and effectively gather the credential and login on behalf of the victim instead of letting the victim login.

This is a classic problem of "you are only as secure as the weakest link". Two factor authentication is good for secure authentication but does not take care of mutual authentication or endpoint security. From the financial organization perspective, maybe further investment into mutual authentication and ensuring client's computer being free of malware would be necessary to protect the client's online transactions."

In the above blog entry at sans.org (Handler's diary) Jason mentions that 2 factor authentication is good for secure authentication but does not take care of mutual authentication or endpoint security. This is partly true as it really depends on the 2 factor authentication device being used. Most of the time consumers and enterprises consider one-time-password generating device (such as RSA Secure ID) to be the 2-factor authentication device as they do satisfy the notion "something you know and something you have" but there are 2 factor authentication devices such as smart cards which have lot to offer in terms of end-to-end security and thus are helpful in tackling man-in-the-middle attack.

Handler's diary points out that to fight against MIM mutual authentication is required and this is where smart cards (especially that of current generation where they are capable of getting easily plugged with enterprises following new standards such as Liberty Alliance and WS-*) distinguish themselves from just being the user authentication device and can also perform (even customized) web site/portal/server authentication.

In one of the his article (Authentication : The Pitfall of Two factor authentication) Jason says:
"In the phishing scenario, challenge response type of second factor seems to be problematic to the phishers. However, that really isn't stopping all the attackers. The desperate ones can still leverage Man in the middle type of attack. There are a few ways for man in the middle attacks to work. One is to put up a look-alike malicious site which is basically a proxy to the actual bank's website. When the victim login with proper credentials, the attacker can simply ride on that established online banking session. Notice that even challenge-response type of token would work in this case because the attacker (or the man in the middle) is passively observing the connection between the bank and the victim. The challenge will reach the victim, who will then send in the response. The attack simply proxies the traffic until the session is establish and then sends in the fraud transaction."

I would say that key here is to do all the transactions that need security over 2 way SSL where mutual authentication is required between device (& thus the user) and web server and all communication happens encrypted with a session key negotiated between device and web server. This way session hijacks could be prevented (correct me if I am missing something).

Solution lies in the mutual authentication and communication over secure channel between a smart device (such as smat card) and web server.

Below are the details for the registration for SecureTheWeb context. Registration site also provide forum for posting questions/issues/problems.

Cryptoflex.NET is a smart card platform implementing a subset of ECMA specification for CLR, IL, Metadata and core libraries. This new smart card technology (already deployed in product form in Microsoft for their corporate ID program) allows the creation of both on-card and off-card(client) applications much easier and faster than it has been done before on other smart card platforms. More on the platform and SDK in upcoming posts.

http://projectliberty.org/resources/whitepapers/SIM_Strong_Authentcation_Whitepaper.pdf

"This paper presents an innovative service called SIM strong authentication service that extends the usage of GSM SIM authentication to Internet Web services. The goal of this proof-of-concept is to demonstrate the possibility of implementing innovative service in a heterogeneous environment using Liberty Alliance Federation Standard. Telenor, Axalto, Linus and Oslo University College have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype in Oslo. The architecture is based on a multi-vendor environment where SUN provides the Identity Provider, IBM the Identity Provider and Service Provider Proxy to connect non-Liberty Alliance Service Providers to the system, Lucent Technologies the Radius server and Ulticom the SS7 MAP Authentication Gateway connecting the prototype to the Telenor mobile network. A typical user flow for such a service would be the case of a user browsing on the World Wide Web from home, a customer premise, an Internet café, etc. When trying to access a protected resource such as Webmail, company portal, or bank account, he logs on to the requested secured site simply by placing his mobile phone close by and communicating with his PC via Bluetooth, or using a SIM card-equipped dongle, card reader, or 2G/3G PC card. This service is available anywhere and can support any Internet services. It is ideal for services like Internet Banking, eAdministration or enterprise internal web pages. The SIM strong authentication is both user-friendly and cost efficient, with a low deployment threshold. The technology is also capable of supporting other Smart-Card based identity services such as USIM (UMTS), certificate based schemes (E.g. TLS) and One Time Password schemes (OTP). A demonstration of the SIM based service is being demonstrated at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, February 2006."

Rohan writes:

InfoCard or JavaCard // Identity Management
Kim had posted a nice article on A simple managed payment card example a while ago. So basicaly
what happens with a "issued" infocard is that the infocard only contains a pointer to where the 
user information is to be obtained from (in this case as per Kim's example the issuer happens 
tobe Bank Of America, and the requestor is amazon.com). Well, Kapil had a nicer post on
Smartcards and Federated Identity. Kapil quotes Smartcards are the actually the real enabler of
biggest network of identity federations world has known till date i.e GSM.

[...]

various standards like SAML, Liberty, InfoCard/WS-Trust, WS-Federation etc for identity 
federationrespect and understand the usefulness of security devices like Smartcards. All 
these standards propose the solution to same set of problems in almost same way and differ
mostly in wire protocols used. SAML and Liberty has a profiles ECP (Enhanced client proxy)
and LECP (Liberty enabled client or proxy) respectively which enables a Smartcard based
authentication where as InfoCard (a profile of WS-Trust) treats Smartcard as another Security
token service which can generate self issued security tokens.
 
nice... I see the light at the end of the tunnel. infocard treats a smartcard as a personal 
security token service (PSTS) which can issue security token in form of SAML assertions. 
and so i thought... or rather... continue to think...
Whats the difference between the long existent JavaCard/Liberty vs InfoCard/WS-Federation ? 

JavaCard/Liberty vs InfoCard/WS-Federation : There is no comparison matrix like this because:

JavaCard technology is not tied to Liberty Alliance and vice versa. Liberty Alliance specifies that security devices (and smart card is one example) can be used to do the authentication. How to communicate to them is unspecified and which makes sense as they will have to specify the protocol for every device that is our there. Now, JavaCard is one type of smart card which has virtual machine, run time and libraries specified by SUN microsystems which we smart card manufacturers implement and put on top of our smart card operating system. There are other types of smart cards for eg. native smart cards which do not have capabilities to run managed code, there is a .NET Smart card which has a virtual machine, run time and libraries specified by ECMA [our implementation is a subset of ECMA specifications for .NET like JavaCard specifications are subset of core Java specifications], and there is one more type which is called Multos smart card.

That said, you could use .NET Smart card in products/implementations of Liberty Alliance. As a matter of fact all the demos that I have done with Liberty Alliance & InfoCard/WS-trust/WS-Federation are with .NET Smartcard. Reason for using .NET Smart card is because it supports richer set of APIs (Hashtable,ArrayList...), language features (strings,long..) and Xml parsing. These features are not availbale in exisiting JavaCards (2.2) and would be part of JavaCard 3.0.

Now, the way you put the matrix it seems that you are thinking of some relation between JavaCard & InfoCard. InfoCard does have a "card" as a suffix but it does not mean it is a smart card. InfoCard is a metadata expressed in XML which describes how a user could authenticate, where the identity provider/security token service is located and what are claims that are supported and JavaCard is a platform for which you could write applications that would store credentials and process requests to use them.

I remember sometime back I had read an article on Microsoft Employees Get Carded" by Karen 
EpperHoffman via Kapil's Blog. Well, Scott made us use these along from a long time ago...And
Microsoft's views on smartcards are no different. 

Smart card technology is a proven security technology and hope technologists around the world appreciate its importance for web security also.

Hubert has put together a nice demo of how a using Liberty’s ID-WSF protocols, we can create a 
module that greatly helps the user in dealing with his digital identities. Currently laptops,
sunray 1g, sunray 170 and desktops ARE available with builtin smartcard readers. 

and hence my dilema...

This is really an excellent demo, I am also working on a smiliar type of demo (Liberty Alliance) in which the authentication is done using a challenge-response algorithm (like CRAM-MD5) where the response is generated by Smart card instead of using username/passoword (as done in Hubert's demo). It is another thing that I will  use a theme other than the famous wine shop example as I am a teetotaler :) .

Today in keio University, Tokyo, Japan at W3C workshop on Ubiquitous web I gave the talk on device coordination with web applications. The position paper can be found here and presentation is hosted here.

The position is basically to standardize the interface to communicate with the security devices which are network addressable and are discoverable using standard discovery protocols such as UPnP, Bonjour or ZeroConf and are locally connected to the user's machine, from the web page and script from remote web site rendered by browsers.

http://www.ovum.com/news/euronews.asp?id=3636

Key Points:

• Identity management has been the fastest growing security sector, and we are pleased to report good progress in getting acceptance of the Liberty Alliance and SAML 2 standards. 
• Identity management will become even more prominent, but in the enterprise space it will mostly be intra-enterprise, with inter-enterprise initiatives, which are still a couple of years away.
• Much faster development of identity and identification infrastructure in the government sector, both for law enforcement and for accessing public services.

A very interesting example from Kim Cameron on the use of InfoCards to send the credit-card number. To make it more interesting and validating the philosophy of InfoCard system being user centric and not PC centric and its extensibility I can give one more scenario regarding payment cards. As I wrote in entries here and here InfoCard sees the security device like Smartcard as a personal security token service (PSTS) which can issue security token in form of SAML assertions and so in the picture the identity provider (bank) can be replaced by the Smartcard (actually the bank issued you the Smartcard as its offline representative). Instead of downloading the one time credit card identity token from the user's bank, the InfoCard system request the Smartcard (PSTS) for SAML assertion (security token) which would contain the credit card number (can be one time valid or static), attributes of user such as name, billing address etc. Of course assertion would be digitally signed (XML signature) & encrypted (XML Encryption or SSL) and would be validated by bank once transaction is sent by the shopping site.

You can appreciate that fact that the sensitive data like credit card number, expiration etc is not on your PC but on Smartcard and you avoid a round trip to Identity provider. Smartcard as PSTS not only enable the transactions on PC but also can be used in Kiosk, ATM etc thanks to its mobility aspect. Automation (no need to type the details on web forms), good user experience and security are achieved in this model.

James McGovern recently asked "How should we think about SmartCards within our own infrastructure and how it plays with federated identity?". I have been talking about the demos we have done with Smartcard in Identity management space but never really talked about the essence of using Smartcards in this domain. I take this oppurtunity to try to explain how Smartcard plays a vital role in federated identity.

Identity federation although new to Internet (www) and world of web services, is not a new concept for the Smartcards. Smartcards are the actually the real enabler of biggest network of identity federations world has known till date i.e GSM. It is this small computer which enables the roaming in the GSM network and let us make use of our mobile phones at places where our operators do not have presence. GSM was devised with the core objective of business harmonization - "you can use my network even though your are a subscriber of another network in another country" which required technical harmonization. Problem is that network 1 does not have an account for you and cannot bill you but they can get your and your operator's (network 2) identity from the phone and ask your operator if they will pay the charges. Of course the operator would want a strong proof of if you are you and not somebody who has stolen your account number. Need is to have a strong authentication for eg using shared key cryptographic where there are exactly 2 copies of secret key - one residing in mobile phone and other at operator's end. The figure below illustrate how a basic GSM authentication is done (it is actually more complicated but for simplicity I am giving this example) :

Basically the user's network sends a random number and result after its encryption with shared key to the visiting network and says that if user's phone gives the same encryption result for the random number I will pay the bill. As you can see there is not only a requirement of strong authenitcation but secure storage of shared key (not even accessible to user) and what better technology to use than Smartcard which has the secure, tamper resistant hardware and secure computing capabilities. Computing capabilities are equally important as it is of no use storing the key in Smartcard and giving it to phone for performing cryptographic operation.

Now federated identity for intrenet and intratnet are no different conceptually than the case that I presented. Only the protocols (SAML, WS-Trust etc) used by service providers and identity providers on www are different for obvious reasons. In today's internet the identity of user is of prime interest both to user and to the service provider and hence the need of Strong authentication.

Fortunately various standards like SAML, Liberty, InfoCard/WS-Trust, WS-Federation etc for identity federation respect and understand the usefulness of security devices like Smartcards. All these standards propose the solution to same set of problems in _almost_ same way and differ mostly in wire protocols used. SAML and Liberty has a profiles ECP (Enhanced client proxy) and LECP (Liberty enabled client or proxy) respectively which enables a Smartcard based authentication where as InfoCard (a profile of WS-Trust) treats Smartcard as another Security token service which can generate self issued security tokens.

Other than Strong authentication, secure storage of attributes/credentials and computing capability, mobile nature of Smartcards is an added advantage for user.