Laribus: privacy-preserving detection of fake SSL certificates with a social P2P notary network

Abstract

In this paper we present Laribus, a peer-to-peer network designed to detect local man-in-the-middle attacks against secure socket layer/transport layer security (SSL/TLS). With Laribus, clients can validate the authenticity of a certificate presented to them by retrieving it from different vantage points on the network. Unlike previous solutions, clients do not have to trust a central notary service nor do they have to rely on the cooperation of website owners. The Laribus network is based on a social network graph, which allows users to form notary groups that improve both privacy and availability. It integrates several well-known techniques, such as secret sharing, ring signatures, layered encryption, range queries, and a distributed hash table (DHT), to achieve privacy-aware queries, scalability, and decentralization. We present the design and core components of Laribus, discuss its security properties, and also provide results from a simulation-based feasibility study.

A State-of-the-Art Survey of Peer-to-Peer Networks: Research Directions, Applications and Challenges

“…Since P2P networks are largely anonymous and decentralized, security is a major issue attracting the interest of researchers such as [2], [19]- [25], [52]. The authors in [2] examined the effect of anonymity on P2P users deviant tendencies.…”

“…Another use will be to conceal communications between journalists and information sources. Meanwhile, a P2P based network capable of detecting local man-in-the-middle attack targets at secure socket layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) was proposed in [25]. The design neither rely on centralized notary service nor owners of websites, rather, the proposed design authenticate certificate via retrieving them at various points on the network.…”

“…Fig. 5: Strategies of Laribus (adapted from [25]) Peer-to-peer traffic is typically not friendly to other sources of traffic in a network, emphasizing the need to identify them. Effects of P2P traffic on network anomaly detector is still a subject of research, in spite of the work in [61], who attempted to minimize the reduction of accuracy to traffic anomaly detectors owing to the presence of P2P traffic by identifying the properties of malicious traffic that do not overlap with peer-to-peer traffic, which is then used to design a traffic preprocessor used by the detector to improve its accuracy.…”

Whom You Gonna Trust? A Longitudinal Study on TLS Notary Services

“…Convergence [23] builds on the same principles as Perspectives and provides further methods for trust management. Bates et al [2] tried to answer the question of what happens if everyone is using the notary service Convergence; Fuchs et al extended the approach of centralized notary servers and implemented Laribus [13], a P2Pbased approach on notary services. Laribus is based on a social graph, which allows users to build notary groups without the need to rely on a central notary server.…”