Contextual OTP: Mitigating emerging man-in-the-middle attacks with wireless hardware tokens

Assaf Ben-David, Omer Berkman, Yossi Matias, Sarvar Patel, Cem Paya, Moti Yung

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

OTP (One Time Password) devices are highly deployed trust enhancing (password entropy increasing) devices which are used to authenticate a user with a second factor (a pseudorandom sequence of digits produced by a device the user owns) and to cope with off-line phishing of password information. Wireless connection adds usability to OTP protocols in an obvious way: instead of the person copying the information between machines, the wireless (say, Bluetooth) mechanism can transfer the value directly. Indeed, OTP devices implemented in a smartphone and communicating with the browser over Bluetooth can act in usable fashion (and this extension was implemented in our organization and got very positive usability feedback). What we then noticed as a key observation is that this mode of OTP wireless transfer has turned the "man to machine" nature of the OTP tokens to a "(mobile) device to machine (the browser on the computer)" method, so we can now employ protocols between the two interacting computers. Thus, we asked what can this new mode contribute to security (rather than to usability only) and cope with increased set of attacks. Specifically, the question we are dealing with is whether wireless OTP devices (i.e., smartphones) can be hardened at a reasonable cost (i.e., without costly OTP infrastructural changes, public-key infrastructure/ operations, and with small modification to browsers) so as to be useful against one type of interesting and currently growing and highly publicized Man in the Middle (MITM) attacks. The work herein summarizes our study which is based on our proposed new notion of Contextual OTP (XOTP for short), which exploits session contexts to break the symmetry between the "user-MITM" and the "MITM-server" sessions.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationApplied Cryptography and Network Security - 10th International Conference, ACNS 2012, Proceedings
Pages30-47
Number of pages18
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event10th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security, ACNS 2012 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 26 Jun 201229 Jun 2012

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume7341 LNCS

Conference

Conference10th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security, ACNS 2012
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period26/06/1229/06/12

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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