There’s an interesting and troubling attack happening to some people involved in the OpenPGP community that makes their certificates unusable and can essentially break the OpenPGP implementation of anyone who tries to import one of the certificates.
The attack is quite simple and doesn’t exploit any technical vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP software, but instead takes advantage of one of the inherent properties of the keyserver network that’s used to distribute certificates. Keyservers are designed to allow people to discover the public certificates of other people with them they want to communicate over a secure channel. One of the properties of the network is that anyone who has looked at a certificate and verified that it belongs to another specific person can add a signature, or attestation, to the certificate. That signature basically serves as the public stamp of approval from one user to another.
In general, people add signatures to someone’s certificate in order to give other users more confidence that the certificate is actually owned and controlled by the person who claims to own it. However, the OpenPGP specification doesn’t have any upper limit on the number of signatures that a certificate can have, so any user or group of users can add signatures to a given certificate ad infinitum. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except for the fact that GnuPG, one of the more popular packages that implements the OpenPGP specification, doesn’t handle certificates with extremely large numbers of signatures very well. In fact, GnuPG will essentially stop working when it attempts to import one of those certificates.
Last week, two people involved in the OpenPGP community discovered that their public certificates had been spammed with tens of thousands of signatures–one has nearly 150,000–in an apparent effort to render them useless. The attack targeted Robert J. Hansen and Daniel Kahn Gillmor, but the root problem may end up affecting many other people, too.
“This attack exploited a defect in the OpenPGP protocol itself in order to ‘poison’ rjh and dkg’s OpenPGP certificates. Anyone who attempts to import a poisoned certificate into a vulnerable OpenPGP installation will very likely break their installation in hard-to-debug ways. Poisoned certificates are already on the SKS keyserver network. There is no reason to believe the attacker will stop at just poisoning two certificates. Further, given the ease of the attack and the highly publicized success of the attack, it is prudent to believe other certificates will soon be poisoned,” Hansen wrote in a post explaining the incident.
Source: OpenPGP Certificate Attack Worries Experts | Decipher
Robin Edgar
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