Many millions of users routinely use their Google accounts to log in to relying party (RP) websites supporting the Google OpenID Connect service. OpenID Connect, a newly standardised single-sign-on protocol, builds an identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol, which has itself been widely adopted to support identity management services. It adds identity management functionality to the OAuth 2.0 system and allows an RP to obtain assurances regarding the authenticity of an end user. A number of authors have analysed the security of the OAuth 2.0 protocol, but whether OpenID Connect is secure in practice remains an open question. We report on a large-scale practical study of Google's implementation of OpenID Connect, involving forensic examination of 103 RP websites which support its use for sign-in. Our study reveals serious vulnerabilities of a number of types, all of which allow an attacker to log in to an RP website as a victim user. Further examination suggests that these vulnerabilities are caused by a combination of Google's design of its OpenID Connect service and RP developers making design decisions which sacrifice security for simplicity of implementation. We also give practical recommendations for both RPs and OPs to help improve the security of real world OpenID Connect systems.
Meanwhile, a range of work exploring the security properties of real-world implementations of OAuth 2.0 has also been conducted. @cite_49 examined a number of deployed SSO systems, focussing on a logic flaw present in many such systems, including OpenID @. In parallel, Sun and Beznosov @cite_13 also studied deployed systems of OAuth 2.0 providing services in English. Li and Mitchell @cite_20 examined the security of deployed OAuth 2.0 systems providing services in Chinese. In parallel, Zhou and Evans @cite_28 conducted a large scale study of the security of Facebook's OAuth 2.0 implementation. @cite_24 , and Shehab and Mohsen @cite_30 have looked at the security of the implementation of OAuth 2.0 on mobile platforms. However, despite all the work on OAuth, very little research has been conducted on the security of OpenID Connect systems.
@cite_30 @cite_28 @cite_24 @cite_49 @cite_13 @cite_20
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Many Chinese websites (relying parties) use OAuth 2.0 as the basis of a single sign-on service to ease password management for users. Many sites support five or more different OAuth 2.0 identity providers, giving users choice in their trust point. However, although OAuth 2.0 has been widely implemented (particularly in China), little attention has been paid to security in practice. In this paper we report on a detailed study of OAuth 2.0 implementation security for ten major identity providers and 60 relying parties, all based in China. This study reveals two critical vulnerabilities present in many implementations, both allowing an attacker to control a victim user’s accounts at a relying party without knowing the user’s account name or password. We provide simple, practical recommendations for identity providers and relying parties to enable them to mitigate these vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities have been reported to the parties concerned. OpenID and OAuth are open and simple Web SSO protocols that have been adopted by major service providers, and millions of supporting Web sites. However, the average user’s perception of Web SSO is still poorly understood. Through several user studies, this work investigates users’ perceptions and concerns when using Web SSO for authentication. We found that our participants had several misconceptions and concerns that impeded their adoption. This ranged from their inadequate mental models of Web SSO, to their concerns about personal data exposure, and a reduction in perceived Web SSO value due to the employment of password management practices. Informed by our findings, we offer a Web SSO technology acceptance model, and suggest design improvements. OpenID is an open and promising Web single sign-on (SSO) solution. This work investigates the challenges and concerns web users face when using OpenID for authentication, and identifies what changes in the login flow could improve the users' experience and adoption incentives. We found our participants had several behaviors, concerns, and misconceptions that hinder the OpenID adoption process: (1) their existing password management strategies reduce the perceived usefulness of SSO; (2) many (26 ) expressed concerns with single-point-of-failure related issues; (3) most (71 ) held the incorrect belief that the OpenID credentials are being given to the content providers; (4) half exhibited an inability to distinguish a fake Google login form, even when prompted; (5) many (40 ) were hesitant to consent to the release of their personal profile information; and (6) many (36 ) expressed concern with the use of SSO on websites that contain valuable personal information or, conversely, are not trustworthy. We also found that with an improved affordance and privacy control, more than 60 of study participants would use Web SSO solutions on the websites they trust. With the boom of software-as-a-service and social networking, web-based single sign-on (SSO) schemes are being deployed by more and more commercial websites to safeguard many web resources. Despite prior research in formal verification, little has been done to analyze the security quality of SSO schemes that are commercially deployed in the real world. Such an analysis faces unique technical challenges, including lack of access to well-documented protocols and code, and the complexity brought in by the rich browser elements (script, Flash, etc.). In this paper, we report the first "field study" on popular web SSO systems. In every studied case, we focused on the actual web traffic going through the browser, and used an algorithm to recover important semantic information and identify potential exploit opportunities. Such opportunities guided us to the discoveries of real flaws. In this study, we discovered 8 serious logic flaws in high-profile ID providers and relying party websites, such as Open ID (including Google ID and Pay Pal Access), Face book, Jan Rain, Freelancer, Farm Ville, Sears.com, etc. Every flaw allows an attacker to sign in as the victim user. We reported our findings to affected companies, and received their acknowledgements in various ways. All the reported flaws, except those discovered very recently, have been fixed. This study shows that the overall security quality of SSO deployments seems worrisome. We hope that the SSO community conducts a study similar to ours, but in a larger scale, to better understand to what extent SSO is insecurely deployed and how to respond to the situation.