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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With the roaring growth and wide adoption of smart mobile devices, users are continuously integrating with culture of the mobile applications (apps). These apps are not only gaining access to information on the smartphone but they are also able gain users' authorization to access remote servers on their behalf. The Open standard for Authorization (OAuth) is widely used in mobile apps for gaining access to user's resources on remote service providers. In this work, we analyze the different OAuth implementations adopted by some SDKs of the popular resource providers on smartphones and identify possible attacks on most OAuth implementations. We give some statistics on the trends followed by the service providers and by mobile applications developers. In addition, we propose an application-based OAuth Manager framework, that provides a secure OAuth flow in smartphones that is based on the concept of privilege separation and does not require high overhead. Correctly integrating third-party services into web applications is challenging, and mistakes can have grave consequences when third-party services are used for security-critical tasks such as authentication and authorization. Developers often misunderstand integration requirements and make critical mistakes when integrating services such as single sign-on APIs. Since traditional programming techniques are hard to apply to programs running inside black-box web servers, we propose to detect vulnerabilities by probing behaviors of the system. This paper describes the design and implementation of SSOScan, an automatic vulnerability checker for applications using Facebook Single Sign-On (SSO) APIs. We used SSOScan to study the twenty thousand top-ranked websites for five SSO vulnerabilities. Of the 1660 sites in our study that employ Facebook SSO, over 20 were found to suffer from at least one serious vulnerability. 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. Millions of web users today employ their Facebook accounts to sign into more than one million relying party (RP) websites. This web-based single sign-on (SSO) scheme is enabled by OAuth 2.0, a web resource authorization protocol that has been adopted by major service providers. The OAuth 2.0 protocol has proven secure by several formal methods, but whether it is indeed secure in practice remains an open question. We examine the implementations of three major OAuth identity providers (IdP) (Facebook, Microsoft, and Google) and 96 popular RP websites that support the use of Facebook accounts for login. Our results uncover several critical vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to the victim user's profile and social graph, and impersonate the victim on the RP website. Closer examination reveals that these vulnerabilities are caused by a set of design decisions that trade security for implementation simplicity. To improve the security of OAuth 2.0 SSO systems in real-world settings, we suggest simple and practical improvements to the design and implementation of IdPs and RPs that can be adopted gradually by individual sites. 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.