The Emperor is Now Clothed: A Secure Governance Framework for Web User Authentication through Password Managers

TY - GEN

T1 - The Emperor is Now Clothed

T2 - International Conference on Information and Communications Security (ICICS 2024)

AU - Cherry, Ali

AU - Barmpis, Kostas

AU - Shahandashti, Siamak F.

N1 - Conference code: 26th

PY - 2024/8/28

Y1 - 2024/8/28

N2 - Existing approaches to facilitate the interaction between password managers and web applications fall short of providing adequate functionality and mitigation strategies against prominent attacks. HTML Autofill is not sufficiently expressive, Credential Management API does not support browser extension password managers, and other proposed solutions do not conform to established user mental models. In this paper, we propose Berytus, a browser-based governance framework that mediates the interaction between password managers and web applications. Two APIs are designed to support Berytus acting as an orchestrator between password managers and web applications. An implementation of the framework in Firefox is developed that fully supports registration and authentication processes. As an orchestrator, Berytus is able to authenticate web applications and facilitate authenticated key exchange between web applications and password managers, which as we show, can provide effective mitigation strategies against phishing, cross-site scripting, inline code injection (e.g., by a malicious browser extension), and TLS proxy in the middle attacks, whereas existing mitigation strategies such as Content Security Policy and credential tokenisation are only partially effective. The framework design also provides desirable functional properties such as support for multi-step, multi-factor, and custom authentication schemes. We provide a comprehensive security and functionality evaluation and discuss possible future directions.

AB - Existing approaches to facilitate the interaction between password managers and web applications fall short of providing adequate functionality and mitigation strategies against prominent attacks. HTML Autofill is not sufficiently expressive, Credential Management API does not support browser extension password managers, and other proposed solutions do not conform to established user mental models. In this paper, we propose Berytus, a browser-based governance framework that mediates the interaction between password managers and web applications. Two APIs are designed to support Berytus acting as an orchestrator between password managers and web applications. An implementation of the framework in Firefox is developed that fully supports registration and authentication processes. As an orchestrator, Berytus is able to authenticate web applications and facilitate authenticated key exchange between web applications and password managers, which as we show, can provide effective mitigation strategies against phishing, cross-site scripting, inline code injection (e.g., by a malicious browser extension), and TLS proxy in the middle attacks, whereas existing mitigation strategies such as Content Security Policy and credential tokenisation are only partially effective. The framework design also provides desirable functional properties such as support for multi-step, multi-factor, and custom authentication schemes. We provide a comprehensive security and functionality evaluation and discuss possible future directions.

KW - Password Managers

KW - Password Manager Security

KW - HTML Autofill

KW - User Authentication

KW - Web Authentication

UR - https://github.com/alichry/berytus

M3 - Conference contribution

BT - Information and Communications Security

Y2 - 26 August 2024 through 28 August 2024

ER -