Jeremy Spilman [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2014-03-02 📝 Original message:On Fri, 28 Feb 2014 ...

📅 Original date posted:2014-03-02
📝 Original message:On Fri, 28 Feb 2014 03:46:49 -0800, Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> wrote:

> 3) Whilst these payment processors currently verify merchants so the
> security risk is low, in future a lighter-weight model or competing
> sites that >allow open signups would give a weak security situation: a
> hacker who compromised your computer could sign up for some popular
> payment >processor under a false identity (or no identity), and wait
> until you use your hacked computer to make a payment to someone else
> using the same >payment processor. They could then do an identity swap
> of the real payment request for one of their own, and your Trezor would
> still look the same. >Avoiding this is a major motivation for the entire
> system!

Let me restate that, it's a huge problem...

Alice's system is compromised,
Mallory intercepts a payment request being sent to Alice from payment
processor X on behaf of merchant X.
Mallory regenerates a spoof payment request which pays to M, from the same
payment processor
Alice can't tell Mallory's spoofed PR apart from Merchant X's and thinks
she's paying Merchant X

It might be a bit challenging for M to generate the new PR on-the-fly
without being noticed, but that's not a security guarantee.

Perhaps the UI just isn't expressive enough currently to expose this
situation in any way, let alone reliably alert the user to the issue,
because there's no way for the payment processor to get authenticated
fields other than memo into the UI.

Today the only solution is for the payment processor to strictly control
the 'memo' field so Mallory wouldn't be able to make his own PR that
looked exactly like merchant Y's. But maybe it's too subtle to make
payment processors embed that kind of information.

So is the main goal is to provide a structured way to embed this
information in the PR and expect that user interfaces will display them to
end users? If that's the case, I don't think we need an entirely secondary
certificate, or cross signing from a secondary ECDSA key.

A poor solution: If the UI included some sort of certificate viewer, even
just tied to the OS certificate viewer, and made the cert available for
inspection, at least the merchant would have a chance to put some fields
in there which a very advanced user might actually find. But this was
discussed a while ago and I think the primary problem is the difficulty in
getting a CA to let you embed any additional fields in your certificate in
the first place, plus you don't want to generate a new cert for each
merchant.

A somewhat better option: Some additional fields defined in an extension
which are reliably shown in the UI. We could try to define specific
fields, like 'DelegateCN' which would possibly override the primary CN...
As an aside, I think you can never allow actually overriding the CN
displayed in the UI directly, the most you can do is add another field in
the UI to show this string. First I need to know it's from Payment
Processor X, and then maybe we can let the payment processor make some
additional claim, like yes you are paying irs.gov. You can't give the
impression that Payment Processor X is not actually man-in-the-middle.

Maybe the simplest would be a single field expected to contain a delimited
key/value string (of course JSON) which could be shown as additional lines
of labeled text in the UI. I don't want to give the "merchant" too much
dynamic control over what the user's screen will display, but making it
somewhat dynamic might add some future proofing.

I think any additional extension fields should be hashed using the hash
function specified in pki_type and signed by X509Certificates.certifcate
private key. No extended_certs required -- I'm thinking something like;

message PaymentRequest {
// new field
optional bytes extended_properties = 6;
optional bytes extended_properties_sig = 7;
}


Thanks,
Jeremy
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