SOURCE RECORD · openalex
Measuring And Securing Cryptographic Deployments
This dissertation examines security vulnerabilities that arise due to communication failures and incentive mismatches along the path from cryptographic algorithm design to eventual deployment. I present six case studies demonstrating vulnerabilities in real-world cryptographic deployments. I also provide a framework with which to analyze the root cause of cryptographic vulnerabilities by characterizing them as failures in four key stages of the deployment process: algorithm design and cryptanalysis, standardization, implementation, and endpoint deployment. Each stage of this process is error-prone and influenced by various external factors, the incentives of which are not always aligned with security. I validate the framework by applying it to the six presented case studies, tracing each vulnerability back to communication failures or incentive mismatches in the deployment process.\nTo curate these case studies, I develop novel techniques to measure both existing and new cryptographic attacks, and demonstrate the widespread impact of these attacks on real-world systems through measurement and cryptanalysis. While I do not claim that all cryptographic vulnerabilities can be described with this framework, I present a non-trivial (in fact substantial) number of case studies demonstrating that this framework characterizes the root cause of failures in a diverse set of cryptographic deployments.