Automatic Detection of Fake Key Attacks in Secure Messaging

Abstract: Popular instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Signal provide end-to-end encryption for billions of users. They rely on a centralized, application-specific server to distribute public keys and relay encrypted messages between the users. Therefore, they prevent passive attacks but are vulnerable to some active attacks. A malicious or hacked server can distribute fake keys to users to perform man-in-the-middle or impersonation attacks. While typical secure messaging applications provide a manual method for users to detect these attacks, this burdens users, and studies show it is ineffective in practice. This paper presents KTACA, a completely automated approach for key verification that is oblivious to users and easy to deploy. We motivate KTACA by designing two approaches to automatic key verification. One approach uses client auditing (KTCA) and the second uses anonymous key monitoring (AKM). Both have relatively inferior security properties, leading to KTACA, which combines these approaches to provide the best of both worlds. We provide a security analysis of each defense, identifying which attacks they can automatically detect. We implement the active attacks to demonstrate they are possible, and we also create a prototype implementation of all the defenses to measure their performance and confirm their feasibility. Finally, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each defense, the overhead on clients and service providers, and deployment considerations.