ICMC16: The OpenSSL 1.1 Audit

Kenneth White

There is an Open Crypto Audit Project. Originally formed to do an audit of the TrueCrypt audit.  Currently seeking non-profit status.  More recently looking ath OpenSSL.  Why? It's everywhere!

OpenSSL 1.0.2 FIPS is in over a 100 validations.

Enterprise people often say they don't care about FOSS, don't realize it's deployed very widely in their enterprise!  Like Cisco VPN client.

The audit of OpenSSL was commisioned by the Linux Foundation.  A pretty ambitious scope.

Most of the code in OpenSSL is written in C (70%), and currently has about 8 million lines of code. (that's a lot to audit!)

FIrst look at BigNum, BIO (focus on composition and file functions), ASN.1 and x.509 and 93M cert corpus, and "frankencert" fuzzing.

Next phase will cover the TLS state machine, EVP, protocol flows and core engine implementation, memory management and crypto core (RSA, SHA2, DH/ECDEH, CBC, GGM).

Need to focus on most relevant platforms and algorithms and protocols.

Preliminary findings:
Complexity led to some potential bugs invalidated due to pre- or post- target parsing.  PEM parsing contained unexpected formats including access to ASN.1 decoding facilities, HMAC and CMAC algorithms. Memory leak and integer overflow identified, but very unlikely invalid or low severity issues.  RSA uses blinding and constant time operations by default.

From the fuzzing work, found found 280 certificates that had very bizarre dependencies that resulted in diverse paths being taken.  The fuzz testing for x.509 parsing did not result in any crashes.  Did find bugs with some DER fuzzing, related to performance, but the right things seemed to happen.

Still looking at low impact, low likelihood, low severity potential vulnerabilities, but overall the code is looking very solid.

As Poly1305 and CHaCha20 were added recently, we'd like to take another look.