Harvesting credentials in trust negotiation as an honest-but-curious adversary

Abstract

Need-to-know is a fundamental security concept: a party should not learn information that is irrelevant to its mission. In this paper we show that during a trust negotiation in which parties show their credentials to one another, an adversary can systematically harvest information about all of a victim's credentials that the attacker is entitled to see, regardless of their relevance to the negotiation. We present examples of need-to-know attacks with the trust negotiation approaches proposed Yu, Winslett, and Seamons; by Bonatti and Samarati; and by Winsborough and Li. Finally, we propose possible countermeasures against need-to-know attacks, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.