PKI: A Technology Whose Time Has
Come in Higher Education
EDUCAUSE Southwest Regional Conference
February 26, 2004
Our Systems Are Under Constant
Attack
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Trojan horses
Worms
Viruses
Spam
Hackers
Disgruntled
insiders
• Script kiddies
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Some of These Attacks Succeed Spectacularly
• Loss of personal data
• Outages
• Potentially huge costs:
– Productivity loss
(user and IT staff)
– Remediation
– User notification
– Bad publicity, loss of credibility
– Lawsuits?
For real-life examples involving thousands of users see the
excellent EDUCAUSE session entitled “Damage Control:
When Your Security Incident Hits the 6 O’Clock News”
www.educause.edu/ir/library/ra/EDU0307.ram
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IT Security Risks Escalate
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More and more important information and
transactions are online:
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Personal identity information
Financial transactions
Course enrollment, grades
Tests
Licensed materials
Confidential research data
We must comply with increasingly strict regulations:
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Health information - HIPAA: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/
Educational records - FERPA:
http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html
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Specific Example: Email
• Spoofing email is trivial (simple setting in most
email clients)
– Spoofed message from professor postponing a final
– Inappropriate message seemingly from College President
to female student
• Email is like a postcard written in pencil
– Others on network can see (or even modify) contents if not
encrypted (really easy on wireless!)
– You may use SSL, but what about other hops between mail
servers?
• Viruses or worms can forward random messages
from email archives to random recipients in address
book
– HR employee forwarding salary data to random employees
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Specific Example: Student
Information System
• Provides online enrollment, schedule, grades
• FERPA protected information
• Available to hackers
Q: What if someone hacks your authentication system
and downloads grades from thousands of students?
A: You are probably obligated by law to notify every
individual whose grades may have been exposed!
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Problems With Centralized
Passwords
Managing the Multitude: User
Perspective
• Users HATE username/passwords
• Too many for them to manage:
– Re-use same password
– Use weak (easy to remember) passwords
– Rely on “remember my password” crutches
• Forgotten password help desk calls cost $25 - $200 each
(IDC) and are far too common
• As we put more services online, it just gets worse…
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Managing the Multitude: Admin Perspective
• Many different
username/password schemes to
learn, set up, and administer:
– Backups, password resets, revoking
access, initial password values, etc.
• Multiple administrators have
access to usernames/passwords –
many points of failure
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Ending the Madness
• Traditional approaches
– Single password
– Single sign-on, fewer sign-ons
• PKI
– Local password management by end user
– Two factor authentication
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Single Password
• Users like it, but…
• Requires synchronizing passwords (inherently
problematic) – actually makes admin madness
worse!
• Single username/password becomes single point of
failure… Hack weakest application and get
passwords to all applications!
• Costly to maintain and difficult to make work well.
• Passwords databases exposed on network and to
administrators, as vulnerable as your weakest
application.
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Single Sign-on, Fewer Sign-ons
• More secure & provides some relief for users, but…
• Requires infrastructure (e.g. WebISO or Kerberos
sidecar).
• Fewer sign-ons still has synchronization problems.
• Single sign-on solutions are typically for web
applications only.
• Kerberos sidecar has problems with address translation
and firewalls and is not widely supported.
• Password database still exposed on network and to
administrators.
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Password Sharing
• Corrupts value of username/password for
authentication and authorization.
• Users do share passwords: PKI Lab survey of
171 undergraduates revealed that 75% of
them shared their password and fewer than
half of those changed it after sharing.
• We need two factor authentication to address
password sharing.
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PKI’s Answer to Password Woes
• Users manage their own (single or few)
passwords.
• Cost-effective two factor authentication.
• Widely supported alternative for
authentication to all sorts of applications
(both web-based and otherwise).
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PKI Passwords Are Local to Client
• PKI eliminates user passwords on network
servers.
• Password to PKI credentials are local in the
application key store or in hardware token.
• User manages the password and only has one
per set of credentials (likely only one or two).
• Still need process for forgotten password, but it
is only one for all applications using PKI
authentication, and users are much less likely to
forgot it since they use it frequently and control
it themselves.
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Underlying Key Technology
• Asymmetric encryption: a pair of asymmetric keys is used, one to
encrypt, the other to decrypt.
• Each key can only decrypt data encrypted with the other.
• One key is private and carefully protected by its holder. The other is
public and freely distributed.
• Authentication challenges the supplicant to encrypt something with
the private key. If it decrypts properly with public key, then they
have proven who they are.
• Private key and password always stay in the user’s possession.
Encrypt
(anyone with public key)
Plain Text
Encrypted Text
Decrypt
(possessor of private key only)
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PKI Enables Single Password
and Single Sign-on
• User maintains one password on their
credentials.
• PKI credentials authenticate user to the various
services they use via PKI standards.
• No need for password synchronization.
• No additional infrastructure other than standard
PKI and simple, standard hooks for PKI
authentication in applications.
• Typically less effort to enable PKI
authentication than other SSO methods.
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PKI Provides Two Factor Authentication
• Requires something the user has (credentials
stored in the application or a smartcard or token)
in addition to something a user knows (local
password for the credentials).
• Significant security improvement, especially
with smartcard or token (a post-it next to the
screen is no longer a major security hole).
• Reduces risk of password sharing.
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But Wait There’s More…
Other Benefits of PKI
Digital Signatures
• Our computerized world still relies heavily on
handwritten signatures.
• PKI allows digital signatures, recognized by Federal
Government as legal signatures:
– Reduce paperwork with electronic forms.
– Much faster and more traceable business processes.
– Improved assurance of electronic transactions (e.g. really
know who that email was from).
Federal digital signature information:
http://museum.nist.gov/exhibits/timeline/item.cfm?itemId=78
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Digital Signatures
• Signer computes content digest, encrypts with their private
key.
• Reader decrypts with signer’s public key.
• Reader re-computes the content digest and verifies match
with original – guarantees no one has modified signed data.
• Only signer has private key, so no one else can spoof their
digital signature.
Compute digest, sign & date,
encrypt
(possessor of private key only)
Plain Text
Encrypted Text
Verify signature, check digest
(anyone with public key)
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Encryption
• Strong encryption with extensible number of bits in key.
• Can use same PKI digital credentials as authentication
and digital signatures.
• More leverage of the PK Infrastructure.
• Easy to encrypt data for any individual without prior
exchange of information – simply look up their certificate
which contains their public key.
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Encryption
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Asymmetric encryption prevents need for shared secrets.
Anyone encrypts with public key of recipient.
Only the recipient can decrypt with their private key.
Private key is secret and protected, so “bad guys” can’t
read encrypted data.
Encrypt
(anyone with public key)
Plain Text
Encrypted Text
Decrypt
(possessor of private key only)
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Benefit: User Convenience
• Fewer passwords!
• Consistent mechanism for authentication that
they only have to learn once. (UT Houston
Medical Center users now request that all
network services use PKI authentication.)
• Same user credentials for authentication,
digital signatures, and encryption – lots of
payback for user’s effort to acquire and
manage the credentials.
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Benefit: Coherent Enterprise-Wide
Security Administration
• Centralized issuance and revocation of user
credentials (goes hand in hand with identity
management).
• Consistent identity checking when issuing
certificates.
• Same authentication mechanism for all
network services.
• Leverage investment in tokens or smart cards
across many applications.
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Interoperability With Other
Institutions
• Inter-institution trust allows identity verification
and encryption using credentials issued by a
trusted collaborating institution:
– Signed forms and documents for business process
(e.g. grant applications, financial aid forms,
government reports)
– Signed and encrypted email from a colleague at
another school
– Authentication to applications shared among
consortiums of schools
– Peer to peer authentication for secure information
sharing
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Standards Based Solution
• Standards provide interoperability among
multiple vendors and open source.
• Wide variety of implementations available
and broad coverage of application space.
• Level playing field for open source and new
vendors – promotes innovation and healthy
competition.
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Unequaled Client and Server Support
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Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris, UNIX
Software and hardware key storage
Commercial and open source
Development libraries, toolkits and applications
Certificate Authority, directory, escrow, revocation, and
other infrastructure tools
• Apache, Oracle, IIS, SSL, Web Services, Shibboleth, etc.
• Applications from: Microsoft, Sun, Cisco, IBM, BEA,
RSA, Verisign, DST, Entrust, AOL, Adobe, Infomosaic,
Aladdin, Schlumberger, and many others
• For more about applications of PKI:
www.dartmouth.edu/~deploypki/applications.html
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Momentum Outside Higher Education
• Industry support for PKI
• Federal and State governments major adopters
• Microsoft, Johnson and Johnson, Disney, heavy
industry adopters
• Major deployment in Europe
• China pushing WAPI wireless authentication
that requires PKI
• Web Services (SAML uses PKI signed
assertions)
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Likely Federal Opportunities
• FBCA, HEBCA bridge projects
• Proof of concept NIH EDUCAUSE project to
demonstrate digitally signing documents for
submission to the Federal government
• Possible DOE, NSF, NIH applications for
Higher Education?
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Dartmouth PKI Lab
• R&D to make PKI a practical component of
campus networks
• Multi-campus collaboration sponsored by the
Mellon Foundation
• Dual objectives:
– Deploy existing PKI technology to improve network
applications (both at Dartmouth and elsewhere).
– Improve the current state of the art.
• Identify security issues in current products.
• Develop solutions to the problems.
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Production PKI Applications at
Dartmouth
• Dartmouth certificate authority
– Over 700 end user certificates
issued, 483 of them for students
• Authentication for:
– Banner Student Information
System
– Library Electronic Journals
– Tuck School of Business Portal
– VPN Concentrator
• S/MIME email (Outlook,
Mozilla, Thunderbird)
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Second Wave of PKI Deployment at
Dartmouth
Actively developing:
• Authentication for:
– Blackboard Course Management System
– Software downloads
• Hardware tokens
– Required for VPN access to secured subnets
• Higher assurance certificates (picture ID check)
• We plan to reach all Dartmouth users with PKI
through continued deployment of applications and
increasing incentives and requirement for its use
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Investigation and Research
• Greenpass: pilot of delegation of PKI
authentication credentials for wireless 802.1x
guest access
– Supported by Cisco
• Wireless authentication
– 802.1x authentication EAP-TLS (PKI) on Windows
and Macintosh
– WEP or improved WPA encryption
– These work well but requires up to date drivers (and
sometimes recent hardware/firmware for WPA)
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“Open Source CA in a Box”
• A hardened open source CA (based on OpenCA) bundle suitable
for trial and (initially) simple deployment.
• “Enforcer” TPM-hardened Linux (product of PKI Lab research)
– Controversial TCPA technology turned to use for good and freedom
– Secures Linux boot process and provides much enhanced run-time
protection against hackers
– Useful for any Linux server application
– slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/10/0255245
• Packaging for easy installation
• Carefully chosen enhancements to OpenCA
– Documentation
– Enhanced private key protection
– Added features
• We welcome feedback on requirements, contributions, testing, etc!
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Deploying PKI
• PKI is a significant undertaking and requires planning
and commitment.
• Get buy in and support from management, legal, audit,
others – a little fear in today’s cyber world is healthy.
• Architect carefully, follow examples of others.
• Choose your initial applications carefully.
• Deploy in phases, plan for future extensibility.
• Remember, PKI ROI is excellent when leveraged
broadly, but probably not strong for individual
applications - take a long term view.
• More detailed project plan and how to information for
deploying PKI:
www.dartmouth.edu/~deploypki/deploying/
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Outreach
• Many presentations
– www.dartmouth.edu/~deploypki/events.html
• Planning a PKI Deployment Summit
• Working with schools deploying PKI
– PKI’s inexpensive 2-factor authentication proving an
attractive proposition
• Deployment partners:
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University of Wisconsin
University of Minnesota
University of Texas
Others getting started (USC, Yale, Brown)
• March/April EDUCAUSE Review “New Horizons”
article
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Blatant Advertisement
• Please check out our outreach web at:
www.dartmouth.edu/~deploypki (still growing, but
already has a lot of useful information)
• We seek a few schools that we can assist as you
deploy PKI credentials and applications for end
users! An explicit part of our mission is to directly
assist as you in the planning/justification,
implementation, and deployment phases. Mark
Franklin and others from the PKI Lab can work
directly and extensively with your team.
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For More Information
• Outreach web:
www.dartmouth.edu/~deploypki
• Dartmouth PKI Lab
PKI Lab information:
www.dartmouth.edu/~pkilab
Dartmouth user information, getting a certificate:
www.dartmouth.edu/~pki
Mark.J.Franklin@dartmouth.edu
I’ll happily send copies of these slides upon request.
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