TruWallet: trustworthy and migratable wallet-based web authentication

Abstract

Identity theft has fostered to a major security problem on the Internet, in particular stealing passwords for web applications through phishing and malware. We present TruWallet, a wallet-based authentication tool that improves previous solutions for protecting web-based authentication. In contrast to other wallet-based solutions, TruWallet provides (i) strong protection for users' credentials and sensitive data by cryptographically binding them to the user's platform configuration based on Trusted Computing technology, (ii) an automated login procedure where the server is authenticated independently from (SSL) certificates, thus limiting the possibility of attacks based on hijacked certificates and allowing less dependency on the SSL PKI model, and (iii) a secure migration protocol for transferring wallet data to other platforms. Our implementation uses a small virtualization-based security kernel with trusted computing support and works with standard SSL-based authentication solutions for the web, where only minor modifications and extensions are required. It is interoperable so that we can re-use existing operating systems and applications like web browsers.