In terms of HSTS implementations, it’s now been implemented in the mainline Firefox code by Sid Stamm, and is supported in the Firefox 4 beta 6 and later. Note that HSTS is already a feature in Google Chrome as of version 4.

=JeffH sez check it out 😉

The HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) spec is now an IETF Internet-Draft, and available here (for now; more about that below): http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hodges-strict-transport-sec

We had a successful “HASMAT” (for “HTTP Application Security Minus Authentication & Transport”) BoF at IETF-78 Maastricht last July, which has resulted in the formation of a new IETF Working Group: WebSec. Plus, the HSTS spec, and two others, were adopted as working group items.

Yea!

So this means I need to get off my butt and edit the HSTS spec such that it’s a proper “working group (internet-)draft” and get it published….

Back in May (apologies for latency, we’ve had a busy summer/fall), Andy Steingruebl and I presented our paper, “The Need for a Coherent Web Security Policy Framework” (slides), at the Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2010 Workshop. It seemed to be relatively well received (the abstract is below). There were a number of interesting papers at the workshop, browsing the workshop pages is encouraged 🙂

Since then, we’ve been waving our paper around and pursuing the action items outlined therein with some modest success, which I’ll outline in subsequent posts.

=JeffH sez check it out…

Abstract

Web-based malware and attacks are proliferating rapidly on the Internet. New web security mechanisms are also rapidly growing in number, although in an incoherent fashion. In this position paper, we give a brief overview of the ravaged web security landscape, and the various seemingly piece-wise approaches being taken to mitigate the threats. We then propose that with some cooperation, we can likely architect approaches that are more easily wielded and provide extensibility for the future. We provide thoughts on where and how to begin coordinating the work.

I can’t do a detailed post right now, pointing to announcement message and the spec itself will have to do. This is what I’ve been working on since joining PayPal…

fyi: Strict Transport Security specification
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2009JulSep/1148.html

draft-hodges-strict-transport-sec-05.plain.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Sep/0051.html

This specification embodies and refines the approach proposed in..

ForceHTTPS: Protecting High-Security Web Sites from Network Attacks
https://crypto.stanford.edu/forcehttps/forcehttps.pdf

=JeffH sez check it out!

Ok, my apologies for latency, this is somewhat old news, but I haven’t as yet “announced” it: I landed at PayPal, in the Information Risk Management organization under Michael Barrett (“InfoSec Team” for short), back in March.

I’m very excited to be working at one of the premier web-based organizations and also directly in the security end of things. I now get to be involved in the adoption and deployment of the various online identity and security technologies I’ve been contributing to for many years, as well as contribute to carrying them forward, and also learn some new things.

The latter has been a fair bit of work and steep learning curve as it has involved “web (in)security”, which is a vast swamp involving XSS, CSRF, response-splitting, clickjacking, etc. (hence my crawling into a cave the last several months). And not least, I’ve been very much enjoying meeting and working with key folks involved in web security and browser implementation.

And so with the public announcement of the first web security specification that I’ve contributed to (see next post), it seemed I ought to really pop this frame to the top of the stack and get it out there 8^).

Some colleagues (Josh Howlett, Leif Johansson, RL “Bob” Morgan) and I had the good fortune to help the MIT Kerberos Consortium (MITKC) with some analysis and strategy planning for the (broad) topic of “Kerberos and the Web”, during this last Fall 2008. The main deliverables of this project are this document..

Towards Kerberizing Web Identity and Services
http://kerberos.org/software/kerbweb.pdf

..and this presentation..

Kerberos for the Web: Current State and Leverage Points
http://kerberos.org/events/Board-11-3-08/4-KerberosandWeb.pdf

..given at the MITKC’s Financial Services Security Summit and MIT Kerberos Consortium Executive Advisory Board Meeting last Fall.

Of course, these documents may not make much sense if one doesn’t know what Kerberos is, so if that’s the case, this brief tutorial ought to be helpful, as well as the Kerberos entry on Wikipedia. Additionally, the MITKC has published a series of Kerberos whitepapers outlining Kerberos’ role(s) in the Big Picture of information systems in general, as well as various best practices.

That said, the MITKC’s announcement of the document provides overall rationale for their Kerberos-on-the-Web project. They have also established a new public mailing list for technical discussions on this topic.

Additionally, here’s the salient portions of the paper’s abstract..

Today authentication and authorization are addressed in an incoherent, and often site-specific, fashion on the Internet and the Web specifically. This situation stems from many factors including the evolution, design, implementation, and deployment history of HTTP and HTTP-based systems in particular, and Internet protocols in general.

Kerberos is a widely-implemented and widely-deployed authentication substrate with a long history in various communities and vendor products. Organizations that currently use Kerberos as a key element of their infrastructure wish to take advantage of its unique benefits while moving to Web-based systems, but have had limited success in doing so.     …

In this paper we outline the evolution of Web Identity and Services and describe the issues surrounding this complex landscape. These issues are captured within a set of more specific requirements that are deemed necessary to satisfy the relevant stakeholders; these requirements are then framed within the context of some general use cases. We then propose and describe a number of activities that leverage Kerberos to realize these improvements, and present an overall strategy and architectural model for working towards a more cohesive and widely deployed Kerberos-based Web authentication infrastructure.

Casual readers may find the section entitled A Short History of Web Identity and Services interesting, while those desiring the gory details as well as the identified opportunities will benefit from reading the entire paper. Here’s the overall summary illustration..

Summary of opportunities for Kerberos and the Web Architecture

In concluding, we recommend that in conjunction with developing an overall strategy and architecture with stakeholders, that the MITKC ought to initiate at least these activities..

• Specify the use of Kerberos with TLS
• SAML-in-Kerberos: Extend Kerberos to permit the inclusion of a SAML assertion in KDC issued authorization data
• Kerberos-in-SAML: SAML profile supporting the generation of SAML assertions containing Kerberos tickets
• Update WS-Security Kerberos Token Profile specification
• Leverage SAML metadata to enable large-scale Kerberos cross-realm communities”), and
• Investigate, document and promote existing methods of using Kerberos to authenticate against a SAML identity provider

Discussion of this paper and the MITKC’s overall Kerberos-and-the-Web project occurs on the (new) mitkc-web@mit.edu mailing list. Feel free to subscribe and join in.