Rafael and others,

Thanks for putting this together.

Considering for a moment figure 1, this attack is possible only if UAs accept incoming requests from any place, and not just their proxy. In practice, this is seldom allowed. Indeed, if it is allowed, there are worse attacks than this which can be launched (free phone calls, spam calling, etc.). Using the SIP recommended TLS between UA and proxy also mitigates that.

So really figure 2 is the interesting one. However, this attack assumes that Alice has credentials on multiple systems. Again, in practice, this is extremely uncommon. Certainly none of the existing deployed enterprise or service provider consumer deployments are of this nature.

As such, I dont think this attack is likely in practice. However, in theory it is possible. The essence of the attack is that the victim is providing credentials to an unauthenticated server (since the attacker is acting like a server, asking for credentials). In that way, as others have pointed out, it is similar to baiting attacks that have been previously documented. With SIP it is most easily remedied by a rule which says, 'don't pass credentials for domain X to a server that is not domain X'. Server identity can be verified by normal server-only auth between a client and its server, but even that is not needed. A client will know which domain its proxy is representing, and once connected, it only provides credentials for that domain.

-Jonathan R.


Raphael Coeffic wrote:
Hello,

a new internet draft has been published concerning the relay attack on digest authentication and SIP. The attack itself has been first disclosed 2 years ago by the maydnes team from the french INRIA. Until now, no document has been pushlished that documents the attack and provides guidance to SIP operators or handset manufacturers.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-state-sip-relay-attack-00

The appropriate mitigations of problem resolutions are still not 100% clear. We hope that this draft can help start a discussion on how to best resolve this problem.


Regards,

Raphael Coeffic.
(on behalf of all the authors of this draft)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Filename:       draft-state-sip-relay-attack
Version:       00
Staging URL: http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/staging/draft-state-sip-relay-attack-00.txt
Title:           SIP digest authentication relay attack
Creation_date:       2009-03-02
WG ID:           Indvidual Submission
Number_of_pages: 18
Abstract:
The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP [RFC3261]) provides a mechanism
for creating, modifying, and terminating sessions with one or more
participants.  This document describes a vulnerability of SIP
combined with HTTP Digest Access Authentication [RFC2617] through
which an attacker can leverage the victim's credentials to send
authenticated requests on his behalf.  This attack is different from
the man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack and does not require any
eavesdropping, DNS or IP spoofing.



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Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D.                   111 Wood Avenue South
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