Thomas Groß
Security analysis of the SAML single sign-on browser/artifact profile
Abstract
Many influential industrial players are currently
pursuing the development of new protocols for federated
identity management. The Security Assertion
Markup Language (SAML) is an important standardized
example of this new protocol class and will be
widely used in business-to-business scenarios to reduce
user-management costs. SAML utilizes a constraintbased
specification that is a popular design technique
of this protocol class. It does not include a general
security analysis, but provides an attack-by-attack
list of countermeasures as security consideration. We
present a security analysis of the SAML Single Sign-on
Browser/Artifact profile, which is the first one for such
a protocol standard. Our analysis of the protocol design
reveals several flaws in the specification that can lead
to vulnerable implementations. To demonstrate their impact,
we exploit some of these flaws to mount attacks on
the protocol.
In 19th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC 2003). IEEE Computer Society Press, 2003. copyright IEEE, 2003. Earlier version IBM Research Report RZ 3501 (#99427) 06/30/03, IBM Research Division, Zurich, June 2003.
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