True2F: Backdoor-resistant authentication tokens
This addresses security vulnerabilities in authentication tokens for users and services, offering strong protection with backward compatibility, though it is incremental as it builds on existing U2F technology.
The paper tackles the problem of securing second-factor authentication against phishing, software compromise, token faults, and backdoors by introducing True2F, a system that achieves this with a 57ms authentication time on tokens, compared to 23ms for unprotected U2F.
We present True2F, a system for second-factor authentication that provides the benefits of conventional authentication tokens in the face of phishing and software compromise, while also providing strong protection against token faults and backdoors. To do so, we develop new lightweight two-party protocols for generating cryptographic keys and ECDSA signatures, and we implement new privacy defenses to prevent cross-origin token-fingerprinting attacks. To facilitate real-world deployment, our system is backwards-compatible with today's U2F-enabled web services and runs on commodity hardware tokens after a firmware modification. A True2F-protected authentication takes just 57ms to complete on the token, compared with 23ms for unprotected U2F.