Lecture, Keynote
Raluca Ada Popa
- The system, termed Blindbox HTTPS, is predicted to significantly impact industry usage by enabling deep packet inspection of encrypted traffic without decrypting the full payload, representing the first capability to allow middle boxes to inspect traffic without seeing the underlying content.
- Performance expectations include page load times increasing by 15 percent to 100 percent for short-lived connections, while SSL handshake latency is expected to remain negligible for long-lived enterprise-to-cloud connections; the detection speed is anticipated to be competitive with Snort, operating at network rates on the order of microseconds.
- Functional applications supported by the system include intrusion detection and prevention, parental filtering, watermark checking for exfiltrated documents, and the execution of sophisticated regular expressions and rules from vendors like McAfee or Lastline.
- The architecture relies on secure two-party computation to generate encrypted values quickly during the handshake, utilizing randomized encryption with salts to prevent frequency analysis attacks while allowing the middle box to learn only if a specific malicious string matches at a location without accessing other data.
- Implementation strategies involve precomputed and time-adaptable indexes built using AES hardware instructions, allowing for fast lookup and token-based detection where the middle box holds no decryption keys and endpoints do not receive rule visibility.
- The approach claims to resolve the tension between privacy and functionality by maintaining strong security guarantees comparable to well-studied notions, ensuring end-to-end SSL integrity without requiring fake certificates or breaking standard guarantees.
- Future outlooks suggest the technology will permeate current user applications, with the presenter asserting it is the first to demonstrate the feasibility of this security model despite the inherent challenges of running at high speeds on encrypted data.