Survivable key compromise in software update systems
Abstract
Today's software update systems have little or no defense against key compromise. As a result, key compromises have put millions of software update clients at risk. Here we identify three classes of information whose authenticity and integrity are critical for secure software updates. Analyzing existing software update systems with our framework, we find their ability to communicate this information securely in the event of a key compromise to be weak or nonexistent. We also find that the security problems in current software update systems are compounded by inadequate trust revocation mechanisms. We identify core security principles that allow software update systems to survive key compromise. Using these ideas, we design and implement TUF, a software update framework that increases resilience to key compromise.
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The identifier is the domain-separated digest over the exact manifest digest, population, root grant, generation sequence, unique parent, and complete lineage-atom set; domain separation prevents a manifest digest, authorization record, or effect receipt from being reinterpreted as a generation identity; the fresh generation sequence makes two otherwise identical manifests distinct; a rollback may
“The identifier is the domain-separated digest in (1), over the exact manifest digest, population, root grant, generation sequence, unique parent, and complete lineage-atom set. Domain separation prevents a manifest digest, authorization record, or effect receipt from being reinterpreted as a generation identity. The fresh generation sequence makes two otherwise identical manifests distinct. A roll”
From Authorization for Self-Modifying AI Agent Populations: Conserving Authority across Replacement, Forking, and Rollback (2026) · cites this paper as [21]
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SoK: Taxonomy of Attacks on Open-Source Software Supply Chains
Ladisa, P., Plate, H., Martinez, M., & Barais, O. (2023) · 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) · doi:10.1109/sp46215.2023.10179304 · Cited by 208 · see citing works
Zhu, G., & Wang, C. (2026) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2610.00347
- Authors
- Samuel, J., Mathewson, N., Cappos, J., & Dingledine, R.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- The Tor Project (US)
- University of Washington (US)
- ORCID
- Cappos, Justin
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2010-10-04
- Pages
- 61-72
- ISSN
- 1543-7221 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2114016378
- Cited by
- 120
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 19 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 6
- FWCI
- 2.59
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Security and Verification in Computing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Cryptography and Data Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Advanced Authentication Protocols Security
- Keywords
- software updates, key compromise, tuf, authenticity, integrity, resilience engineering, digital signatures, certificate revocation
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