W3C VCDM verification vulnerable to DoS from RDFC canonicalization
Original title: A Security Analysis of Verifiable Credential Verification Pipelines: Attack Surface Arising from JSON-LD/RDFC Canonicalization Compared with SD-JWT VC and mdoc
Poison graphs raise W3C VCDM canonicalization cost 278x causing DoS
The paper evaluates verification pipelines for SD-JWT VC, W3C VCDM, and mdoc. It identifies DoS, context injection, and SSRF in W3C VCDM due to RDFC-1.0 canonicalization. A poison graph with symmetric blank nodes forces deep recursion. Mitigations include static loaders and context allowlists. SD-JWT and mdoc resist these vectors.
- Poison graph causes 278x baseline cost
- Every attack aborts at call limit 16
- Legitimate credentials complete at limit 1
- SD-JWT VC and mdoc need no canonicalization
From the original article
1 min read at arxiv.orgWe evaluate, at implementation level and under an explicit threat model, the verification pipelines of three Verifiable Credential (VC) formats: SD-JWT VC; the W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model 2. 0 with the Data Integrity cryptosuite eddsa-rdfc-2022 (W3C VCDM); and mdoc (ISO/IEC 18013-5). For W3C VCDM we identify and exercise three structural attack surfaces from remote context resolution and RDFC-1.
By Naohiro Fujie · arxiv.org
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