Chain of trust: Unraveling references among Common Criteria certified products

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to map and analyze dependencies among Common Criteria certified IT products, revealing key components that are heavily relied upon and could pose security risks if compromised.

Contribution

It develops a novel approach combining graph construction and machine learning to identify and measure dependencies among certified products.

Findings

Identified a small set of highly relied-upon certified components.

Quantified the extent of dependencies within the ecosystem.

Discussed security implications of critical reference points.

Abstract

With 5394 security certificates of IT products and systems, the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation have bred an ecosystem entangled with various kind of relations between the certified products. Yet, the prevalence and nature of dependencies among Common Criteria certified products remains largely unexplored. This study devises a novel method for building the graph of references among the Common Criteria certified products, determining the different contexts of references with a supervised machine-learning algorithm, and measuring how often the references constitute actual dependencies between the certified products. With the help of the resulting reference graph, this work identifies just a dozen of certified components that are relied on by at least 10% of the whole ecosystem -- making them a prime target for malicious actors. The impact of their compromise is assessed and potentially problematic references to archived products are discussed.