Analysis of Signature Wrapping Attacks and Countermeasures

In recent research it turned out that Boolean verification of digital signatures in the context of WS-Security is likely to fail: If parts of a SOAP message are signed and the signature verification applied to the whole document returns true, then nevertheless the document may have been significantly altered. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis on the possible scenarios that enable these signature wrapping attacks. Derived from this analysis, we propose a new solution that uses a subset of XPath instead of ID attributes to point to the signed subtree, and show that this solution is both efficient and secure.