Strengthening Web3 Authentication Against Blind Message Attacks Through Enhanced Analysis and Protocol-Level Defenses

Abstract

Web3 authentication has become a key to the decentralized applications and allows users to sign in using cryptographic wallet signatures rather than centralized credentials. Nevertheless, recent research has shown that the current Web3 authentication systems are very susceptible to message-based attacks especially Blind Message Attacks, which takes advantage of unclear message semantics, lack of domain binding, insecurity with nonce, and lack of verification on the server side. This paper critically examines those vulnerabilities based on realworld deployments of Web3 authentication and shows that a large percentage of extant implementations can be compromised by an attacker. In order to handle such issues, we present a configurable and deployable authentication model, the socalled Secure Web3 Authentication Framework (SWAF), that implements structured authentication messages, high message equality checking, nonce management in context-sensitive fashion, and protocol-level domain binding. The suggested scheme is tested on a real-world set of 29 Web3 authentication examples, in which it perfectly mitigates Blind Message Attacks, Replay Attacks, Blind Multi-Message Attacks, as well as, cross-domain authentication abuses keeping its computational overhead at only a small fraction. Our findings indicate that looking at protocol-level authentication semantics strictly is feasible and necessary to enhancing confidence and security in Web3 authentication schemes.