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Let's Encrypt is Trusted

letsencrypt.org

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Re: Let's Encrypt is Trusted

#221

Post by IgorPartola »

rplnt wrote: post #216
harshreality wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New wannabe CA Entity B can approach an established CA entity A, convince A to sign B's root or intermediate cert, and then B can forge browser-trusted certs for every SSL website on the net that's not pinned. In this case, B is LetsEncrypt and is (hopefully) pretty solid, but that isn't always the case. Earlier this year, it became known that CNNIC had issued a CA cert to MCS Holdings (of Egypt), which then did bad…

Is it (technically) possible to limit CAs validity to certain subset of.. something? I.e. certain CAs could only be used to verify limited number of.. domains? something?

AFAIK, no it's not. However, this is the solution as far as I see it. When you buy a domain name from a registrar they should give you a mini-CA that's valid for just that domain for as long as the domain is registered. Then it's up to you to create and sign any certs for any subdomains. This would cut out the CA businesses entirely, enabled security-by-default, and simplify the whole system.

Re: Let's Encrypt is Trusted

#222

Post by sarciszewski »

mehrdada wrote: post #66
sarciszewski wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's Encrypt isn't the first to offer free TLS certificates. I've attempted to maintain a list of all the providers that do (in one way or another), and it's currently 4: * CloudFlare https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl * StartSSL https://startssl.com * WoSign https://buy.wosign.com/free * Let's Encrypt https://letsencrypt.org For people reading this comment dozens of months in the future, a maintained list will be kept…

They are not quite the same thing: * CloudFlare doesn't give you a certificate. It terminates your TLS connection at their endpoint with a certificate they own the private key to. * StartSSL free tier is for non-commerical use only. * Haven't used WoSign so no idea what it is, but clicking on the link took was so laggy it didn't give me much confidence. (I personally wouldn't work with a company in China jurisdiction…

> (I personally wouldn't work with a company in China jurisdiction when it comes to security products.)

I could say the same for most countries.

Re: Let's Encrypt is Trusted

#223

Post by LukeShu »

axx wrote: post #200

The big question: Does this mean we can now all use Let's Encrypt to generate new certificates without people running into problems?

"Yes", except that general availability doesn't come until the week of November 16th.

Re: Let's Encrypt is Trusted

#224

Post by Gregordinary »

alwillis wrote: post #158
peterwwillis wrote: post #127

Remember that you only need one of the hundreds of CAs (650 at my last count) to generate you a cert to essentially compromise a site's connection security. Free certs mean more sites will use TLS, which means there will be more targets, which means more incentive to start attacking the weakest CAs and/or their verification practices. But this is kind of a good thing, because after enough attacks on the old model, pe…

Thanks to HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP), this is no longer a threat: HTTP Public Key Pinning, or HPKP, is a security policy delivered via a HTTP response header much like HSTS and CSP. It allows a host to provide information to a user agent about which cryptographic identities it should accept from the host in the future. This can protect a host website from a security compromise at a Certificate Authority where rog…

It isn't foolproof, user installed Root CAs or roots installed by 3rd party applications are given permission to override pins. So HPKP wouldn't protect against scenarios like Superfish.

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/05/04/pinning.html

Re: Let's Encrypt is Trusted

#225

Post by grhmc »

rplnt wrote: post #216
harshreality wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New wannabe CA Entity B can approach an established CA entity A, convince A to sign B's root or intermediate cert, and then B can forge browser-trusted certs for every SSL website on the net that's not pinned. In this case, B is LetsEncrypt and is (hopefully) pretty solid, but that isn't always the case. Earlier this year, it became known that CNNIC had issued a CA cert to MCS Holdings (of Egypt), which then did bad…

Is it (technically) possible to limit CAs validity to certain subset of.. something? I.e. certain CAs could only be used to verify limited number of.. domains? something?

Yes using "Name Constraints" but that RFC / extension is really broken, and implementations don't support it. See 4.2.1.10 of https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5280.

Re: Let's Encrypt is Trusted

#226

Post by dheera »

Spooky23 wrote: post #212
lorddoig wrote: post #81

Being told that you now trust someone with your secrets via a news website is a pleasingly succinct display of everything that's wrong with the CA model.

You would like to buy a knitted scarf from a yak herder in Ecuador. How do you propose that establish trust between you and the yak guy without an intermediary?

Pictures of the yak sent by Snapchat, of course.

Re: Let's Encrypt is Trusted

#227

Post by UserRights »

The headline is wrong and not very clever for such a project.

The project was able to get a CA to sign their keys, this is what happened. Using the word "trust" is simply wrong and might be interpreted as a too simple kind of propaganda after we learned a lot about the untrustable nature of a hierarchical certification infrastructure.

Another, even bigger trust-breaking elephant in the room is the fact that this project is USA based - as long as US government and agencies are insisting on practices we know from authoritarian and anti-democratic states like e.g. China or Saudi-Arabia there is no way any US based project can use the word "trust" for their product description - it might be recognized as a simple lie by informed people.

Questions to the project leaders:

* you must obey US laws and therefore offer MITM access to every Let's-Encrypt "trusted" network stream - why aren't you educating your users about this serious limitation of your product?

* why don't you rebase your project to a country where a government policy exists that is allowing companies to build trustable security based products?

Re: Let's Encrypt is Trusted

#228

Post by aianus »

jnbiche wrote: post #205
aianus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty much everyone except maybe the site administrator won't notice and won't consider it a problem when a lock icon is shown instead of a green bar. I don't know if it's worth the money per se, but you can pin a couple of trusted CA root EV certs via HPKP and know it's much more difficult for someone to "accidentally" issue a valid cert for your site. If you do that, users won't see a lock instead of a green bar…

You can pin any certs via HPKP, including self-signed ones. The only security feature EV certs have over regular ones right now is the use of certificate transparency, but that should be extended to non-EV certs within 1-2 years.

No, the security feature is that if you only pin, say, Verisign EV root and Digicert EV root then an attacker would have to pass EV validation at those vendors. Which is much more difficult to do than to get any cert anywhere.

You could pin your own cert, but that makes it difficult to rotate keys in a heartbleed type situation.

Re: Let's Encrypt is Trusted

#229

Post by andrewmcwatters »

UserRights wrote: post #227

The headline is wrong and not very clever for such a project. The project was able to get a CA to sign their keys, this is what happened. Using the word "trust" is simply wrong and might be interpreted as a too simple kind of propaganda after we learned a lot about the untrustable nature of a hierarchical certification infrastructure. Another, even bigger trust-breaking elephant in the room is the fact that this proj…

I just want free TLS dude.

Re: Let's Encrypt is Trusted

#230

Post by ckozlowski »

dheera wrote: post #226
Spooky23 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would like to buy a knitted scarf from a yak herder in Ecuador. How do you propose that establish trust between you and the yak guy without an intermediary?

Pictures of the yak sent by Snapchat, of course.

I'm imagining snickering goats on the other end, uploading yak photos from a stock image website. =)
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