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StartEncrypt considered harmful today

computest.nl

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Re: StartEncrypt considered harmful today

#11

Post by philsnow »

Certificate authorities are the (shaky af) basis of the entire trust chain of the web.

Because its root certificate is in everybody's CA bundle, StartCom had a moral responsibility to understand the security around this product. This is negligence.

I don't have any StartCom certificates right now, but I sure won't have any in the future after this display.

What would a "CA death penalty" look like? They're a "root" CA, is there an entity that signed their root certificate that could issue a revocation? Or would we have to get all the OS and browser vendors to agree to phase out their root after some time?

Re: StartEncrypt considered harmful today

#12

Post by Ruud-v-A »

I distrusted all StartCom certificates anyway after 2014; StartCom is a rogue CA who certify the authenticity of sites which they know have been compromised. Read the story here: https://web.archive.org/web/20140412085458/https://revokame.... (the original page disappeared mysteriously a few days after the story was published). And the HN thread about the incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7577290

Re: StartEncrypt considered harmful today

#14

Post by rocqua »

Is there any way to semi-blacklist CAs in the browser?

I'd like to be warned about certificates from certain CAs without access to that site being blocked. That way I can still reach these sites, but know not to trust them with confidential data. It also allows me to ask those sites to use a CA I trust.

The point being to be able to punish CAs less harshly than the death-sentence that is root removal.

Re: StartEncrypt considered harmful today

#15

Post by arcticfox »

mafuy wrote: post #4
Confiks wrote: post #2

tl;dr: StartSSL would issue certificates for sites like Github and Dropbox, and practically any site offering OAuth2, without having to have control over the domain. StartEncrypt by StartCom/StartSSL has a LetsEncrypt-like verification process wherin the ownership of the domain is verified by doing a HTTP request, and having the listening webserver return a specific token. The problem was that they allowed the user t…

Thank you. Wow.

Woah. I have zero security experience or acumen and I probably could have found that vulnerability. Remarkably poor.

Re: StartEncrypt considered harmful today

#16

Post by schoen »

sigio wrote: post #3

Shame that these elemental security issues were present in the first case, and that StartCom went live with such an 'untested' and 'unaudited' product without doing a public-beta like Lets-Encrypt did (with non-trusted-by-default certificates).

During Let's Encrypt's beta, the certificates were already publicly trusted.

Re: StartEncrypt considered harmful today

#17

Post by mnx »

rocqua wrote: post #14

Is there any way to semi-blacklist CAs in the browser? I'd like to be warned about certificates from certain CAs without access to that site being blocked. That way I can still reach these sites, but know not to trust them with confidential data. It also allows me to ask those sites to use a CA I trust. The point being to be able to punish CAs less harshly than the death-sentence that is root removal.

Yeah, I'd like that too. For a while I was running with StartSSL removed entirely, but eventually I run into sites that used them, that I just couldn't live without.

Re: StartEncrypt considered harmful today

#18

Post by ultramancool »

Welcome to the world of certificate authorities, where the dumbest decision maker means the whole system is a joke.

If you're a government authority or even just a individual looking to get a nice signed certificate for some big domains you need look no further than that giant CA list. Any one of thousands. It's damn hard to have one developer write something reasonably secure, how hard do you think it is to have thousands write everything perfect?

Re: StartEncrypt considered harmful today

#19

Post by sp332 »

schoen wrote: post #16
sigio wrote: post #3

Shame that these elemental security issues were present in the first case, and that StartCom went live with such an 'untested' and 'unaudited' product without doing a public-beta like Lets-Encrypt did (with non-trusted-by-default certificates).

During Let's Encrypt's beta, the certificates were already publicly trusted.

They were untrusted for about a month at least. September 14 - October 19 https://letsencrypt.org/blog/

Re: StartEncrypt considered harmful today

#20

Post by raimue »

GavinMcG wrote: post #13

Is there a guide out there for how browser users can protect themselves from untrustworthy CAs?

First of all, how do you define "untrustworthy"? Usually you delegate that decision to your browser vendor or OS distribution. If you no longer trust them for a specific CA, why trust them for any of the others?

Browsers may rely on the certificate store and trust settings provided by your OS. For example, Firefox always uses their own certificate store, while Chrome relies on the system.

certsimple has this guide on how to remove or distrust certificates in various browsers:

https://certsimple.com/blog/control-the-ssl-cas-your-browser...

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