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Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates

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Re: Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates

#71

Post by 0x0 »

cm2187 wrote: post #64
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the solution to big banks and big CAs? We are just in the process of collectively creating the biggest CA the world ha sver seen.

The solution for big banks is the orderly failure. Things like bail-in, where a bank is required to be able to go through a flash chapter-11 process over a week end. Or the "living will", basically the bank preparing a contingency plan in advance if it needs to wind down its activity. In the CA world, I would assume this would require a standard protocol across CA to request, renew and transfer certificates from CA p…

Transferring certificates from an untrustworthy CA makes no sense. Burn the certificates. Websites should just obtain brand new ones from a different CA. If you are running a website that's important to you, this should be at most a one hour operation (or, if politics and procedures delay you in obtaining a new cert, maybe you should have planned ahead and kept two different certificates on hand already)

Re: Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates

#72

Post by tajen »

joosters wrote: post #53
Kadin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should just pull the rug out. Site operators need to be more aware of which CAs they're using, and need to feel some of the pain from the failure if they're going to shop for CAs based on anything except price. The behavior of consumers in the certificate marketplace is part of the systemic problem: nobody cares very much about their CA, as long as it causes the little padlock to display correctly (and, mo…

Site operators need to be more aware of which CAs they're using How? I've got no way to judge the security / responsibility of any CA. The amount of money that they charge may have no relation to their behaviour. I don't think anyone has claimed that the CAs who issued wrong certs were charging less than their competitors. You can't blame the CA customers for this.

One sign is that if Symantec has issued rogue certificates, and Google publishes the problem, then it's time to leave.

Of course, the CA would then be incentivized to publish their procedures and show how they intend to fix the breach, which shouldn't have happened in the first place, to regain customer's trust. Or go bankrupt. Let me tell you they wouldn't let their employees do mistakes.

Customers who stay, in the situation that it is discovered that Symantec issues another rogue cert, which causes Mozilla to completely revoke Symantec, can later sue Symantec for harming their business by not applying their public procedures. And here's how the economy gets rid of bad actors. The rule is much tougher for cloud machine providers (EC2 and DO): Should they lose one customers' data, everyone would leave them and go bankrupt, that's why they don't.

In parallel, losing a CA doesn't harm the customers very much, even for amazon.com. They can buy a new certificate in a matter of hours. bzbarsky even says it's commonplace to have the certificates signed by 2 CAs.

Re: Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates

#73

Post by cm2187 »

0x0 wrote: post #71
cm2187 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution for big banks is the orderly failure. Things like bail-in, where a bank is required to be able to go through a flash chapter-11 process over a week end. Or the "living will", basically the bank preparing a contingency plan in advance if it needs to wind down its activity. In the CA world, I would assume this would require a standard protocol across CA to request, renew and transfer certificates from CA p…

Transferring certificates from an untrustworthy CA makes no sense. Burn the certificates. Websites should just obtain brand new ones from a different CA. If you are running a website that's important to you, this should be at most a one hour operation (or, if politics and procedures delay you in obtaining a new cert, maybe you should have planned ahead and kept two different certificates on hand already)

By transferring I meant re-issuing automatically a new certificate, not keeping the signature. Of course this requires to re-authenticate the request. And that process has to be automated. A bit like the renewal of the certificate should also be automated.

Re: Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates

#74

Post by icebraining »

ak217 wrote: post #55
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the solution to big banks and big CAs? We are just in the process of collectively creating the biggest CA the world ha sver seen.

I see two solutions to big CAs. One is to reengineer the CA trust system to delegate limited authority to CAs (e.g. there is no good reason for a CA in the US to be able to sign certificates with Chinese TLD CNs, and vice versa). The second is to build out the Certificate Transparency project to the point where the revocation of trust due to a mis-issued certificate is immediate, widespread, and automatic.

(e.g. there is no good reason for a CA in the US to be able to sign certificates with Chinese TLD CNs, and vice versa).

Sure there is. If you have a .cn domain but don't trust Chinese companies not to MITM your site, you can get a cert from a foreign CA and then pin it using the HSTS preload list.

That way, even if the registry hijacks the domain and sends people to a server with a valid (but fraudulent) cert, you're still protected by the pin.

Re: Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates

#75

Post by rblatz »

aianus wrote: post #54
rblatz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I attempted to remove all StartCom certs from the OS X keychain, apparently you can't do it even as root. You have to boot into the recovery partition first. http://superuser.com/questions/1070664/security-seckeychaini... Edit: Don't delete them, instead right click each certificate, select "Get Info", Expand the "Trust" panel, and set it to "Never Trust"

You don't have to remove them, you can just set the 'Trust' setting to 'Never Trust'.

Thanks! I assumed that was an option I just didn't see it at first.

Re: Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates

#76

Post by 794CD01 »

icebraining wrote: post #74
ak217 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see two solutions to big CAs. One is to reengineer the CA trust system to delegate limited authority to CAs (e.g. there is no good reason for a CA in the US to be able to sign certificates with Chinese TLD CNs, and vice versa). The second is to build out the Certificate Transparency project to the point where the revocation of trust due to a mis-issued certificate is immediate, widespread, and automatic.

(e.g. there is no good reason for a CA in the US to be able to sign certificates with Chinese TLD CNs, and vice versa). Sure there is. If you have a .cn domain but don't trust Chinese companies not to MITM your site, you can get a cert from a foreign CA and then pin it using the HSTS preload list. That way, even if the registry hijacks the domain and sends people to a server with a valid (but fraudulent) cert, you're…

If you don't "trust Chinese companies not to MITM your site" then why do you trust CNNIC enough that you decided to register your domain in .cn?

Re: Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates

#77

Post by 0x0 »

cm2187 wrote: post #73
0x0 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transferring certificates from an untrustworthy CA makes no sense. Burn the certificates. Websites should just obtain brand new ones from a different CA. If you are running a website that's important to you, this should be at most a one hour operation (or, if politics and procedures delay you in obtaining a new cert, maybe you should have planned ahead and kept two different certificates on hand already)

By transferring I meant re-issuing automatically a new certificate, not keeping the signature. Of course this requires to re-authenticate the request. And that process has to be automated. A bit like the renewal of the certificate should also be automated.

No, existing certificates should not be reissued. We can't trust that they were issued to the rightful owner originally by the failed CA. Clients should request new certificates and validate their ownership from scratch.

Getting a certificate is an hour's work tops if you are doing the csr dance manually. If you use ACME and letsencrypt it's done in seconds.

EV certificates are more work but if this matters to you then perhaps you should source multiple certificates to begin with, or act quickly when a CA is dropped (I'm sure browser vendors will give at least a few days notice)

Edit: Maybe I misunderstood you. If you just meant that software in general should offer requesting certificates from any provider, then sure, why not just use ACME. CertBot appears to be designed with multiple providers in mind. But this doesn't really have much to do specificially with the case of CAs being dropped from the root. (At first I got the impression you wanted other CAs to "bail out" certificates from the revoked CA)

Re: Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates

#78

Post by zeveb »

Kadin wrote: post #39
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the solution to big banks and big CAs? We are just in the process of collectively creating the biggest CA the world ha sver seen.

I think we should just pull the rug out. Site operators need to be more aware of which CAs they're using, and need to feel some of the pain from the failure if they're going to shop for CAs based on anything except price. The behavior of consumers in the certificate marketplace is part of the systemic problem: nobody cares very much about their CA, as long as it causes the little padlock to display correctly (and, mo…

> Site operators need to be more aware of which CAs they're using, and need to feel some of the pain from the failure if they're going to shop for CAs based on anything except price.

Why? CAs just operate as a tax on sites. Having a certificate doesn't buy a site much; it's typically more for the _users'_ convenience, since they are the ones relying on the CA.

Really, users should pay CAs (probably indirectly), and CAs should issue certs for free. But I doubt that'll ever happen.

Re: Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates

#79

Post by koolba »

mariuolo wrote: post #63
koolba wrote: post #32

Too big to fail my ass. There's no such thing when it comes to security. If anything, that's more reason to cut them loose. If a CA pulls shit like this they need to be revoked immediately and let the wrath of 1000s of businesses that are impacted by cert warnings rain down upon them. That will 1) Solve the security problem immediately and 2) Publicize what it means to get a cert from a crap CA that doesn't care abou…

I won't comment on the specifics of this case, but a more nuanced approach regarding security is preferable because it favours transparency. If a vendor/CA/whatever knows that they will die if anything comes out, they will bury things like this even deeper.

> I won't comment on the specifics of this case, but a more nuanced approach regarding security is preferable because it favours transparency.

Certificate Transparency solves a lot of this already. It'd be nice if you could flag your domain as being only acceptable from a CA of your choosing. I don't even think the false positives would be an issue as worst case you have security conscious customers not coming to your site (i.e. you make the business decision).

> If a vendor/CA/whatever knows that they will die if anything comes out, they will bury things like this even deeper.

There's already ways to handle this. Rather than signing everything with your top level cert, you sign a series of intermediate certs and use those to sign the end user keys. The intermediate certificates would be rolled over every N days and creation of new ones should happen offline (i.e. where you keep your master CA cert, the "approved" one).

If you have a system like that in place before shit hits the fan, the damage is isolated to the impacted intermediate certs which could be selectively revoked/blacklisted. If a CQ has not taken those precautions then they've got no recourse when something like this happens.

From a user's perspective, I wouldn't want my browser/OS/app to trust any certificates from these losers. If they can't isolate the damage that's their and their customer's problem. I'm not going to compromise my security for their sake.

Re: Chinese CA WoSign faces revocation after possibly issuing fake certificates

#80

Post by 794CD01 »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #49
privong wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you don't punish ... ppl who don't do research first, things will deteriorate rapidly. Is there a way customers would have or could have known beforehand that this CA was fishy? I agree that the CA should be punished/ostracized, but it isn't obvious to me that most of its customers would have known they were a fishy CA.

on first google search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8982013 " It's 2015. They're using SHA-1 for everything (NOOOO!). They're based in China, which has just said it wants to ban encryption. It looks like they've messed up OSCP, so even their own cert doesn't pass. Oh, and RC4, TLS 1.0 "

Politicians in the US and UK have also claimed they want to ban encryption. Unless the CA is literally run by the government (which some Chinese CAs are, but not this one), it doesn't make sense to penalize them for dumb things their country's politicians say.
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