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WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

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Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#101

I'm not going to defend WoSign/StartCom's shady tactics, but the way the deprecation of SHA1 was performed puts people in a pretty shitty position. You can't support Windows XP users who use IE anymore with HTTPs. In the western world, that number is very small. It's around 1% still using XP and most of those people are probably not using IE anymore. In china though, that number is still >5%, and I got that number pe…

>You can't support Windows XP users who use IE anymore with HTTPs.

Not correct; you can't support Windows XP users who have not updated to SP3 yet. (Typically a pirated version which has all updates disabled...SP3 has been available since May 6, 2008)

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#102
post #63
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget things like certificate pinning which can make sites inaccessible for long durations of time if the user doesn't visit said website during this transition period. I'm not super convinced about the user security argument either. Sure, they backdated SHA-1 certificates and that's nasty but those certificates still expire at a reasonable time in the near future and will soon enough not be accepted by browsers…

Mozilla and the other browser developers' position seems to be that issuing SHA-1 certificates when they've said SHA-1 certificates should not be issued is a cardinal sin - never mind that this would break payments infrastructure. They eventually agreed to an exception process after Tyro's payments systems would presumably have stopped working if WoSign hadn't issued them a certificate.

The SHA-1 deprecation wasn't a secret: it was decided back in October, 2014. In February 2016, one provider basically said "oops, we screwed up, how can we get a SHA-1 certificate?", whereupon the answer was a one-off exception that would be notated as "yes, Symantec violated the rules, but everyone agreed to let this exception go through." This exception was converted into a more formal exceptions approval in June.

Tyro's certificate would have expired on June 9, 2016 if I'm reading the timeline right. There is nothing that would have prevented them from doing what WorldPay did and approach the CAB themselves, or become vigorously involved in the ongoing discussion (the proposal document for the process was made June 3, 2016).

On the other hand, as the IT mantra goes, failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency to plan on my part. The evidence is that Tyro updated its certs at the last minute, found that they couldn't get the SHA-1 they needed, and basically shopped around until they found someone who gave it to them (while lying about it!), instead of, say, making sure to request a certificate in late December to maximum the transition time available.

The great sin is not so much that they issued the SHA-1 certificate, but that they agreed not to do it, and when someone needed one, rather than bring it up with the CAB Forum, they issued one and lied about their compliance. The REALLY great sin is that they appear to have built an entire system to do the backdating, rather than applying one-offs.

Browsers can forgive CAs when they fess up to their mistakes. It's when they lie about them that they get really pissed off.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#103
post #95
post #13

>We also hope the public can see that when there are allegations of CA wrongdoing, Mozilla is committed to a fair, transparent and thorough investigation of the facts of each case. I'm very happy to see the way Mozilla handled this incident, both with the process and the conclusion. I have a moderate trust in the CA ecosystem as a whole, but I'm glad to see that overwhelming incompetence, if not outright maliciousnes…

My hope would be that since this method of punishing seems to be liked by most and even feels "generous" to some, the browser vendors would more aggressively start handing out "1 year suspensions" for more and more CAs that are caught doing anything even remotely like this. Then after a year or two, and after the CAs have learned that they need to take this stuff seriously, and yet some still get caught doing it, the…

The people saying this is "generous" are making largely irrational arguments. What Mozilla is proposing is the worst case for incumbent CAs.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#104

why is this google docs ? why is this not atleast a markdown file in github ?

This is a working draft of a findings document that's being actively edited. Google Docs allows for realtime cooperative collaboration, with nice features like chat and annotation of documents. There are a few other collaborative editing systems out there, but they tend to have more hitches than google docs'

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#105
I remember that there was some talk about double voting (WoSign and StartCom not being separate entities, but voting with two votes) in the mailing list. Is there a reason as to why this event hasn't been included in the document?

edit: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security...

> "In no case were these the deciding votes."

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#106
post #105

I remember that there was some talk about double voting (WoSign and StartCom not being separate entities, but voting with two votes) in the mailing list. Is there a reason as to why this event hasn't been included in the document? edit: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security... > "In no case were these the deciding votes."

It's in the wiki

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:WoSign_Issues

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#107
post #105

I remember that there was some talk about double voting (WoSign and StartCom not being separate entities, but voting with two votes) in the mailing list. Is there a reason as to why this event hasn't been included in the document? edit: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security... > "In no case were these the deciding votes."

The issue you're describing is a concern for the CA/B Forum, not really all that relevant for Mozilla/mozilla.dev.security.policy. That being said, the CA/B Forum seems to be discussing the issue[1].

[1]: https://twitter.com/sleevi_/status/780454860676149248

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#109
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what about all the modern browsers you also need to support?

It's possible to determine whether a client supports certificates using SHA-2 by analyzing the ClientHello and use that to switch between a SHA-1 and SHA-2 certificate. CloudFlare[1] and some of the bigger sites like Facebook have done this. [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/sha-1-deprecation-no-browser-lef...

And here's the technical detail of how we do it: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tls-certificate-optimization-tec....

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#110
Nuke it from orbit. The whole idea of PKI is Broken and Wrong and confuses two different goals.

Here's a fun one I noticed: Wells Fargo and several other banks are CAs. This is idiotic. The "logic" behind PKI dictates that it's a third party identifying my bank to me. If banks themselves are CAs even that fig leaf doesn't mean much.

We have known bad actors in the pool of widely accepted CAs, right now. There's no sense bringing up obscure possibilities of MitMs that might happen absent a CA system: we have bogus certs, in the wild, today. Nuke it from orbit and teach people to pin certificates.

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