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WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

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Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#191

Post by homero »

byuu wrote: post #175

Wow, this would be devastating if they actually went through with revoking their root certificate. StartCom is (well, was ) the only competition to Let's Encrypt in the free certificate space. It is far and away the cheapest direct provider of wildcard certificates (which are impossible to get for free), unless you move into reseller territory. And even their free certificates last four times as long, and don't requi…

True but you're forgetting that it may be cheap to cover up shady certs they throw in, distraction. Like all the money laundering resorts in Cancun.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#192

Post by mcpherrinm »

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #180
ylere wrote: post #61

Well shit. I always liked StarCom because of their approach to charge for verification (with increasing costs for each higher trust level) but not for issuing certs (while still manually checking every cert request, at least for any OV&EV cert in my case). This entire WoSign acquisition is incredibly shady. Shortly after that some of the customer reps had chinese names, service quality declined and we got offered to…

What would being an "Intermediate CA" actually mean in practise? Am I right in thinking I could generate my own certificates for any domain I wanted and have them validate in any browsers or devices that currently trust StartSSL/WoSign? Or to put it another way, would it give me the same powers as running my own internal CA but without the problem of convincing people to install my root-ca? I assume it _can't_ mean t…

I'm not sure about this specifics here, but this is a feature offered by some CAs:

They create a new intermediate, signed by their root, just for you. You then get to ask that CA to issue certs for you - and only you.

You don't have total control over the intermediate -- as you suggest, that would let you mitm everyone.

But by having an intermediate that you effectively control, you could have apps/devices/etc that trust only that intermediate (via pinning, HPKP, etc). That prevents a bunch of the possible downsides of using the public PKI (eg, a CA mis-issuing a cert for your domains), the downsides of pinning a leaf cert (because you can always issue another one off your intermediate if you change names, etc), and the downsides of a private PKI (because stuff that trusts the public PKI works too)

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#193

Post by agwa »

scrollaway wrote: post #182
agwa wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the founder of SSLMate, which resells Comodo and GeoTrust certs with an automated, ACME-like API: https://sslmate.com Our API predates ACME, but we'll most likely be implementing ACME once it's finalized.

What's your take on the Comodo trademark claim on Let's Encrypt, and all the BS that ensued? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11964583 I personally immediately replaced all of my and my company's comodo certificates with DigiCert ones.

The incident was terrible, but it is not a reflection on how their CA is run. They run a trustworthy CA and employ some really awesome and competent people (e.g. Rob Stradling) who actively contribute to improving the Web PKI, such as by (co-)authoring the CAA, Must-Staple, and Certificate Transparency standards. They run https://crt.sh, which is an invaluable resource for investigating Web PKI problems (the Mozilla report and associated mailing list threads are peppered with crt.sh links). If their trademark filings had amounted to actual legal threats against Let's Encrypt I would hesitate to send them business, but it seems more like their CEO is just a giant blowhard. The good they do makes up for it.

In contrast, I'm much more appalled by Symantec/GeoTrust's misdeeds (e.g. issuing unauthorized "test" certificates for google.com, badly botching the SHA-1 deprecation, cross-signing the US Federal PKI). I think Symantec is incompetent and contributes negatively to the Web PKI. I no longer issue their certificates by default, and am going to replace them with a different CA.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#194

Post by an_account_name »

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote: post #142
nandhp wrote: post #11

I'd be interested to know what the plans are from other vendors (Microsoft, Google, Apple, ...); can we expect them to follow Mozilla's lead in taking action against WoSign?

When the story first broke, I manually untrusted WoSign's and StartCom's root certificates in OS X, instead of deleting them outright...at least I thought I did. I upgraded to macOS 10.12 Sierra this past weekend, and repeated the process. Except WoSign's certificates aren't there to begin with, though StartCom's still are. So perhaps Apple had dropped WoSign already? Would anyone else running 10.12 verify?

I had distrusted a bunch of others, too - it looks like the update flipped everything to be trusted again. Thanks for the heads up.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#195

Post by scrollaway »

agwa wrote: post #193
scrollaway wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your take on the Comodo trademark claim on Let's Encrypt, and all the BS that ensued? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11964583 I personally immediately replaced all of my and my company's comodo certificates with DigiCert ones.

The incident was terrible, but it is not a reflection on how their CA is run. They run a trustworthy CA and employ some really awesome and competent people (e.g. Rob Stradling) who actively contribute to improving the Web PKI, such as by (co-)authoring the CAA, Must-Staple, and Certificate Transparency standards. They run https://crt.sh , which is an invaluable resource for investigating Web PKI problems (the Mozilla…

Thanks for the insight!

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#196

Post by tbrownaw »

ceejayoz wrote: post #137
tarancato wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a political organisation and their ideas conflict with mine. I don't keep a strong boycott on them, but I don't want to support their products, that's all.

I'd be very interested to know which of the EFF's political positions you object to, but it appears pretty clear you're avoiding answering that question...

I don't see how that's relevant, unless the goal is to invalidate his(?) dislike of them by claiming the political views that dislike is based on are wrong and stupid.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#197

Post by tedunangst »

geofft wrote: post #118
bandrami wrote: post #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 se…

OK, so what do you want to happen starting tomorrow morning? * All HTTPS sites show up as trusted. Woohoo! * All HTTPS sites show up as untrusted, people are encouraged to switch to HTTP. Woohoo! * All HTTPS sites use trust-on-first-use, which means that we have a date and time announced when MITM attacks are particularly effective and will persist for a very long time. * All HTTPS sites are untrusted, except for tho…

#3, with HKPK and a transition period covered by CAs, is not entirely unreasonable and even offers some real advantages. The changeover doesn't need to take place at the stroke of midnight.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#198

Post by vertex-four »

tarancato wrote: post #54
hayleox wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly don't you like about Let's Encrypt? Besides Let's Encrypt, your other option is paying for a cert from GoDaddy or something. My two cents: don't give business to Comodo, given their horrible track record of sleaziness ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comodo_Group#Controversies ).

I don't like the EFF, but I guess I will have to use Let's Encrypt if there's no other option.

As much as I don't agree with you... Let's Encrypt isn't actually an EFF project, or even majority EFF funded. One developer is provided by the EFF, one of the board members is from the EFF, one member of the technical advisory board is from the EFF, and there is a sponsorship from the EFF. The organisation has various other employees, board members, and sources of funding. Even in the genesis of it, it involved three non-EFF people and one EFF person.

The suggested client, CertBot, is an EFF project, but there's a wide variety of alternatives - https://letsencrypt.org/docs/client-options/

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#199

Post by vertex-four »

voltagex_ wrote: post #159
gcp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browsers will distrust the CA. Which will, in all likelyhood, lead to their bankruptcy.

Will they? Still gotta wait for Google, Microsoft and Apple. Is there any mechanism to push certificate updates to Android devices in the wild? Otherwise there's going to be a lot of devices that trust WoSign and StartCom, no matter what.

In practice, nobody is going to buy a cert for general web use which doesn't work for Firefox. They could scale back drastically and focus on internal certs and certs for other uses, but that might not be enough to keep them afloat, especially with the reputation damage from this.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#200

Post by joepie91_ »

finnn wrote: post #121
ylere wrote: post #61

Well shit. I always liked StarCom because of their approach to charge for verification (with increasing costs for each higher trust level) but not for issuing certs (while still manually checking every cert request, at least for any OV&EV cert in my case). This entire WoSign acquisition is incredibly shady. Shortly after that some of the customer reps had chinese names, service quality declined and we got offered to…

What use case do you have for wildcards that you can't use Let's Encrypt or similar automated issuance? Just curious, as I've yet to hear a terribly compelling one...

Multi-tenant systems, for example, where each tenant gets their own subdomain. Let's Encrypt still has rate limits in place.
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