Comodo is communicating actively in the bug, in the email discussion, and proactively CC'd the original reporter on the bug that was filed about this without being asked to do so. The general rule in Operations work is tolerance. You don't fire someone for making a mistake, you fire them for lying about the mistake, for refusing to avoid mistake-prone behaviors, and other problem of that sort. Applying that same prin…
I would bet money (maybe not a lot of money, but money) that the only outcome of this is that Comodo ends up within a month being the CA that most reliably checks CAA records. It would be shocking if Google penalized them for this. As you say, that's based in part on how they handle it.
Comodo fails to check CAA records
61–70 of 71 posts
Re: Comodo fails to check CAA records
#62If you're not already familiar with his work, you should know that Hanno Böck is a machine, and someone worth following. If there's some mistake you can make with the web PKI that is so stupid nobody would ever bother to check for it, rest assured that Hanno will eventually check.
Couldn't agree more, this (among others) was brilliant: https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/888-How-I-tricked-Symantec-w...
Re: Comodo fails to check CAA records
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would bet money (maybe not a lot of money, but money) that the only outcome of this is that Comodo ends up within a month being the CA that most reliably checks CAA records. It would be shocking if Google penalized them for this. As you say, that's based in part on how they handle it.
Let's Encrypt is pretty good about checking CAA records. At work I built a system that allows our customers to order certs from LE and we see lots of failures for CAA query timeout (customer using a DNS provider that doesn't support CAA queries).
Re: Comodo fails to check CAA records
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, so they are three days late. That doesn't sound too serious.
On a requirement they voted for half a year ago for a standard specified 5 years ago. It's sloppy and sloppy is not a property you want in a certificate authority.
Re: Comodo fails to check CAA records
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would bet money (maybe not a lot of money, but money) that the only outcome of this is that Comodo ends up within a month being the CA that most reliably checks CAA records. It would be shocking if Google penalized them for this. As you say, that's based in part on how they handle it.
The thing I'm sad to see is that there's no third-party information stated on when Comodo's CAA verification started and stopped. When they first announced CAA support, who tested it? When did it stop working? So I'm hoping this will come out of the post-mortem and be shared with us all.
Re: Comodo fails to check CAA records
#66Comodo is communicating actively in the bug, in the email discussion, and proactively CC'd the original reporter on the bug that was filed about this without being asked to do so. The general rule in Operations work is tolerance. You don't fire someone for making a mistake, you fire them for lying about the mistake, for refusing to avoid mistake-prone behaviors, and other problem of that sort. Applying that same prin…
I worked in a hybrid Infrastructure / Development job for almost 17 years. One of the reasons I could never shake the infrastructure part of things[0] was that I knew the environment from more angles than most of the staff and I tended to be key in high severity issues. We were a highly geographically distributed team and coordinated almost all activity via conference calls.
We had two major rules when a critical failure was discovered. The first was that anyone asking "who caused this" was admonished and often ejected from the call. Often, the person responsible for the failure was on the calls and everyone had a pretty good understanding of who was at fault (if it was, indeed, a self-inflicted wound). The person at fault was also usually critical to the fix and putting them on the defensive caused evasiveness out of self-preservation. To help the first rule, the second rule was barring of anyone at the Director level or higher on these calls[1]. Generally, they were concerned with two things: (1) When's it going to work again and (2) why did it fail in the first place -- both result in delays. They were given updates, separately, by someone from the call at regular intervals. Keeping the politics low and focusing on the problem meant much shorter outages and calmer, more focused, brains of our technical staff.
And to your point, despite working at a company that laid off 10% or so of it's staff about every 9 months, I can't think of a case where a member of technical staff was specifically let go because of an (infrequent) failure -- even situations that would fall under gross negligence of the technician were forgiven provided they were one-off. People get distracted and fail to follow testing procedures/forget to read architecture documentation and make mistakes[2].
After the situation is resolved, a post-mortem/"root cause analysis" was always performed. It was often done via documents rather than meetings, to avoid the confrontation associated with a bunch of managers pointing fingers, and we always learned from our mistakes and got better as a result.
[0] I was a developer of infrastructure services, doing similar work that a DevOps might do, today but more focused on providing internal services and automating support. I was a full-time developer for 3/4 of that time with regular interruptions of sev0 incident response.
[1] This didn't always happen, but I can count on one hand the number of times when a director/VP/C-Level joined and actually made his/her presence known.
[2] I'll never forget the time early in my career when I was on-call and had to restore our most critical/largest file server that was destroyed as a result of a technician getting frustrated with a rack and dislodging a 60(?)-pin SCSI cable...partly...where it attempted to run for several hours in that condition. The best part was the maintenance he was doing was on the backup server that had required his attention for a few weeks and hadn't functioned since then. When I saw the condition of the cables, I was so pissed off that while restoring the weeks' old backups at 4:00 AM, I had the operators in that room show me how to review the (VHS) security tapes. Watching him kick the door several times to get it to latch, then peering in -- directly at the bent-up cable -- just before walking out the door was the best part. He should have been fired for that, and eventually a similar behavior had that result.
Re: Comodo fails to check CAA records
#67Curious to see how the CAB will handle this or if they're going to be "soft" as it's the first days of the CAA enforcement. Historically, they've been very accurate in enforcing their rules, which could mean a serious reprimand of Comodo. If anyone is interested in testing their own CAA records, we built an online CAA validator specifically for this; https://dnsspy.io/labs/caa-validator
Between their decision to release a rebranded "more secure" version of Chrome where their changes had introduced security holes, and their decision to try and trademark "Let's Encrypt", I can't imagine they have many friends in the CAB. On the other hand, they issue a lot of certs - if you've used Cloudflare's free SSL stuff, you've got a Comodo certificate - so they're unlikely to be shut down or anything that extre…
They're still smaller than Symantec, for whom the nuclear option was considered (and ultimately decided against, in favour of a phased distrusting).
Re: Comodo fails to check CAA records
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Revocation can be done only for new certs. It's time to throw a CA to the dogs once in a while pour encourage les autres.
Not at all. Revoke trust in the signing authority and all it's certificates turn invalid the second that change hits. Update your OS's trust store to not trust Comodo anymore and you'll see the effects immediately in IE/Edge on Windows or Safari and Chrome on macOS (Firefox still ships its own CA bundle). It's just that when trust has been revoked in CAs recently, it's been done in a more gradual fashion to not hurt…
Re: Comodo fails to check CAA records
#69CAA is fresh like IPv10. Done some tracking the last couple of months on the alexa top 1 million domains. In April 400(!) had CAA records. In August 800. 10% have errors (the issuer-critical flag's value is set to 128, 4 6 or 9) where it should be either 0 or 1. iodef set to totally unusable web addressed, you name it. As a matter of fact there are MANY large DNS service providers that do not even bother providing CA…
Are you certain?
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc6844/?include_text=1
> The data fields are defined as follows:
>
> Flags: One octet containing the following fields:
>
> Bit 0, Issuer Critical Flag: If the value is set to '1', the
> critical flag is asserted and the property MUST be understood
> if the CAA record is to be correctly processed by a certificate
> issuer.
>
> A Certification Authority MUST NOT issue certificates for any
> Domain that contains a CAA critical property for an unknown or
> unsupported property tag that for which the issuer critical
> flag is set.
>
> Note that according to the conventions set out in [RFC1035], bit 0
> is the Most Significant Bit and bit 7 is the Least Significant
> Bit. Thus, the Flags value 1 means that bit 7 is set while a value
> of 128 means that bit 0 is set according to this convention.
EDIT: Fixed formatting? I hope.
Re: Comodo fails to check CAA records
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. Revoke trust in the signing authority and all it's certificates turn invalid the second that change hits. Update your OS's trust store to not trust Comodo anymore and you'll see the effects immediately in IE/Edge on Windows or Safari and Chrome on macOS (Firefox still ships its own CA bundle). It's just that when trust has been revoked in CAs recently, it's been done in a more gradual fashion to not hurt…
Which is exactly what I said above could be done.
> Revocation can be done only for new certs.
That's not true. The "newness" of a cert or a CA has absolutely nothing to do with how, if and when it can be revoked.