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DigiCert Statement on Trustico Certificate Revocation

digicert.com

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Re: DigiCert Statement on Trustico Certificate Revocation

#51

Post by tialaramex »

ceejayoz wrote: post #37
bostik wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They apparently have a [webgui] “certificate wizard” that will generate the certificate and corresponding private key for you. Any company doing that deserves to have their decision makers crucified, head down, on the outer wall of the town church, with the nails hammered through their genitals. If you didn't create the private key yourself, by definition it's not private. If generating CRSs and handling the certif…

> If you didn't create the private key yourself, by definition it's not private. In fairness, though, your certificate vendor already has the power to issue a brand new certificate for your domain if they wanted to quietly snoop on traffic. Same thing with AWS generating SSH keys if you want them to - they can get at all the data on your server anyways. No, it's not the greatest practice, but it probably does help a…

Misconceptions at work:

If a hypothetical Bad Guy has got a different Certificate for my site they cannot "quietly snoop on traffic". They have to do an active Man-in-the-middle attack on each connection or else it's completely opaque to them. Each of the clients they do this to receives a free Smoking Gun, a copy of their illegitimate certificate showing who signed it and when. In a future where CT policy enforcement is completed (not yet but maybe soon) they must also have logged the certificate so that everybody can see it, or it won't work.

If the hypothetical Bad Guy has my Private Key, they can quietly snoop traffic using ciphersuites which lack "Forward Secrecy" although no popular browser will choose this unless forced to, and in TLS 1.3 Forward Secrecy is mandatory.

If the Bad Guy has my Private Key and is willing to do a Man-in-the-middle attack the same applies as above, except that I don't learn anything from Certificate Transparency since they can use my cert as they know the key for it.

Re: DigiCert Statement on Trustico Certificate Revocation

#52

Post by lathiat »

Lazare wrote: post #49
pfg wrote: post #47

Trustico now posted a statement on their site[1]. My favourite part is this: > Trustico® followed the requests of DigiCert by initially recovering Private Keys from cold storage and subsequently e-mailing the associated order number and Private Keys to DigiCert in a ZIP file. The file did not contain any other type of data. [1]: https://www.trustico.com/news/2018/symantec-revocation/certi...

What a bizarre defense. Do they think this makes them look...better? The core issue is 1) they had the keys at all 2) they decided to compromise them by emailing them DigiCert Saying "hey, we did nothing wrong, all we did is email the keys we had to DigiCert" just isn't a very compelling defense to claims they had the keys and emailed them to DigiCert. More like a "total admission of guilt" than a defense, really.

The secondary part is that they requested mass revocation of active certificates, including from brands such as RapidSSL which were not being browser distrusted AFAIK (even though some others were.. if I need to be corrected on this please let me know).

They did this without notifying their customers in advance, so literally, they were going to intentionally screw their customers by revoking all their active SSL certificates without their authorisation and without any notice. Which then happened.

This would have affected ALL certificates, but since Digicert said no, they then pulled all of these generated private keys from storage which they should NOT have been storing -- on their reseller web interface when you generate a certificate (which is a questionable activity but lets just go with it for the argument).. a few days after you place the order the private key disappears from the web interface. You would therefor assume they deleted it. It seems they kept a copy of all of them this whole time - which is doubly irresponsible let alone stupid.

All I can say is thankfully LetsEncrypt is making these guys mostly irrelevant...

The good news is, as far as I know, they're only revoking the certificates that used the generator at least (though I haven't confirmed that) -- so hopefully most people that used a normal CSR certificate won't have them revoked.

Bunch of morons, I can't see why they thought this was a good idea, and as the commentator above said, this response doesn't sound better in any way. It just proves they are intentionally screwing their customers for no real reason. Even if they were intent on this distrust process, they should have at least been ensuring customers got new certificates first and had plenty of notice -- e.g. how the chrome distrust worked. They didn't.

Re: DigiCert Statement on Trustico Certificate Revocation

#53

Post by pfg »

lathiat wrote: post #52
Lazare wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bizarre defense. Do they think this makes them look...better? The core issue is 1) they had the keys at all 2) they decided to compromise them by emailing them DigiCert Saying "hey, we did nothing wrong, all we did is email the keys we had to DigiCert" just isn't a very compelling defense to claims they had the keys and emailed them to DigiCert. More like a "total admission of guilt" than a defense, really.

The secondary part is that they requested mass revocation of active certificates, including from brands such as RapidSSL which were not being browser distrusted AFAIK (even though some others were.. if I need to be corrected on this please let me know). They did this without notifying their customers in advance, so literally, they were going to intentionally screw their customers by revoking all their active SSL cert…

> The secondary part is that they requested mass revocation of active certificates, including from brands such as RapidSSL which were not being browser distrusted AFAIK (even though some others were.. if I need to be corrected on this please let me know).

To my knowledge all CAs under Symantec's control, including RapidSSL, are affected[1], with only a handful of exceptions for cross-signed intermediates where Symantec was not under control of issuance. IIRC they belong to Apple and Google (and maybe a few others).

[1]: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-dist...

Re: DigiCert Statement on Trustico Certificate Revocation

#54

Post by jaas »

0x0 wrote: post #48
toast0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even non DV PKI uses a lot of trust of the DNS. Where I work, I got our first non-DV certificate issued, and while the CA verified our organization exists (and made our certs show the city listed in our corporation filing instead of the city I wanted to show), the only reason they issued certificates to me is because I did essentially Domain Validation for the domain.

Yep, it's a race to the bottom for CAs to perform the absolute minimum work necessary, because otherwise competitors come in and make things easier for customers. Paying a premium for the services of a stricter CA currently has no benefits, since end-users have no way to evaluate whether a certificate is legitimate vs sloppily or maliciously issued by a different CA. Funny thing about ccTLDs are that end-users might…

"it's a race to the bottom for CAs to perform the absolute minimum work necessary"

I can assure you that we, Let's Encrypt, are not doing the minimum. We are headed in quite the opposite direction. It's not easy to keep things simple while improving security but it can be done.

Re: DigiCert Statement on Trustico Certificate Revocation

#56

Post by 0x0 »

jaas wrote: post #54
0x0 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's a race to the bottom for CAs to perform the absolute minimum work necessary, because otherwise competitors come in and make things easier for customers. Paying a premium for the services of a stricter CA currently has no benefits, since end-users have no way to evaluate whether a certificate is legitimate vs sloppily or maliciously issued by a different CA. Funny thing about ccTLDs are that end-users might…

"it's a race to the bottom for CAs to perform the absolute minimum work necessary" I can assure you that we, Let's Encrypt, are not doing the minimum. We are headed in quite the opposite direction. It's not easy to keep things simple while improving security but it can be done.

Sorry, I was mostly having the various commercial EV services in mind for that comment. Thanks for all the great work your team seems to be consistently doing!

Re: DigiCert Statement on Trustico Certificate Revocation

#59

Post by olliej »

To clarify trustico disclosed private keys to an entity other than the owner of the key, which automatically starts a 24 hour countdown for the CA.

regardless of who discloses the private key, a CA is required to revoke any keys that they learn have been compromised within 24 hours. CAs have been reprimanded in the past for failing to do so.

The only ambiguity is the initial request to revoke by trustico - essentially for a CA the question is whether trustico is the agent for the certificatesTo clarify they disclosed private keys to an entity other than the owner of the key, which automatically starts a 24 hour countdown for the CA.

The only ambiguity here is whether a reseller like trustico gets to decide to revoke certificates that they sold or whether the end users are the owner and so are the only people who can request revocation without proof of key compromise.

From the point of view of the CA the initial “revoke all these certs “ email could have been any random person on the internet collecting public certificates, and then telling the CA to revoke them.

The communication that needlessly included the private keys was equivalent to someone trawling github or what have you, then reporting all private keys that they found to the appropriate CA. It doesn’t matter how someone proves access to the private key, and it doesn’t matter who demonstrates it, all that matters is that someone said “here is evidence this key is no longer under complete control by its owner”.

At that point a CA must revoke and no one gets to stop that.

Re: DigiCert Statement on Trustico Certificate Revocation

#60

Post by dwd »

Having receiving multiple emails and free certificate replacements from all parties involved, it's really just a turf war.

Trustico want to sell their customers their own branded certs, and DigiCert aren't going to just let those customers go.

I for one am done with all of them and had any affected sites shifted to auto-renew certs within about 20 min.

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