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Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate

daemonology.net

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Re: Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate

#101

Post by arjn »

derrida wrote: post #24

The DigiNotar hack adds to the hack of Comodo in terms of recent attacks on certificate authorities. The lead of Comodo blamed the attack on "a sophisticated state actor" aka Iran. Moxie Marlinspike pointed out that it was his script 'sslsniff' that the hackers downloaded to carry out the attack. They didn't even change IPs from the one they used to download 'sslsniff' to the one used in the attack. The lesson: this…

I agree. the "Iran Forged ...." heading is a bit much. No one really has any idea if this was state sponsored/encouraged or not. One cannot discount the single self motivated actor in this case. In fairness, the article does mention the presumption. I would be happier if they just said someone from within Iran.

Re: Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate

#102

Post by jamesgeck0 »

caf wrote: post #63
robtoo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All vendors want market share in the Netherlands, so a few Dutch CAs get on the list; and they all want market share in China so the Chinese Ministry of Information gets on the list. No browser wants to be the one which doesn't work with someone, somewhere's bank, so once you're on one list, you tend to get added to all of them; and it becomes nigh-on impossible for marketing reasons to remove anyone from the list ev…

...and what compounds the problem is that CAs are trusted on an all-or-nothing basis - you don't have a concept of "this CA is trusted only for .nl domains, and this other CA is trusted only for .cn and .hk domains" .

Chrome plugins are too limited, but could this functionality be implemented via a Firefox extension?

Re: Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate

#103

Post by kragen »

tptacek wrote: post #76
cperciva wrote: post #2

Paging tptacek, please come to the white courtesy phone and explain that SSL is the greatest thing since sliced bread. ;-)

Colin, I'd like it if you're stop muddying the waters about my take on SSL/TLS. I am not a fan of the HTTPS/TLS CA system. You know I'm not. I am a "fan" of TLS, as much as anyone can be a fan of a protocol. Most if not all of the smartest crypto protocol people in the world have taken shots at TLS. Roughly once every 3-5 years, one of them finds a new vulnerability in TLS, which, when fixed, makes the protocol stron…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't you also attacked TOFU POP as being worse than the CA system? If I understand correctly, it was a limited form of TOFU POP that caught this attack. (And it seems like TOFU POP MONK would fix the remaining weaknesses of TOFU POP.)

Re: Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate

#104

Post by SoftwareMaven »

moxie wrote: post #99
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can appreciate that, I'm just not sure I understand how that will happen. I don't have a direct trust relationship with the vast majority of the internet, so I need to put my trust in somebody else I have a closer relationship with. Right now, I trust the browser/OS vendors with the ability to black-list individual CAs (or white-list, as the case may be). In the "trust agility" model, I just have to choose somebody…

The problem is that right now, in the common case, the browser/OS vendors can't black-list individual CAs. Their ability to do so with DigiNotar is exceptionally rare, and would not be possible most of the time. Trust agility ensures that clients have the ability to make these trust decisions easily. A client does not necessarily have to be a user , it could still be the browser/OS vendors. For details on how Converg…

The presentation cleared things up marvelously. It may be worth adding the presentation to the convergence.io details page, even if it was just a clip of the last few minutes where you talk about notaries. Once you went through that, everything cleared up.

Thanks for taking the time to educate me.

Re: Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate

#105

Post by tptacek »

kragen wrote: post #103
tptacek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colin, I'd like it if you're stop muddying the waters about my take on SSL/TLS. I am not a fan of the HTTPS/TLS CA system. You know I'm not. I am a "fan" of TLS, as much as anyone can be a fan of a protocol. Most if not all of the smartest crypto protocol people in the world have taken shots at TLS. Roughly once every 3-5 years, one of them finds a new vulnerability in TLS, which, when fixed, makes the protocol stron…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't you also attacked TOFU POP as being worse than the CA system? If I understand correctly, it was a limited form of TOFU POP that caught this attack. (And it seems like TOFU POP MONK would fix the remaining weaknesses of TOFU POP.)

I think key continuity is an even worse solution for Internet trust than CAs.

Re: Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate

#106

Post by cperciva »

tptacek wrote: post #76
cperciva wrote: post #2

Paging tptacek, please come to the white courtesy phone and explain that SSL is the greatest thing since sliced bread. ;-)

Colin, I'd like it if you're stop muddying the waters about my take on SSL/TLS. I am not a fan of the HTTPS/TLS CA system. You know I'm not. I am a "fan" of TLS, as much as anyone can be a fan of a protocol. Most if not all of the smartest crypto protocol people in the world have taken shots at TLS. Roughly once every 3-5 years, one of them finds a new vulnerability in TLS, which, when fixed, makes the protocol stron…

I am not a fan of the HTTPS/TLS CA system. You know I'm not.

Yeah, but to 99.99% of people out there, the existing CA system is an integral part of TLS. Every time you tell people to use TLS, you're (inadvertently) encouraging them to trust the certificate authority structure.

Re: Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate

#107

Post by Nick_C »

stanleydrew wrote: post #85
dalore wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's time to install noscript for chrome.

Chrome has some script-control features built in that I use heavily. What would I gain from a chrome extension?

I can't find anything that provides those features. Can you let us know where it is? (Chrome 13.0.782.112 on Linux)

Re: Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate

#108

Post by unfasten »

buddydvd wrote: post #37
mike-cardwell wrote: post #14

I'm not a big fan of handing over the security of my website to third parties by letting them inject arbitrary code into my pages, eg Google Analytics. A lot of people seem to do it without giving it any consideration though. You have to weigh up the pros and cons I agree. However, do you need that like button which works by including javascript from facebook.com, or can you live without it? Even better, can you do s…

> can you do something alternative which allows you to have a like button, but without including third party script? How about create a JavaScript library that sandboxes execution of third-party scripts by loading them in iframes based off of a different domain? This would allow site owners to embed Google Analytics or FB Like buttons without worrying about the third-party scripts getting compromised or becoming mali…

> How about create a JavaScript library that sandboxes execution of third-party scripts [...]

There has been some work done in this direction. I don't know how active the project is, but it's called ADsafe (http://www.adsafe.org/). It's a subset of regular JavaScript and doesn't allow access to global variables or the DOM, instead giving access to an ADSAFE object to limit the access of the script.

    ADsafe makes it safe to put guest code (such as third party scripted
    advertising or widgets) on a web page. ADsafe defines a subset of
    JavaScript that is powerful enough to allow guest code to perform
    valuable interactions, while at the same time preventing malicious or
    accidental damage or intrusion. The ADsafe subset can be verified
    mechanically by tools like JSLint so that no human inspection is
    necessary to review guest code for safety. The ADsafe subset also
    enforces good coding practices, increasing the likelihood that guest
    code will run correctly.
Some of the things removed:

    - Global variables: Limited access to Array, Boolean, Number, String, and Math is allowed.
    - Dangerous methods and properties: arguments callee caller constructor eval prototype stack unwatch valueOf watch
    - Date and Math.random: Access to these sources of non-determinism is restricted in order to make it easier to determine how widgets behave.

Re: Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate

#109

Post by tptacek »

cperciva wrote: post #106
tptacek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colin, I'd like it if you're stop muddying the waters about my take on SSL/TLS. I am not a fan of the HTTPS/TLS CA system. You know I'm not. I am a "fan" of TLS, as much as anyone can be a fan of a protocol. Most if not all of the smartest crypto protocol people in the world have taken shots at TLS. Roughly once every 3-5 years, one of them finds a new vulnerability in TLS, which, when fixed, makes the protocol stron…

I am not a fan of the HTTPS/TLS CA system. You know I'm not. Yeah, but to 99.99% of people out there, the existing CA system is an integral part of TLS. Every time you tell people to use TLS, you're (inadvertently) encouraging them to trust the certificate authority structure.

No I'm not.

Re: Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate

#110

Post by xtal »

dalore wrote: post #43
aw3c2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet people laugh at me for being a paranoid silly tin-foil-hat nerd if I tell them that I browse with Javascript disabled by default and if a site requires it I am more likely to simply close the tab and move on before I enable it.

I think it's time to install noscript for chrome.

Isn't the purpose of NoScript (in this context) defeated if you use Chrome?
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