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Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OS X

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Re: Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OS X

#81

Post by mike_hearn »

dionyziz wrote: post #47
legulere wrote: post #46

I don't know why people trust companies more than governments. Both can be large and powerful. Also I find it highly unlikely that these certificates get abused: - Those certificates are from other branches of the government. They won't like the NSA abusing their certificates. - When abuse of these signatures gets detected it would be a big scandal. It's way more easy and stealthier to steal the keys of a intermediat…

We should be moving to systems that cannot be abused instead of systems that "we won't like it" when they get abused. PKI is broken.

Brave words. Let us know what you come up with.

Re: Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OS X

#82

Post by skuhn »

mike_hearn wrote: post #76
skuhn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, this is not really breaking news. The reality is that any company that wants to operate within the confines of the law can be compelled to work against its purported customers -- no one wants to go to jail because of your website. One nit to pick: obtaining Verisign's root CA key isn't enough to decrypt traffic over the wire. That would just allow Uncle Sam to issue fake certs that appear to be from Verisign…

There isn't any way to solve it. People's fears about the PKI boil down to "if I trust anyone else at all, they might betray me". And yet using encryption without trusting other people is impossible. You aren't going to build your own computer from scratch, for example. I think our industry needs to collectively move beyond "zomg CA's are pwned by governments". It's just unhelpful. Firstly there's no evidence it's tr…

I agree with you, from a day-to-day standpoint there really is nothing to be done and little point in worrying about it. The only solution is to stop using technology, and that proposition isn't very attractive.

While the ideal solution is technical -- no one can see or interfere your stuff without your permission -- it isn't practical. Solving the problem with laws and societal pressure is more realistic, although still verging on impossible.

Re: Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OS X

#83

Post by skuhn »

mike_hearn wrote: post #79
skuhn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The classic manual method of cert pinning is not feasible for more than a handful of large sites, because each browser that supports it has to update its own pin list. Google adds a whitelist of public keys to Chrome upon request, only for high impact sites. Firefox does the same, with a different list. Safari doesn't support it at all. IE supports it in a useless fashion. This is totally unworkable in the long term.…

To give a real example, CryptoCat managed to commit pinning suicide recently. They requested a pin in Chrome and then their CA's intermediate expired, meaning they had to reissue the cert .... but failed, because Chrome rejected the new cert. They had to wait for the next Chrome version to recover and basically had a multi-week outage because of it. Pinning eliminates CA's by eliminating the agility they provide. Not…

You really need at least one alternate (from a different company!), even though that reduces security. 2 is still better than 150. I'm surprised that Google would accept a one hash pin, but I guess they'll let you shoot your own foot off if you want to.

The other side of that is you must actually be able to issue certs from that other CA. If you have to wait for your account to get set up and verified, you've lost.

Re: Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OS X

#84

Post by Tepix »

wampus wrote: post #65
Tepix wrote: post #33

With certificate pinning, the chances that malicious use of certificates by rogue CAs goes undetected have decreased a lot. For Firefox, use CertPatrol: • http://patrol.psyced.org/ • https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/certificate-p... Also, a few websites are starting to use DNSSEC with TLSA and DANE. There's also a Firefox plugin for that at https://www.dnssec-validator.cz/

I love the concept of certificate pinning, but I don't see how it solves the core problem: User: Why should I trust this root CA to secure this domain? Domain Owner: How can I specify which root CA should be trusted to secure this domain? If neither of these parties are significantly involved in the trust decision, how can it be said that trust has been established at all? Most pinning implementations seem to either…

The reasoning is as follows:

1. An attacker can't MITM everything, all the time. Perhaps he can, but it would create unwanted attention

2. Thus, a visitor will usually not be a victim of MITM during her visits

3. When an attack occurs, the certificate pinning will make it visible.

Re: Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OS X

#85

Post by owly »

Perspectives is a new approach to helping computers communicate securely on the Internet. With Perspectives, public “network notary” servers regularly monitor the SSL certificates used by 100,000s+ websites to help your browser detect “man-in-the-middle” attacks without relying on certificate authorities.

http://perspectives-project.org/

Re: Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OS X

#86

Post by yuhong »

mike_hearn wrote: post #79
skuhn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The classic manual method of cert pinning is not feasible for more than a handful of large sites, because each browser that supports it has to update its own pin list. Google adds a whitelist of public keys to Chrome upon request, only for high impact sites. Firefox does the same, with a different list. Safari doesn't support it at all. IE supports it in a useless fashion. This is totally unworkable in the long term.…

To give a real example, CryptoCat managed to commit pinning suicide recently. They requested a pin in Chrome and then their CA's intermediate expired, meaning they had to reissue the cert .... but failed, because Chrome rejected the new cert. They had to wait for the next Chrome version to recover and basically had a multi-week outage because of it. Pinning eliminates CA's by eliminating the agility they provide. Not…

The problem is they switched to non-EV and they pinned only the EV root.

Re: Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OS X

#87

Post by yuhong »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #40

None of them appear in my Windows PC (Windows 7)…A Windows 7 PC has 38 Certificate Authority certificates installed. My Mac OS X Yosemite has 217 Certificate Authority certificates installed. This is a poorly-reseasrched comparison, because Windows downloads root certificates when they are first encountered (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931125 ). "When a user goes to a secure website (by using HTTPS SSL), read…

Win8.1 has certutil -generateSSTFromWU that lets you get the entire list

Re: Government-Linked Certificate Authorities in OS X

#88

Post by yuhong »

mike_hearn wrote: post #80
dletozeun wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, I was looking for this. However, in any case, there are already so many CAs, that I am wondering what is preventing governments of forcing one of them to provide a fake certificate that suits their needs for national security reasons...

What "stops" them (to the extent that anything stops a government that is ignoring their own laws) is that the agreements CAs sign with browser/OS makers don't have any provision for issuing fake certs just because a government requested it or compromised the key. That means if anyone found evidence that a CA was issuing bogus certs (such as one of those certs), that CA would be revoked and bankruptcy would follow so…

ANSSI if I remember correctly, and one of their intermediate CAs issued an intermediate that was installed in a MITM device. They seems to be phasing out the root now BTW.
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