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Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

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Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#11

Post by hoppa_liza »

geofft wrote: post #5
geofft wrote: post #3

Note that this is not the CA/Browser Forum, the usual industry association you hear about. The CA Security Council is a group of a small number of old-guard CAs, which has been notable recently for pushing a distinction between (automatic) domain validation, organizational validation, and Extended Validation, mostly as a response to Let's Encrypt. The "London Protocol" appears to be a proposal for formalizing the dis…

Also - CASC member Entrust Datacard told Troy Hunt (the Have I Been Pwned guy) that the London Protocol meant that they were going to "phase out insecure DV certificates": https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1012190910254235649 CASC member GoDaddy cold-called a random musician with an HTTP site and told her the only way to avoid an SSL warning from Google would be to pay them $200+: https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.a…

Was it confirmed to be GoDaddy? That is dishonest marketing to say the least.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#12

Post by jrochkind1 »

karlshea wrote: post #10
jrochkind1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't actually even _heard_ of "OV" before. Googling... I still can't tell what the difference between it and EV is supposed to be, other than how much someone paid a CA.

OV is EV where you also get the business name in the URL bar.

Uh... this is crazy.

Are you suggesting that they both verify the same thing (that a particular legal entity is the owner of the cert, verified by a certain CA), so convey the same security-related information to a client... but with one of them, you pay extra to a CA to get a name in the URL bar?

If the browsers aren't getting a cut of this fee to have _their_ software put someone's name in the URL bar... they're really missing out! It's browser software that's providing the "value" to the person paying the fee, but the CA apparently obtaining the fee, and none of it seems of any value to the user... what am I missing?

I hadn't realized the cert market had gotten _this_ screwy.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#13

Post by gpm »

hoppa_liza wrote: post #11
geofft wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also - CASC member Entrust Datacard told Troy Hunt (the Have I Been Pwned guy) that the London Protocol meant that they were going to "phase out insecure DV certificates": https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1012190910254235649 CASC member GoDaddy cold-called a random musician with an HTTP site and told her the only way to avoid an SSL warning from Google would be to pay them $200+: https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.a…

Was it confirmed to be GoDaddy? That is dishonest marketing to say the least.

I assume it was edited in. But to be clear to future readers, the bracketed link in grandparent links to a tweet proving they did.

A more direct link to where they admit it (and publicly try to fix the mistake) is this: https://twitter.com/perezbox/status/1011708133960536064

They don't admit to a general pattern of mistakes like this there, they do say they will use this "as a learning opportunity for all our agents. Whether that is because this was genuinely a one off or because this is the only publicized example is unclear.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#14

Post by michaelbuckbee »

I have mixed feelings about all of this. The big philosophical divide is really around what you think a cert/https should mean.

The one side (I'm summarizing here) says that HTTPS only means that the data transferred over the wire is secure and has nothing to do with authenticating that you're actually talking to the correct website. And that's correct, there are all sorts of MITM attacks, etc. that could be done and people shouldn't automatically trust that seeing a green lock means it's safe to put their password into a website. And that's correct.

The other side says: nothing is 100% secure and security is all about defense in depth and these EV certs can be really helpful. Consider the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

There is a whole cottage industry of unscrupulous advertisers who make their living off of scraping the look and feel of websites like the WashingtonPost, setting up a URL like washingtonpostnews.com and then making up a fake story about how the Rock was arrested because he had some special muscle growing formula on him that oh look they have a link to buy for only $15/mo.

It's quite unlikely that an EV cert would be issued for washingtonpostnews.com and it doesn't seem crazy to think that there is some value in having the EV cert on the proper www.washingtonpost.com website.

They'll also point out that even DV cert issuance pre LetsEncrypt was a mixed bag of good and bad. Some CA's wouldn't issue you a cert if it had certain habitually abused trademark names, etc. in it. You'd have to do more than just have an email address or a DNS entry for it. This is for terms like BMW, Tesla, Facebook, etc. and this practice legitimately tripped up (but likely didn't stop) a metric ton of phishing sites.

I think LetsEncrypt is awesome and makes a ton of sense and probably has made the internet safer in general. But the general response to things like LetsEncrypt issuing upwards of 15,000 different certs for domains containing "paypal" [1] is that you should rely upon sending your browsing information to Google, Microsoft, etc. so that they can tell you "Warning this is a possible Phishing Site" [2] which worryingly seems like we've then replaced multiple CAs (which we thought were too centralized) with an even fewer number of browser vendors (which are even more centralized).

1 - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/14-766-lets-e...

2 - https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/static/faq.html

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#15

Post by technion »

karlshea wrote: post #10
jrochkind1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't actually even _heard_ of "OV" before. Googling... I still can't tell what the difference between it and EV is supposed to be, other than how much someone paid a CA.

OV is EV where you also get the business name in the URL bar.

OV does not put the name in the address bar.

OV requires users actually open the certificate (assuming browser support), hit "details", then scroll down to the Subject section. Then, if there is an O= section there, you can read the Organisation name. That field is missing in a DV cert.

The CA industry wants us to believe the average user does this regularly, in order to determine trust in a website. It's absurd.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#16

Post by akerl_ »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #14

I have mixed feelings about all of this. The big philosophical divide is really around what you think a cert/https should mean. The one side (I'm summarizing here) says that HTTPS only means that the data transferred over the wire is secure and has nothing to do with authenticating that you're actually talking to the correct website. And that's correct, there are all sorts of MITM attacks, etc. that could be done and…

What percentage of users do you think routinely check for the presence of an EV or OV certificate on the sites they're browsing?

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#17

Post by geofft »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #12
karlshea wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OV is EV where you also get the business name in the URL bar.

Uh... this is crazy. Are you suggesting that they both verify the same thing (that a particular legal entity is the owner of the cert, verified by a certain CA), so convey the same security-related information to a client... but with one of them, you pay extra to a CA to get a name in the URL bar? If the browsers aren't getting a cut of this fee to have _their_ software put someone's name in the URL bar... they're re…

Roughly, yes.

I believe that the CA/Browser Forum has extensive documents on what passes for EV (and, notably, you have to be a registered business/organization for EV), and the only rule for OV is that you have to "implement a process" that makes sure you have "verified" the information but doesn't care how stringent you are, so in theory the "extended" part actually means something.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#18

Post by geofft »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #14

I have mixed feelings about all of this. The big philosophical divide is really around what you think a cert/https should mean. The one side (I'm summarizing here) says that HTTPS only means that the data transferred over the wire is secure and has nothing to do with authenticating that you're actually talking to the correct website. And that's correct, there are all sorts of MITM attacks, etc. that could be done and…

> It's quite unlikely that an EV cert would be issued for washingtonpostnews.com

I think the https://stripe.ian.sh story argues otherwise - it would be pretty easy to start an LLC named "Washington Post News" in some other state and have the government agencies be fine with that. (In fact, for the specific case of Washington Posts, half of all US states have a city/town named "Washington.")

Also the more practical problem with the Washington Post is the existence of the Washington Times, established in 1982 by Sun Myung Moon well before the web or SSL.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#19

Post by snowwrestler »

geofft wrote: post #6
threeseed wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting question: is there value to certificate identity verification ? Apple's App Store for example demands that companies wanting to publish apps have to undergo a verification process using a DUNS number. And this has been useful for example in resolving trademark and DMCA disputes. But not really sure if it's improved security in any way.

Apple's case is a little different because it lets you publish native code on the phone. (You can argue that websites effectively also publish code, but the web sandbox is probably quite a bit stronger than the iOS one.) I don't think there's much advantage in knowing that you're some registered organization. It's pretty easy to register an organization - see e.g. https://stripe.ian.sh , to which the CASC responded b…

Same-origin policy does not help you on first visit, and trust on first visit is really the hard problem that PKI was invented to solve.

If you can count on a prior relationship in encryption, then you don't even really need PKI. Just mutually decide on an encryption key and then use that to encrypt/decrypt your traffic.

Not every website is Twitter or Facebook or Google or a major bank, where the vast majority of visits are repeat visitors. I run dozens of websites, and every single one has more than 50% new visitors, year in and year out. That is representative of the vast majority of websites out there.

Browser makers have dramatically shifted their security focus toward repeat visitors. Two-factor authentication, same-origin policy, HSTS, and other new security features are only useful for repeat visitors.

EV certificate notices (the "green banner" in the address bar) are one of the very few browser features that attempt to help first-time site visitors. Now, obviously EV certs have problems as you cite with Stripe... but instead of trying to solve this problem, browser makers are simply copping out and falling back on a posture that HTTPS just means encrypted over the wire, not identity. Essentially: establishing security is the user's problem. Once it's established, then we've got all sorts of tools to maintain it.

This is a mistake. It does not help most websites, and it privileges incumbent services (which have lots of repeat visitors) over new websites (who are trying to win new customers).

CAs and browser makers must continue to attack the problem of trust on first visit. It's not an easy problem but it is the essence of the promise of the web. Visitors should be able to load a new site and know if it is trustworthy, just like people trust that they can physically walk into a new store and not get robbed.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#20

Post by ubernostrum »

threeseed wrote: post #4
geofft wrote: post #3

Note that this is not the CA/Browser Forum, the usual industry association you hear about. The CA Security Council is a group of a small number of old-guard CAs, which has been notable recently for pushing a distinction between (automatic) domain validation, organizational validation, and Extended Validation, mostly as a response to Let's Encrypt. The "London Protocol" appears to be a proposal for formalizing the dis…

It's an interesting question: is there value to certificate identity verification ? Apple's App Store for example demands that companies wanting to publish apps have to undergo a verification process using a DUNS number. And this has been useful for example in resolving trademark and DMCA disputes. But not really sure if it's improved security in any way.

It's an interesting question: is there value to certificate identity verification ?

This is interesting to me, in part because I've argued again and again against the idea that HTTPS must involve verification of the legal identity of the operator of a website, and for many years I always had people push back and insist that the encryption part was only a tiny, almost worthless portion of HTTPS -- identity verification was the real benefit. I even had people claim that encryption without identity verification was actually worse than no encryption at all! It was as if they lived in a completely different world than I did, where eavesdropping/recording of unencrypted transmissions was incredibly rare and not worth worrying about, but ten trillion googolplexes of HTTPS spoofers were lurking around every corner.

Now, of course, people have done a complete 180 and realized that the encryption is the important part, and the identity verification is at best a distant secondary or even tertiary concern. Identity verification doesn't significantly add anything to end-user security; the avenues for phishing and other malicious uses of the web rely on a general public so technologically illiterate that prominently-displayed identity verification is probably several hundred steps down the list of the top thousand things you can do to protect average users, if it even cracks the list at all. Which is probably why all the prominent identity display stuff seems to be phasing out in browsers; the vendors have recognized that it doesn't contribute useful additional security (and some notable cases have shown that it's easy enough, if you want, to spoof even "verified" identities).

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