The HTTPS cert is used for the router's login page - apparently putting an IP address on the box backside label confuses too many people. It makes sense to put it behind HTTPS because the browser will whine "this page is insecure"... but how is a router vendor supposed to include the neccessary certificate that won't get leaked? The only thing I can imagine here is a dedicated HSM chip... but that's overkill for a 10…
Netgear Signed TLS Cert Private Key Disclosure
11–20 of 158 posts
Re: Netgear Signed TLS Cert Private Key Disclosure
#12The HTTPS cert is used for the router's login page - apparently putting an IP address on the box backside label confuses too many people. It makes sense to put it behind HTTPS because the browser will whine "this page is insecure"... but how is a router vendor supposed to include the neccessary certificate that won't get leaked? The only thing I can imagine here is a dedicated HSM chip... but that's overkill for a 10…
2. Router coordinates with company server to get its own hostname like n-123123123.netgear.com (which points to 192.168.1.1 or whatever), generates private key and company server issues certificate for that key. HTTP requests to 192.168.1.1 return HTTP 302 to this address. It requires Netgear to operate CA or make some extended agreement with existing CA to let them issue certificates. I know that Plex does something similar, so it should be possible.
3. Company server creates hostname which points to a public router IP address and router uses letsencrypt to get a certificate for that hostname. But that requires public IP and some providers are using NAT nowadays, so it won't work universally.
4. To configure a device you're talking with company server, rather than your device and your device is talking with that server as well. It requires working Internet, so not a complete solution as well.
I don't believe that HSM chip would work. You would just extract that chip and use it as a private key and that's about it. You won't be able to extract private key bits, but you don't need them. May be it might work with very secure device like iPhone, where everything is signed, but yeah, $10 device and someone will still hack it, causing bad situation.
Re: Netgear Signed TLS Cert Private Key Disclosure
#13Re: Netgear Signed TLS Cert Private Key Disclosure
#14The HTTPS cert is used for the router's login page - apparently putting an IP address on the box backside label confuses too many people. It makes sense to put it behind HTTPS because the browser will whine "this page is insecure"... but how is a router vendor supposed to include the neccessary certificate that won't get leaked? The only thing I can imagine here is a dedicated HSM chip... but that's overkill for a 10…
1. Just let it be HTTP. Stupid browsers are stupid, but at least they don't prevent this page from working yet. 2. Router coordinates with company server to get its own hostname like n-123123123.netgear.com (which points to 192.168.1.1 or whatever), generates private key and company server issues certificate for that key. HTTP requests to 192.168.1.1 return HTTP 302 to this address. It requires Netgear to operate CA…
Re: Netgear Signed TLS Cert Private Key Disclosure
#15The HTTPS cert is used for the router's login page - apparently putting an IP address on the box backside label confuses too many people. It makes sense to put it behind HTTPS because the browser will whine "this page is insecure"... but how is a router vendor supposed to include the neccessary certificate that won't get leaked? The only thing I can imagine here is a dedicated HSM chip... but that's overkill for a 10…
Re: Netgear Signed TLS Cert Private Key Disclosure
#16The HTTPS cert is used for the router's login page - apparently putting an IP address on the box backside label confuses too many people. It makes sense to put it behind HTTPS because the browser will whine "this page is insecure"... but how is a router vendor supposed to include the neccessary certificate that won't get leaked? The only thing I can imagine here is a dedicated HSM chip... but that's overkill for a 10…
"How" is that they only inlude the private key for that specific router, and then that key/cert itself is certified by the real CA cert, the key for which is not kept on the router itself?
Re: Netgear Signed TLS Cert Private Key Disclosure
#17The HTTPS cert is used for the router's login page - apparently putting an IP address on the box backside label confuses too many people. It makes sense to put it behind HTTPS because the browser will whine "this page is insecure"... but how is a router vendor supposed to include the neccessary certificate that won't get leaked? The only thing I can imagine here is a dedicated HSM chip... but that's overkill for a 10…
Ideas:
1) An extension to PKI that browsers support. If you browse a service with a certain type of cert on a certain TLD, a) it won't work except on private networks, b) it will prompt the user to enter a key, such as a key printed on the backside of a router (this is already used to get consumers onto WPA routers, so we know it's reasonable). The device with the cert creates the cert itself. If the key is right, you can browse the service, and your browser caches the key with the cert. If an attacker learns the key they can try to make a new fake cert, but the browser would know it's not the same as the old cert and block it. Replacing these should be quite infrequent, as often as people replace their home network devices.
2) A TLD that browsers will only ever respond to if its names resolve to private address ranges. If a service wants to serve HTTPS privately, it will request a cert be signed by a device that is auto-detected on the local network. The device will return signed certs for a particular host on the local-only TLD. The device can have any logic it wants to restrict what can get a cert and how. The trick is how to make the client trust the device, which I think 1) would solve. This device can, for example, only ever create a given FQDN's cert once; if an attacker tries to generate a duplicate, it will fail. If the cert ever needs to be refreshed, the memory/flash of the device needs to be reset. This makes it possible to have a captive portal request a cert from a local router, and no attacker can generate an identical cert unless the router was reset and they triggered the cert generation before the captive portal did. (Also for captive portals, the admin of the router could just hard-code what clients could request what certs, so the captive portal could always request particular local certs for itself, while no attacker could). It's still tricky to determine trust on first connection in the case of things like coffee shops, but maybe you could receive a public key via WPA or something (then again that's kinda kicking the can down the road to WPA)
Re: Netgear Signed TLS Cert Private Key Disclosure
#186 days is nowhere near a justifiable timeframe for full disclosure. Even if you disagree with that, you should have first reported Key Compromises to Entrust and Comodo before publicly posting the private keys. They are bound by BRs and their own CPS to revoke certificates such as this one - and they would have done so promptly. This is not what you should do as a security researcher - delete the gist until the CAs h…
Of course it is, if you didn't get a response in the first 48 hours you're not going to, that's the way things like this tend to operate. The security contact for all companies is either a) inactive or b) very active. It's a detriment to everybody that for some reason it has been normalized that people should wait months or years for disclosing bugs. Full disclosure is the only way things get fixed.
> This is not what you should do as a security researcher - delete the gist until the CAs have a chance to revoke it via OCSP.
Github is archived in real time for the most part. Especially you'll notice that if you post a private key for a cryptocurrency address or credentials for AWS, it'll be stolen and used within seconds. There's some really good sets of information out there like https://www.gharchive.org/ which give you an idea of the sheet amount of data that github produces on a daily basis, and that's just the metadata and things like comments rather than actual git repository contents.
The idea that you could delete something from there and have it actually "removed from the internet" is amusing.
Re: Netgear Signed TLS Cert Private Key Disclosure
#196 days is nowhere near a justifiable timeframe for full disclosure. Even if you disagree with that, you should have first reported Key Compromises to Entrust and Comodo before publicly posting the private keys. They are bound by BRs and their own CPS to revoke certificates such as this one - and they would have done so promptly. This is not what you should do as a security researcher - delete the gist until the CAs h…
Now it's an open race with the bad guys, and surely a lot of them all at once; hardly an advantageous scenario for end users.
Re: Netgear Signed TLS Cert Private Key Disclosure
#206 days is nowhere near a justifiable timeframe for full disclosure. Even if you disagree with that, you should have first reported Key Compromises to Entrust and Comodo before publicly posting the private keys. They are bound by BRs and their own CPS to revoke certificates such as this one - and they would have done so promptly. This is not what you should do as a security researcher - delete the gist until the CAs h…
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://gist.github.com/nstark...