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WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

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Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#121

Post by finnn »

ylere wrote: post #61

Well shit. I always liked StarCom because of their approach to charge for verification (with increasing costs for each higher trust level) but not for issuing certs (while still manually checking every cert request, at least for any OV&EV cert in my case). This entire WoSign acquisition is incredibly shady. Shortly after that some of the customer reps had chinese names, service quality declined and we got offered to…

What use case do you have for wildcards that you can't use Let's Encrypt or similar automated issuance? Just curious, as I've yet to hear a terribly compelling one...

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#122

Post by x0x0 »

tptacek wrote: post #42
bcg1 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is it a year without revenue... I imagine this will devastate their revenues in future years as existing customers up for renewal during that time will likely permanently migrate to another CA.

It looks like Mozilla and Google have created a set of circumstances where the rational next step would be to wind down WoSign/Startcom and just start a new company.

There should be a 1-year plus ban on principals as well.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#124

Post by bandrami »

geofft wrote: post #118
bandrami wrote: post #110

Nuke it from orbit. The whole idea of PKI is Broken and Wrong and confuses two different goals. Here's a fun one I noticed: Wells Fargo and several other banks are CAs. This is idiotic. The "logic" behind PKI dictates that it's a third party identifying my bank to me. If banks themselves are CAs even that fig leaf doesn't mean much. We have known bad actors in the pool of widely accepted CAs, right now. There's no se…

OK, so what do you want to happen starting tomorrow morning? * All HTTPS sites show up as trusted. Woohoo! * All HTTPS sites show up as untrusted, people are encouraged to switch to HTTP. Woohoo! * All HTTPS sites use trust-on-first-use, which means that we have a date and time announced when MITM attacks are particularly effective and will persist for a very long time. * All HTTPS sites are untrusted, except for tho…

Mostly #5, with some of #4. We have known bad certs in the wild (including for Google) so the "security" PKI offers us is just theater. I think the theater should end, which might actually get people off their asses to fix the real problem and stop outsourcing it to shady rent-seeking companies.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#125

Post by Negitivefrags »

prdonahue wrote: post #109
pfg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to determine whether a client supports certificates using SHA-2 by analyzing the ClientHello and use that to switch between a SHA-1 and SHA-2 certificate. CloudFlare[1] and some of the bigger sites like Facebook have done this. [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/sha-1-deprecation-no-browser-lef...

And here's the technical detail of how we do it: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tls-certificate-optimization-tec... .

Is there actually an open source implementation of this though?

I've looked, but never found one, though that was quite some time ago. Perhaps things have changed.

This approach is beyond the ability of most to implement for themselves if they don't have support from their webserver for it.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#126

Post by bandrami »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #117
bandrami wrote: post #110

Nuke it from orbit. The whole idea of PKI is Broken and Wrong and confuses two different goals. Here's a fun one I noticed: Wells Fargo and several other banks are CAs. This is idiotic. The "logic" behind PKI dictates that it's a third party identifying my bank to me. If banks themselves are CAs even that fig leaf doesn't mean much. We have known bad actors in the pool of widely accepted CAs, right now. There's no se…

> The "logic" behind PKI dictates that it's a third party identifying my bank to me Not true. The third party is an operational detail to scale, there's no reason your bank is less trusted than anyone else to confirm that they're really your bank, are they? You're suggesting that you don't trust your bank's opinion on what websites belong to them, but do trust some third party's? Even if this made any sense, the thir…

there's no reason your bank is less trusted than anyone else to confirm that they're really your bank, are they?

Yes, there is.

The list of entities I actually care about authenticity for are vanishingly small, basically just financial institutions and CAs themselves (for all other communication I don't trust who I think I'm talking with any more than I would trust a hypothetical man in the middle, so authenticity doesn't give me anything there). But for that small group, I definitely want an entity other than whoever controls their IT infrastructure to be verifying they are who they say they are.

Meanwhile, all of the dicking around these attempts at preventing largely-hypothetical active attacks have stalled simply solving the much-easier and arguably more-important issue of simply securing transport against passive attacks.

Connecting to TLS to news.ycombinator.com is nice in that I know nobody has read or altered the message in transit. The fact that a third party vouches that news.ycombinator.com is who they say they are doesn't add anything for me, because I don't trust news.ycombinator.com any more than I would trust somebody impersonating news.ycombinator.com. The CA in this situation simply complicates things and adds nothing for me.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#127

Post by TeMPOraL »

tptacek wrote: post #56
shawkinaw wrote: post #55

Goddammit. I really liked StartCom for free S/MIME certificates and TLS certs that don't expire after a month. So people, is there a comparable free product out there (don't say LetsEncrypt, they don't do S/MIME unless I'm mistaken)?

Why are you using S/MIME? You can still get free S/MIME certs from Comodo.

Wasn't Comodo on the list of bad CAs one should avoid too?

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#128

Post by tajen »

tptacek wrote: post #103
mtgx wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hope would be that since this method of punishing seems to be liked by most and even feels "generous" to some, the browser vendors would more aggressively start handing out "1 year suspensions" for more and more CAs that are caught doing anything even remotely like this. Then after a year or two, and after the CAs have learned that they need to take this stuff seriously, and yet some still get caught doing it, the…

The people saying this is "generous" are making largely irrational arguments. What Mozilla is proposing is the worst case for incumbent CAs.

> worst case

Can you develop please? To me it seems that the worst case would be an immediate and permanent revocation of their certs because of fraud. I find Mozilla/Google very lenient in this affair, and that's probably because I don't understand what's the problem with revoking a CA with short notice. Ok it's annoying for customers, but they just have to subscribe to a new CA and install the new cert. It's annoying but it's a security emergency. If your bank was physically guarded by a security company who has been found to replace agents with puppets in 62 Macau banks, wouldn't the head of security interrupt their week-end to guard the bank and contract a new company? If CA revocation takes customers by surprise today, it's time to start revoking certs more regularly. Heck, if you don't answer to a request from your domain provider within 15 days, your domain can even be revoked. CAs are more important than that.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#129

Post by aianus »

bandrami wrote: post #110

Nuke it from orbit. The whole idea of PKI is Broken and Wrong and confuses two different goals. Here's a fun one I noticed: Wells Fargo and several other banks are CAs. This is idiotic. The "logic" behind PKI dictates that it's a third party identifying my bank to me. If banks themselves are CAs even that fig leaf doesn't mean much. We have known bad actors in the pool of widely accepted CAs, right now. There's no se…

> Here's a fun one I noticed: Wells Fargo and several other banks are CA's. This is idiotic. The "logic" behind PKI dictates that it's a third party identifying my bank to me. If banks themselves are CA even that fig leaf doesn't mean much.

How is that idiotic? Go to any CA's site and their cert will be (essentially) self-signed. There is no requirement that it's a third party signing the cert, just that it's a 'trusted' party.

Re: WoSign and StartCom: Mozilla’s proposed conclusion

#130

Post by tptacek »

tajen wrote: post #128
tptacek wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people saying this is "generous" are making largely irrational arguments. What Mozilla is proposing is the worst case for incumbent CAs.

> worst case Can you develop please? To me it seems that the worst case would be an immediate and permanent revocation of their certs because of fraud. I find Mozilla/Google very lenient in this affair, and that's probably because I don't understand what's the problem with revoking a CA with short notice. Ok it's annoying for customers, but they just have to subscribe to a new CA and install the new cert. It's annoyi…

Immediate distrust of all StartCom certificates might be the worst case for WoSign/StartCom, but it's not the worst case for the incumbent CAs as a whole, and it's only marginally worse than what's being done already for WoSign/StartCom.

The fact that they have a way to punish the CA business itself without punishing its customers is a good thing. It sends a clear message that the browsers can't be blackmailed out of punishing abuse by a CA's huge customer base. The browsers have demonstrated that they can put a CA basically out of business without impacting its customers.

If I ran a CA, I'd be much more nervous about this than I would be about them zapping the CA and all its customers.

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