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A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

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Re: A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is many things but not incompetent.

From a security standpoint that's debatable. Multiple RCEs and critical CVEs cannot be fixed because Microsoft "lost" the source code. So they disclosed those RCEs but without any solution or fix. (Not kidding, sadly, look it up, there also have been occasional binary patches because of the same reason) [1] https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide

> From a security standpoint that's debatable.

still not incompetence if what they gain from it is bigger than what their customers lose, unfortunately.

Re: A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the state's interest in having their CA built into windows?

So that they don't depend on anyone else to have proper TLS for their state sites and for companies operating in their state. Imagine if you don't have a state CA, and your relationship with the USA goes sour, and the USA prohibits all of their major CAs from doing business with your country, including Let's Encrypt. People in your country still use the internet and you still want to protect them from scammers preten…

This seems like a matter of signing a certificate signed by an actual CA with your own CA as well. If the relationship sours, you still have your own CA to vouch for it.

Re: A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

#173

Things like this make me wonder why certificates are not also signed by the certificate owner. Right now, a CA can issue a certificate for any public key and domain they like. A rogue trusted CA can intercept all traffic. If a certificate also included a signature by the owner of the public key signed by the CA (using their private key, signed over the CA signature), then a CA would no longer have this ability. What…

> What am I missing?

The chain of trust for all the certificates in your example is established by trusting the rogue CA root certificate. The CA (or a bad actor who misled the CA through real-world fraud) could be the “owner” of the key pair you’re trusting for the second signature.

Re: A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

#174

Microsoft seems to be casual about trusting CAs, isn't transparent in their inclusion decisions, and their trust store is quite large. Any reasonable website would only use a certificate trusted by a quorum of browsers (especially Chrome), so the benefit of the extraneous CAs seems low. I'm not a Windows user, but I have to wonder if there's a way to use the Chrome trust store on Windows/Edge. I can't imagine trustin…

> Microsoft seems to be casual about trusting CAs Woah, that is a bold statement. Classic HN overreach. I am not here to shill for MSFT, but, in terms of OS sales to gov'ts, no one else has nearly the same level of experience. I am sure that MSFT carefully vets all CA additions. Are you aware of the big hack on Netherlands govt-approved CA? Read about: DigiNotar. My point: That was a widely trusted CA that was hacked…

> I am sure that MSFT carefully vets all CA additions.

Are you? Why? For Mozilla the vetting process takes place in public, that's one purpose of m.d.s.policy so we can see what is or is not done and draw our own conclusions.

Each of the proprietary trust stores has an opaque process which unless you're a CA applicant you don't even know what they're asking for, much less what (if anything) they do with it.

These are for-profit companies, and this is a cost centre. The cheapest possible thing they could do is piggy back entirely on the public Mozilla process (which of course for this CA would mean rejecting)

The next cheapest option would be to allow senior management to override Mozilla's decisions for, you know, commercial reasons.

And yes, it would certainly be possible for them to have their own teams every bit as effective as the public process but entirely made up of employees and contractors. Weirdly though, although it's easy to run into people who worked for say, the Windows OS team, or XBox team, or Azure team, you don't run into ex-Microsoft opaque CA process people. One reason might be that they're all career professionals, never leave, never get downsized, maybe there are dozens of them. But the more likely reason is they do not exist.

Re: A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft seems to be casual about trusting CAs Woah, that is a bold statement. Classic HN overreach. I am not here to shill for MSFT, but, in terms of OS sales to gov'ts, no one else has nearly the same level of experience. I am sure that MSFT carefully vets all CA additions. Are you aware of the big hack on Netherlands govt-approved CA? Read about: DigiNotar. My point: That was a widely trusted CA that was hacked…

> I am sure that MSFT carefully vets all CA additions. I'm sure that Microsoft carefully ensure they're paid for all CA additions. Given their monopoly there is no incentive for vetting.

I'm pretty sure there isn't a fee. Somebody from ISRG (the people who brought you Let's Encrypt) might be able to state categorically that there was no fee charged by Microsoft, obviously it's not free in practice to spin up a decent Certificate Authority, but that's not the same thing as Microsoft charging a fee.

For these government CAs my expectation is that they're a sort of quid pro quo and (wrongly) not seen as a security problem.

Re: A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

#176
post #143
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is CT here? Central Time? Connecticut? Maybe Certificate Transparency? I guess that last one might make the most sense. Abbreviations are hard.

Certificate Transparency, all CA's log their issued certificates to central log servers, managed by Cloudflare, google etc. If this is not done, the certificate will not be seen as trusted by Browsers. It was designed to have a publicly auditable source of issued certificates, exactly so we can notice rogue google.com certs.

Technically you don't have to log certificates during issuance, and actually doing so is slightly more trouble (because of a chicken & egg problem, you want the log proof in the certificate, so you must log special "poisoned" certificates to get that proof and then fasten that proof to the certificate.

A customer can take an unlogged cert, log it themselves, and then use the certificate and the separate proof of logging they received and use that just fine. Google have some services which do this. One clever thing this enables is you can buy the cert secret-product-name.example, unlogged, build the web site, check everything works, and log the certificate seconds before the product launch event, so snoops can't tell your new product is secret-product-name until the moment you announce it, yet the site works immediately. I have very rarely seen this done but it's possible. When there's an ordinary White House transition process both plausible transition site certs get logged, even though in practice one of those sites is never published. Since Trump I have no idea if this process is so smooth any more.

A CA can choose whether to have this "issue unlogged certs" process as something they offer, it's a niche thing, but it could make sense. They need to keep adequate records of every certificate they issue (that's required) and logging is a very easy way to satisfy that requirement, but it's not the only way.

In practice, the logged certificates are the easy consumer option, like selling ready-to-eat food in a deli. Some customers might be prepared to buy ingredients and go away to make food, but, many customers probably want to eat food immediately so for extra money you sell products that can just be eaten immediately. So, yes, the vast majority of certificates issued every day are indeed logged immediately so as to provide the product people want.

Re: A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

#177
post #30

Not clear (to me) in the original post -- was this done accidentally or intentionally?

As a CA, how does one accidentally issue a certificate for google.com? I mean, is there a scenario that isn't malicious?

Most Certificate Authorities have manual issuance†, at least as an option. There's a UI where an authorized employee can issue whatever they want, the UI may be fairly crude or something quite polished used in ordinary business processes.

So an employee can type in google.com and check any boxes about did you verify this is the correct name and it's OK to issue, and then they hit issue and the certificate is minted, just like that.

Why google.com? Well, if you're testing something, say a web browser, what web site comes to mind? Maybe google.com? Doesn't work. Oh - the cable is unplugged. Doesn't work. Wait, this checkbox isn't checked, try again. Aha, now it works... Oops we issued a certificate for google.com

This is a "Never" event, there should be countless things in place to ensure it doesn't happen. In practice, just like safety guards on dangerous machinery, too many people just can't be bothered with safety, it's a cultural issue.

† Let's Encrypt famously does not. As part of the Mozilla application process they need to show their certificates expire properly, usually people either manually issue a back-dated certificate which has expired already, or they manually issue one with a deliberately short lifetime to expire. Since they can't issue manually Let's Encrypt obtained an ordinary certificate from their own service and then waited ninety days for it to expire like a fucking boss.

Re: A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

#178
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but normally this is done by making your own CA and installing it into your client devices, not by getting it into every device globally by working with Microsoft. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Cloudfare, Godaddy, Lets encrypt. They all "work with Microsoft".

Does any employer get a certificate from any of the CAs you listed to MITM their internal networks?

The listed companies are employers. I think they all have self-managed CAs.

Re: A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to do it that isn't tedious? I'm not familiar with tooling beyond the UI browsers offer, which doesn't match the experience I was trying to describe.

I mean... It's as easy as getting SSL certs and importing them into a trust store/adding them to a directory. The hard part is getting the people you want to establish a trust relationship with to give you a copy of their key. Web of Trust was the answer to logistical key distribution problem. The idea being there would be an organization that would vet people and vouchsafe their cryptographic material for everyone e…

Web of trust is way more ambitious than what I'm talking about. Key distribution for the Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla trust stores is already a solved problem and works well at scale already.

However, if you don't trust the inclusive nature of Microsoft's trust store and prefer Chrome's, there should be a tool to swap out trust stores. I don't think such a tool exists yet.

Re: A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

#180
post #143
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is CT here? Central Time? Connecticut? Maybe Certificate Transparency? I guess that last one might make the most sense. Abbreviations are hard.

Certificate Transparency, all CA's log their issued certificates to central log servers, managed by Cloudflare, google etc. If this is not done, the certificate will not be seen as trusted by Browsers. It was designed to have a publicly auditable source of issued certificates, exactly so we can notice rogue google.com certs.

Actually, it won't be trusted by most browsers. As of today, Firefox hasn't implemented it yet [0]

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1281469

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