Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

digicert.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 73 posts

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#31

Post by geofft »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #27
geofft wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

This is one example, sure, but EV does, in general, work. And the reason why is not because it's an ironclad indefeatable process for proving you are legitimately a major trustworthy party: It's a frustrating pile of hoops to jump through. The arcane and archaic nature of getting an EV gates out malicious actors pretty effectively. If you go through all of the process to get an EV (often involving scanned/faxed docum…

https://stripe.ian.sh addresses this objection:

> First, from incorporation to issuance of the EV certificate, I spent less than an hour of my time and about $177. $100 of this was to incorporate the company, and $77 was for the certificate. It took about 48 hours from incorporation to the issuance of the certificate.

> The primary point raised by advocates of extended validation is that obtaining EV certificates would leave behind a signifigant paper trail of the bad actor's identity. However, there is minimal individual identity verification in the process. Dun & Bradstreet1 is the only entity who attempted to verify my identity, and did so with a few trivial identity verification questions. Purchasing identities with answers to common verification questions is neither hard nor expensive.

> Otherwise, there was no attempt at identity verification from the state of Kentucky or the registered agent I used in the process. This is typical of company formation in the United States.

Given the use of a registered agent, and given that registered agents are a pretty common thing, I don't think that anything is actually being burned here, unless you want to say that any registered agent who incorporates a phishing company gets all their other companies banned. Which, like the CASC's "You can't have EV if you haven't existed for 18 months" suggestion, will technically work at the cost of making EV useless.

Also, a lot of attacks don't care that they're burning credentials anyway. You don't need to spoof MyEtherWallet more than once to walk off with hundreds of thousands in Ethereum. You don't need to spoof the Washington Post more than once to spread fake news 48 hours before a presidential election.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#32

Post by azernik »

beefsack wrote: post #24
snowwrestler wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is. If you don't care who you're talking to, it doesn't matter if your message is encrypted. The anonymous mystery person who decrypts your HTTPS connection might be the same person who would have MITM'd your HTTP connection. The entire concept of encryption presupposes that you care who you're talking to. If you don't, then why not just broadcast your message in the clear?

It's FUD to say encryption doesn't matter without authentication - unencrypted traffic is eavesdroppable by default and exposes you much more broadly than just being exposed to one potential bad actor. Of course using authentication is vastly superior, but lacking it doesn't render encryption useless.

Without authentication, a man in the middle is indistinguishable from your intended target, so you are exposed to anyone on the network path.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#33

Post by nailer »

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…

> stops pretending that paying money to a CA means that you're a morally upright website.

The rest of this is correct, but nobody is asserting EV means you're good, just that it means you are whoever you're verified to be.

I.e. your cert has an Organisation field of 'Verified Org Inc' rather than a blank item like a DV cert has.

DigiCert still very much supports EV, they just don't like how CASC is planning to do silly things like require you to be in business 3 years before getting verified.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#34

Post by nailer »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #8
geofft wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Google's certs are OV (verified organisation but no visible sign), GitHub's and Apple's are EV (verified organisation and visible), your blog is probably DV (only proves you have a domain).

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#35

Post by geofft »

snowwrestler wrote: post #19
geofft wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vi…

To be fair to Google, they do have a pretty-well-staffed portion of the company that works on giving you trustworthy URLs to the first visit to a website. :-)

But seriously, I think that's the actual answer. The only way you find websites is by receiving a URL from somewhere - whether that's from a search engine, or from a link on some other website, or from non-web means like a paper advertisement or a billboard. And the PKI does solve the problem of bootstrapping trust from a textual URL. (And to be actually fair to Google, they've HSTS-preloaded the top-level domain .app, so any website inside .app gets HSTS from first use onwards - which seems like the right way to solve the problem of URLs communicated aurally.)

To solve the problem of "Am I on the right website," the concept of "right website" has to be well-defined - which generally means you have to already know of the existence of some right website. The UX problem in security is how to take advantage of that knowledge, e.g., not let a Bank of America customer click a link in a phishing email that doesn't actually go to the website they previously signed up with.

The alternative is that some committee like the CASC determines which sites are morally upright and worth anyone visiting, and which ones aren't. That solution works okay for physical sites, more or less, but applying it to the internet generally doesn't produce good outcomes.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#36

Post by nailer »

geofft wrote: post #18
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 pr…

That's a flaw (specific to the US, where the same name can be registered in different states) but DigiCert (the subject of the article) is proposing remedies to fix it.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#37

Post by nailer »

ubernostrum wrote: post #21
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…

As Troy Hunt has been at pains to point out, some of the largest, most important and most spoofed/phished sites on the internet use only DV certs. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay are all DV. If they don't see value in EV/OV, then who on earth is it meant for?

OTOH: your bank, Apple, GitHub, npm, most fintech companies do.

And yes your bank account is a higher value target than your gmail.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#38

Post by jeffcore »

ubernostrum wrote: post #21
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…

As Troy Hunt has been at pains to point out, some of the largest, most important and most spoofed/phished sites on the internet use only DV certs. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay are all DV. If they don't see value in EV/OV, then who on earth is it meant for?

Google, Amazon, Facebook and eBay all use OV certs, but you're probably right in that they don't see value in EV.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#39

Post by ubernostrum »

nailer wrote: post #37
ubernostrum wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Troy Hunt has been at pains to point out, some of the largest, most important and most spoofed/phished sites on the internet use only DV certs. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay are all DV. If they don't see value in EV/OV, then who on earth is it meant for?

OTOH: your bank, Apple, GitHub, npm, most fintech companies do. And yes your bank account is a higher value target than your gmail.

Getting access to someone's personal email account is often sufficient to gain access to everything else they use, including banks and other financial services, at least for long enough to clean out some money.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#40

Post by ocdtrekkie »

geofft wrote: post #31
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one example, sure, but EV does, in general, work. And the reason why is not because it's an ironclad indefeatable process for proving you are legitimately a major trustworthy party: It's a frustrating pile of hoops to jump through. The arcane and archaic nature of getting an EV gates out malicious actors pretty effectively. If you go through all of the process to get an EV (often involving scanned/faxed docum…

https://stripe.ian.sh addresses this objection: > First, from incorporation to issuance of the EV certificate, I spent less than an hour of my time and about $177. $100 of this was to incorporate the company, and $77 was for the certificate. It took about 48 hours from incorporation to the issuance of the certificate. > The primary point raised by advocates of extended validation is that obtaining EV certificates wou…

Your first quote proves my point: $177 times... how many malicious attempts? That isn't a cost that scales, because in the case of a multitude of malicious activities online, the number of attempts, at $177 a try, would not be worth it. You are using an example of singular high profile attempts, such as "I incorporated a company for this demo" or "I am a state actor trying to derail a Presidential election". While you fail to recognize that EV would likely protect users from 99% of attacks caused by malicious actors spoofing domains, which could trivially be domain validated otherwise.

I find this a particular trend amongst security discussion, particularly here on HN: Focus on the most possibly sophisticated and capable attack, while ignoring that tens of millions of users are afflicted by pretty rudimentary attacks that are more or less automated on a daily basis. If EV were to solely succeed in ensuring an actual human had to go through the registration process, it would almost certainly be worth it.

Additionally, as a point of note, EV certificates could be made vastly more effective by easily addressing your concerns: Raise the price of EV certs significantly, which CAs would be more than happy to do, and ensure you needed to go to one of the upper levels of the CA system (say, having to go to Comodo for them, rather than your Trustico nonsense) to reduce the number of parties which could issue them as much as possible, and raise the mutual requirements between them to issue them.

Post reply on HN