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WoSign: Free two-year multi-domain SSL certificate

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Re: WoSign: Free two-year multi-domain SSL certificate

#31

Post by dsacco »

nadams wrote: post #27
dsacco wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that SSL has problems, but you cannot be the certificate authority for your own domain, and I'll explain why. The certificate authority system is an imperfect solution for the problem of public key infrastructure. It is designed such that a trusted, independent third party can verify messages between two communicating parties. The third party's trusted signature verifies that the user is who they say the…

> By design, certificate authorities need to be 1. trustworthy, 2. highly vetted and 3. very few. If everyone is a certificate authority, then no one is. Isn't that the situation we are in now? All it takes is one CA with poor security cough Diginotar cough and the whole system is broken. I'm obviously ignoring the fact we have CRLs - but if someone has a signed cert for say chase.com or google.com they can do a lot…

I agree with everything you've said here. Certificate authorities are, like all organizations, prone to corruption and misaligned incentives. There are certainly issues, and it's very much an imperfect solution. The trouble is that getting rid of them (right now) is a net loss for cryptographic integrity. SSL, and perhaps public key infrastructure underpinning it, needs to be redesigned. There is no viable alternative just yet.

Re: WoSign: Free two-year multi-domain SSL certificate

#32

Post by btgeekboy »

Animats wrote: post #25
nadams wrote: post #12

> great free StartSSL It looks like they cleaned up their forums from when they were last mentioned[1] but I'll still keep my distance. Anything like this is really a bandaid for the real problem with SSL/CA. As in why can't I be a CA for my own domain? I think Android is a perfect example of this problem - if you import a CA cert using the built in Android credential storage every time you reboot it will show a vagu…

As in why can't I be a CA for my own domain? Because then anyone who can hijack DNS for your domain can also be a CA for your domain.

Is that any worse than what we have now? If I can hijack your DNS, I can certainly insert or replace enough infrastructure to acquire a basic cert from numerous providers. All I really need is to hijack the MX. Bonus points if I can do it without you knowing, such that mail is first delivered to me and then on to you.

In other words, if you could put a CA into a TXT record at the root of the domain and have browsers/etc trust it, how is it any less secure than what we have now?

Re: WoSign: Free two-year multi-domain SSL certificate

#33

Post by technomancy »

btgeekboy wrote: post #32
Animats wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in why can't I be a CA for my own domain? Because then anyone who can hijack DNS for your domain can also be a CA for your domain.

Is that any worse than what we have now? If I can hijack your DNS, I can certainly insert or replace enough infrastructure to acquire a basic cert from numerous providers. All I really need is to hijack the MX. Bonus points if I can do it without you knowing, such that mail is first delivered to me and then on to you. In other words, if you could put a CA into a TXT record at the root of the domain and have browsers/…

The scenario you've described leaves an audit trail. If you don't have a CA, hijacking the DNS means you can pull off an attack completely silently.

Re: WoSign: Free two-year multi-domain SSL certificate

#35

Post by technomancy »

cnst wrote: post #30
iancarroll wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because once you deploy the https:// address scheme, there is no going back. Unless you send the HSTS header, that's not true. Even so, you could just set the HSTS expiry time to the certificate's expiry (which would have to be done within your code, sadly).

What do you mean it's not true without HSTS? Do modern browsers now automatically switch to the http:// address scheme if https:// is no longer available? Because otherwise, unless you don't care about incoming links, bookmarks etc, there is indeed absolutely no going back, with or without HSTS. That's the problem, only solvable with opportunistic encryption. And if you have dozens of domains and subdomains, what wou…

> Do modern browsers now automatically switch to the http:// address scheme if https:// is no longer available?

Browsers do not, humans do.

Re: WoSign: Free two-year multi-domain SSL certificate

#36

Post by indrax »

cnst wrote: post #16

This offer sounds great! However, I must ask -- what's their business model? Even as great as the offer is, this is akin to the free sample... Because once you deploy the https:// address scheme, there is no going back. On the other hand, this would have been perfect if there was opportunistic encryption within HTTP.

EFF is going to be giving out free certs starting later this year. https://letsencrypt.org/ It's not too surprising someone would lower prices now to adjust.

This is becoming a freemium product.

Re: WoSign: Free two-year multi-domain SSL certificate

#38

Post by AlyssaRowan »

They might've passed the WebTrust audit, but I'm still pretty worried about their security posture.

Remember, unless you're pinning your certificate using DNSSEC+DANE or HPKP, in practice any CA in the world can issue certificates for any domain.

Let's recap: It's 2015. They're using SHA-1 for everything (NOOOO!). They're based in China, which has just said it wants to ban encryption. (So has Cameron in the UK, yes, but at least he hasn't won an election yet. Edit: he pledged to if he wins; we have a coalition government, nobody won last time, least of all us! ) It looks like they've messed up OSCP, so even their own cert doesn't pass. Oh, and RC4, TLS 1.0 only, check out their login server: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=login.wosign.... - let's put the (slightly) stronger ones at the end, everyone! Ugh.

Let's Encrypt will do it properly. Or Else™. ;)

Re: WoSign: Free two-year multi-domain SSL certificate

#39

Post by ibejoeb »

>Before you stop reading because you don't trust a Chinese company for your website encryption please keep in mind that you don't have to trust them at all! You generate the SSL key on your server and only send them the CSR (certificate signing request) which doesn't contain any private information.

That's not really the reason we might not trust a CA. The CA needs to make assurances that it won't improperly sign certificates for an entity purporting to be the principal, e.g., DigiNotar. Maybe this CA has, but that's still a weak argument.

Re: WoSign: Free two-year multi-domain SSL certificate

#40

Post by NKCSS »

ibejoeb wrote: post #39

>Before you stop reading because you don't trust a Chinese company for your website encryption please keep in mind that you don't have to trust them at all! You generate the SSL key on your server and only send them the CSR (certificate signing request) which doesn't contain any private information. That's not really the reason we might not trust a CA. The CA needs to make assurances that it won't improperly sign cer…

I don't get your DigiNotar reference; they were hacked; how is that different from any other CA that got hacked?
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