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Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

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Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#51

Post by tialaramex »

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…

There are two different parties effectively involved and it's worth distinguishing for very practical reasons:

The human who may be sat at a PC using, say, a web browser, can contemplate anything they like about a certificate and, in principle has some very sophisticated tools at their disposal, for example a human _could_ read the name "Fun Co. Jurassic Toys Inc." in the Subject O field of a certificate and think about a TV documentary they saw last week which said this company was run by a convicted fraudster from Spain, and that might colour their opinion of the web site they thought was a legitimate discount airfare company named "Cheaper Flights" they'd seen recommended on Facebook. They might ask their IT literate nephew Steve, "Hey, Steve, one moment, does this site look dodgy to you?" and end up not giving a criminal $850 for tickets to San Francisco that never existed.

The software, a Web Browser or similar User Agent software, is not capable of such sophisticated insight. But unlike a human its mindless checks are done for every single resource in every single page. That GIF in the top left corner, the CSS stylesheet, the Javascript auto-scroll, since it isn't thinking it doesn't get bored and skip things or take short cuts.

All trusted certs, including DV certs, allow the software to do all its checks, in real time, as it proceeds. When you submit a form by pressing the "reply" button on Hacker News to insist I'm wrong, your browser will insist on verifying that it is posting that reply to a server which has the appropriate credentials for news.ycombinator.com before it transmits the reply, not a minute afterwards when it's too late. This simple, entirely automatic, verification is the only way to make it painless enough to actually get used. Any security strategy that says "And then obviously the human operator does X" is from a dreamworld unrelated to ours, a world which also has no drink driving, nothing is ever left in the back of a cab, a world where the pencil eraser was never invented.

If the browser vendors had wanted EV to have a practical impact on the actual security, rather than just the cosmetics desired by the CA industry's sales people, they'd have instigated a more complicated origin policy, but they intentionally didn't do that.

If your situation really is that your sites mostly attract visitors who genuinely had no previous connection, nothing we can do fixes the actual problem, you are asking merely for theatre, which will cost you extra money, in the foolish belief that conmen aren't going to also put on a show, and probably a better one than you, if it makes them money.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#52

Post by tialaramex »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #12
karlshea wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OV is EV where you also get the business name in the URL bar.

Uh... this is crazy. Are you suggesting that they both verify the same thing (that a particular legal entity is the owner of the cert, verified by a certain CA), so convey the same security-related information to a client... but with one of them, you pay extra to a CA to get a name in the URL bar? If the browsers aren't getting a cut of this fee to have _their_ software put someone's name in the URL bar... they're re…

What the Commercial public Certificate Authorities wanted, more than ten years ago, was a change to browser UI to make it easier to sell the better (more expensive) certificates to their clients ("subscribers" in technical speak). They wanted the Subject Organisation shown prominently.

What the browsers wanted was for all the Public Certificate Authorities to get their shit together and do a better job.

They met and discussed at length how both sides could get most of what they wanted. The immediate results were twofold:

1. New versions of popular browsers (all for desktop operating systems because this is over a decade ago) added the "green bar" showing the Subject Organisation for certificates which met some agreed criteria.

2. The Commercial CAs all agreed to obey these "EV SSL Certificate Guidelines". https://cabforum.org/extended-validation/

This is a pretty good deal for the CAs, they get a new product they can sell for a premium price, the browsers do a bunch of extra engineering work. Many feared this was creating a something like a treadmill, they predicted that soon "EV certificates" would be cheapened and a new "Even more Extended Validation" would be needed, with correspondingly higher prices just to get back to reasonable trust and the cycle would repeat forever.

But there's two unexpected consequences. Humans like socialising, so the meetings continued, the CA/Browser Forum standing meeting is now important across the industry and it set not just these "EV SSL" guidelines but eventually the Baseline Requirements for all "SSL certificates". https://cabforum.org/baseline-requirements-documents/ Also, desktop browsers ceased to be as important because everybody now owns a mobile phone, and the quite different UI in a phone browser lets them reconsider what is important. An Android phone doesn't show Organisation info prominently, just the domain name.

So in the end mostly the browsers got what they wanted more than the commercial CAs. The CAB BRs have allowed them to gradually tighten things up, the treadmill runs in reverse - so that today your $0 Let's Encrypt cert is produced under more stringent conditions than were needed for the $$$ Extended Validation certificates from 2007, and the EV UI is less important though it still exists in popular desktop browsers.

Fixing the problem is arguably better for at least two of the big browser vendors than just getting a cut of the money, that is Mozilla and Google. Both need a trustworthy web, Mozilla as part of their charitable purpose, and Google as a direct need of their business, so for them improving DV over ten years was much better than making a few grand off the higher priced certificates AND it avoided the inevitable conflict of interests taint.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#54

Post by tialaramex »

thefounder wrote: post #47
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…

How can they decide what certificate gets the padlock? It's really a browser decision, isn't it?

Yes, three of the browsers are commercial products (albeit at zero dollar price), Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, Microsoft's IE/ Edge, so it's ultimately a commercial decision for those companies.

The Mozilla Foundation on the other hand takes these decisions in public, m.d.s.policy is the newsgroup for security policy decisions, which ultimately mostly means stuff about SSL/TLS and these certificates.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#55

Post by tialaramex »

vbezhenar wrote: post #53
JoshTriplett wrote: post #2

I'd be curious the real reasons for this, because the reasons listed in this press release sound like marketing-speak.

letsencrypt destroying their business model, they are trying to find new sources of income.

I didn't look in the last few months, but most definitely when I did last look the reality is that Let's Encrypt and the strongly related "HTTPS Everywhere" movement actually drove growth for the _entire CA industry_

This is undoubtedly at least in part due to a halo effect. If Alice and Bob have $0 Let's Encrypt certs for their blogs about, respectively, an obscure species of tree frog and restoring muscle cars, when Carol asks them if her new business "needs" an SSL certificate they are more likely to say "Yes" rather than "Not really" or "I don't know what that is". Even if most Carols use Let's Encrypt, any who don't are new customers for a commercial CA.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#56

Post by tialaramex »

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.

It's all very well that my bank does, but it displays "National Savings and Invest..." which isn't its full name and would also be shown for any number of businesses with the same start to their name.

My mother's bank says "Lloyd's Banking Group PLC" which isn't its name, you'd have to know that it's owned by another group of banks to decode that.

Another of my accounts says "first direct (HSBC Bank plc)". It so happens I know that First Direct is owned by HSBC, but if I didn't shouldn't that further concern me?

This all ends up as extra cognitive load for humans, and it barely contributes to helping with the problem, because this information is only (can only be) displayed after all the backend stuff has finished happening, so it's too late to tell me that wasn't really my bank after I tell them my password...

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#57

Post by moju »

markonen wrote: post #41
threeseed wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting question: is there value to certificate identity verification ? Apple's App Store for example demands that companies wanting to publish apps have to undergo a verification process using a DUNS number. And this has been useful for example in resolving trademark and DMCA disputes. But not really sure if it's improved security in any way.

My company pays for an EV certificate, and we pin our clients to expect EV certificates in the corresponding domain names. This gets us most of the benefits of standard certificate pinning without coupling us to any specific private key or certificate vendor. The theory is that it’s hard(er) to fraudulently get an EV certificate issued, although—having gone through the process—it does not strike me as super secure ag…

https://stripe.ian.sh/

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#58

Post by nailer »

ubernostrum wrote: post #39
nailer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In some cases - most banks use 2FA, compromising email wouldn't be sufficient to handle that, but a phishing site can do a pass through attack and get both from the user.

But the point still stands: getting access to someone's bank account is far more direct way of getting access to their money than their gmail.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#59

Post by nailer »

tialaramex wrote: post #56
nailer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's all very well that my bank does, but it displays "National Savings and Invest..." which isn't its full name and would also be shown for any number of businesses with the same start to their name. My mother's bank says "Lloyd's Banking Group PLC" which isn't its name, you'd have to know that it's owned by another group of banks to decode that. Another of my accounts says "first direct (HSBC Bank plc)". It so happ…

It's a seperate topic, but yes, there's definitely a need to improve how names map to human understanding. Most people know 'Coke' or 'Coca Coca' than 'The Coca Cola Company' or 'CCA Amatil' or cocacola.com.im. There's discussion (mainly led by DigiCert) now about making EV use trademarks.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#60

Post by jrochkind1 »

tialaramex wrote: post #52
jrochkind1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh... this is crazy. Are you suggesting that they both verify the same thing (that a particular legal entity is the owner of the cert, verified by a certain CA), so convey the same security-related information to a client... but with one of them, you pay extra to a CA to get a name in the URL bar? If the browsers aren't getting a cut of this fee to have _their_ software put someone's name in the URL bar... they're re…

What the Commercial public Certificate Authorities wanted, more than ten years ago, was a change to browser UI to make it easier to sell the better (more expensive) certificates to their clients ("subscribers" in technical speak). They wanted the Subject Organisation shown prominently. What the browsers wanted was for all the Public Certificate Authorities to get their shit together and do a better job. They met and…

Thanks for the background, very helpful.

Did "OV" exist at the point you are talking about, more than ten years ago, that "EV" was solidified?

If not (I literally hadn't heard of it until now), it seems like the "treadmill" has worked in a different way, filling in the market underneath with a cheaper "OV", which it's unclear how it's security assertions are any different than EV, it's just cheaper (and it doesn't get a name in the location bar). I'm not sure this is helping the security landscape.

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