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Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

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Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#61

Post by tialaramex »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #60
tialaramex wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

More history I'm afraid

In the mid-1990s, the Netscape Corporation invents SSL so that their web browser ("Netscape Navigator") can offer secure encrypted web pages, a huge innovation that will make it possible to do things like sell stuff on the Internet.

They find out that basically there's a problem here about who the hell you're communicating with securely, and one obvious option is that Netscape sets itself up to make this decision. And the problem is that obviously competitors won't accept that, and so either the Web gets balkanized or nothing ends up secured. Also Netscape would need a whole new division to bootstrap this whole identifying web sites and proving their identity problem.

However, the X.500 directory system already has an associated system of certificates X.509, and some fairly serious-sounding companies are minting such certificates, so Netscape picks some of those (names you're familiar with today like Verisign and Thawte) to offer certificates for their new Secure Sockets Layer encrypted web.

The X.500 system envisions a single global directory hierarchy, countries are at the top (e.g. C=GB - the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) and under those are States, then Localities, and Organizations, and Organizations have Organizational Units under them, one vast all-encompassing tree, envisioned by technologists but never actually realised.

So, SSL uses X.509 certificates, and those have X.500 directory names for their subjects, but no such directory really exists, and so the Certificate Authorities write whatever seems roughly correct into the certificate, or they check what an applicant wrote, and if it seems OK they just sign that.

At first then, the certificates are what we'd now call OV because there is no other kind of certificate.

But there's a pressure on the Certificate Authorities to drive more revenue, and making more certs at a lower price seems easier than persuading everybody to buy a $500 cert. So they invent "Domain Validated" certificates. You write the Fully Qualified Domain Name into the X.509 "Common Name" human readable field, and then you write "Domain Validated" in fields like Organizational Unit, and it looks pretty much OK in Netscape Navigator or the shiny new Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser, but instead of needing make international phone calls and own paper business directories for foreign countries now you can just send an email to like "certificate-officer@example.com" and call it job done.

And it kinda, sorta works, and there are other more pressing problems like making dynamic HTML work, so the web browsers mostly just let the Certificate Authorities carry on doing whatever seems best to them... for a while.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#62

Post by geofft »

ubernostrum wrote: post #20
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.

It's an interesting question: is there value to certificate identity verification ? This is interesting to me, in part because I've argued again and again against the idea that HTTPS must involve verification of the legal identity of the operator of a website, and for many years I always had people push back and insist that the encryption part was only a tiny, almost worthless portion of HTTPS -- identity verificatio…

There's two things in this thread under the name of "identity verification": automatically verifying the hostname (origin) of a site and manually inspecting the legal name of the entity who requested a certificate. The first is incredibly important, and encryption is useless without it - the second is not.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#63

Post by geofft »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #40
geofft wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Our scales of economics must be totally off. I'd argue that an attack that costs $177 a try is entirely scalable - presumably you should gain more than $177 in value from a single spoofed domain, right?

I do agree that if $177 is too high a cost, then the problem is solvable by just setting a price floor on certificates (modulo CA/Browser Forum antitrust concerns). I do not think that solution is likely to work, except at a price point at which EV becomes unusably expensive for legitimate users.

EV only works if we are reasonably confident that users will refuse to enter credentials into a site without EV. As EV stands today - with EV costing less than $177 for a legitimate user (because they've already incorporated) - that isn't happening. Making EV harder to acquire doesn't actually solve phishing. That's my objection. Sure, you can make it harder to get an EV cert for a phishing site, but, so what?

(A better solution that actually works against rudimentary attacks is to just give everyone a U2F security key.)

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#64

Post by snowwrestler »

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.

Browser makers must not agree with you, because self-signed certificates get huge warnings, but HTTP connections get at most a little "Not Secure" notice in the address bar.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#65

Post by snowwrestler »

voidmain wrote: post #26
snowwrestler wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you want to know if a site is trustworthy , you want a certificate from their insurance company, not their CA. Someone who is promising to pay you real money if the site contains malware or a scam or whatever. Unfortunately this sort of insurance would probably be more, not less, expensive than EV certs.

That type of insurance is often called cyber insurance, and is pretty common among businesses. I work for a nonprofit--not even a tech company--and we carry cyber insurance and require all our technology vendors to carry it too.

Personally, I would not be opposed to CAs requiring proof of cyber insurance in order to issue an EV cert.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#66

Post by ocdtrekkie »

geofft wrote: post #63
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Our scales of economics must be totally off. I'd argue that an attack that costs $177 a try is entirely scalable - presumably you should gain more than $177 in value from a single spoofed domain, right? I do agree that if $177 is too high a cost, then the problem is solvable by just setting a price floor on certificates (modulo CA/Browser Forum antitrust concerns). I do not think that solution is likely to work, exce…

I don't agree EV should be the bar for "entering credentials". I currently don't consider it a requirement that I only "enter credentials" in HTTPS sites either, insofar as "credentials" is a very wide term. (I find the fact that simple password boxes on low security sites now pester me with a dropdown warning on Firefox. I know they're HTTP sites, but I don't care.)

As an example I do not care about: My HN account. I would not care if it was intercepted and "hacked", because the damage it can do to me personally is minimal. It would probably annoy the mods somewhat, but the handful of spam posts would get cleaned up, I'd have to reach out to the mods to get unbanned, and life would move on. I don't really care that HN has a cert at all, I certainly don't think HN needs an EV cert, I have no real concern about either my password being intercepted, or me being phished into believing a fake site is HN.

If we move DV certificates to be the bare minimum a site is expected to have, then EV should be a bar for important credentials. Aka, your Gmail account, your Bank of America account, etc. You know, Fortune 500 level companies which could afford, I don't know, a $5,000 or more annual investment. The higher cost would also justify higher requirements to get one. At that sort of cost, they could literally fly someone out to your office to check you out directly.

Whereas people have mistakenly corroborated the lock icon with "legitimate websites", an EV cert should ideally be the sort of thing household name companies have, which someone trustworthy has directly ensured is actually the keepers of that certificate.

I don't think placing the burden on my grandma to have a U2F security key is reasonable, but we should have a process so that google.com is clearly marked as being owned by Google, LLC, and that it is, in fact, the real google.com.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#67

Post by markonen »

moju wrote: post #57
markonen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I should clarify that we are not pinning the organization information in the certificate or relying on it; just the fact that it’s an EV certificate.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#68

Post by geofft »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #66
geofft wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our scales of economics must be totally off. I'd argue that an attack that costs $177 a try is entirely scalable - presumably you should gain more than $177 in value from a single spoofed domain, right? I do agree that if $177 is too high a cost, then the problem is solvable by just setting a price floor on certificates (modulo CA/Browser Forum antitrust concerns). I do not think that solution is likely to work, exce…

I don't agree EV should be the bar for "entering credentials". I currently don't consider it a requirement that I only "enter credentials" in HTTPS sites either, insofar as "credentials" is a very wide term. (I find the fact that simple password boxes on low security sites now pester me with a dropdown warning on Firefox. I know they're HTTP sites, but I don't care.) As an example I do not care about: My HN account.…

I support DV as the bare minimum for sites, and agree that sites with specific concerns should have something stronger.

I don't think that EV for "important credentials" is likely to be a workable option or a good one for society for the following reasons:

- Simply displaying EV and not using it as part of some automated should-the-browser-pass-credentials flow is, I believe, unlikely to deter phishing. (If you disagree, let's find studies, which probably exist, and I'll concede the point if the studies show that it works. But given that Verified by Visa uses this site with this EV cert https://www.mycardsecure.com/ and expects you to enter personal info there, I'm not optimistic.)

- I do not see how a web browser can determine whose credentials are important to whom. I would expect that there are people on HN who do care deeply about their account not being compromised (e.g., founders and VCs).

- If we simply state that the only people with EV certs are current Fortune 500 companies and current household names, that seems like a bad political decision for the web - first, it is political, and second, it seems like a position that's pretty strongly at odds with the web's political values, insofar as they exist: the web has long been a place for upstarts to compete on an equal footing with companies that have been around for years.

- There are solutions other than EV for these problems, like U2F and also password managers. The fact that the MyEtherWallet BGP attackers were able to steal user login credentials without even getting a valid SSL cert makes me not optimistic about "make certs harder to get" being the answer - we should stop the mechanism by which those credentials were sent in the first place.

I do think placing the burden on your grandma to have a U2F security key is entirely reasonable - she has a key to get into her house, right? A fob to get into her car? A credit card with an EMV chip? I think your grandma is perfectly capable of plugging something into a USB port.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#69

Post by ocdtrekkie »

geofft wrote: post #68
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree EV should be the bar for "entering credentials". I currently don't consider it a requirement that I only "enter credentials" in HTTPS sites either, insofar as "credentials" is a very wide term. (I find the fact that simple password boxes on low security sites now pester me with a dropdown warning on Firefox. I know they're HTTP sites, but I don't care.) As an example I do not care about: My HN account.…

I support DV as the bare minimum for sites, and agree that sites with specific concerns should have something stronger. I don't think that EV for "important credentials" is likely to be a workable option or a good one for society for the following reasons: - Simply displaying EV and not using it as part of some automated should-the-browser-pass-credentials flow is, I believe, unlikely to deter phishing. (If you disag…

How does a U2F key even solve the problem of knowing that a website associates with a real identity? It may stop a phishing attack, but where do you get the initial trust to begin with?

I think the issue is that we need to know that google.com can be shown to clearly be owned by Google, LLC, and not GoogleCo in a small African nation. (And also, presumably, that google.com is actually google.com, and not some weird substitutions in there like https://www.xn--80ak6aa92e.com/ which shows as apple.com on Firefox.) That's going to be the EV system or something like it, and it's inherently impossible to keep that in line with "the web's political values", if you describe those values as requiring that "anyone can get one". There will always be some justification that someone, somewhere, can find to call themselves something.

Re: Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

#70

Post by geofft »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #69
geofft wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I support DV as the bare minimum for sites, and agree that sites with specific concerns should have something stronger. I don't think that EV for "important credentials" is likely to be a workable option or a good one for society for the following reasons: - Simply displaying EV and not using it as part of some automated should-the-browser-pass-credentials flow is, I believe, unlikely to deter phishing. (If you disag…

How does a U2F key even solve the problem of knowing that a website associates with a real identity? It may stop a phishing attack, but where do you get the initial trust to begin with? I think the issue is that we need to know that google.com can be shown to clearly be owned by Google, LLC, and not GoogleCo in a small African nation. (And also, presumably, that google.com is actually google.com, and not some weird s…

> I think the issue is that we need to know that google.com can be shown to clearly be owned by Google, LLC, and not GoogleCo in a small African nation.

Google, LLC? Why not Google, Inc.? Wait, is it Alphabet, Inc.? Why do I trust companies from Palo Alto (or Delaware?) more than I trust companies from small African nations?

I don't trust google.com because they're run by some Delaware corporation named "Alphabet." I trust them because I have come to trust G O O G L E dot C O M, generally by being told by other people that G O O G L E dot C O M is a good site (or perhaps in the case of Google, because it's baked into my web browser, which I've figured out how to bootstrap trust for). I trust - and want to enter credentials into - gmail.com because they're the owners of the website gmail.com, and when I give out my email address to people, I say "gmail.com", not "an email service run by a subsidiary of an American corporation named Alphabet."

Anyone can call themselves anything - that is and has long been part of the web's values. The other one is that, once you get a name, you get to keep that name as long as you want. Dropbox didn't originally have dropbox.com, but they still have getdropbox.com, the name I saw on marketing and on referrals from friends about 10 years ago. I don't care if getdropbox.com was started by some of my college classmates or by people from a small African nation, as long as I can type the letters "getdropbox.com" into my browser, I've successfully bootstrapped trust.

If you personally trust companies because they're from the United States and not from small African nations, you do you, but I see no reason that the web should design itself around your politics, when the web already has a perfectly good system for bootstrapping trust - typeable domain names.

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