Actalis: Insufficient Serial Number Entropy
bugzilla.mozilla.org
Actalis: Insufficient Serial Number Entropy
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Actalis: Insufficient Serial Number Entropy
#2Actalis is a major Italian CA that works mainly with big banks and the public sector, like (from the bug report)
- the Tuscany Region (e.g. O=Rete Telematica Regionale Toscana, etc.)
- the Piedmont Region (e.g. O=CSI Piemonte, etc.)
- central public government (eg. O=Bank of Italy, Ministry of Transports, etc.)
- major banks (e.g. O=Unicredit S.p.A., FinecoBank, etc.)
- large private companies (e.g. O=SNAM, Terna, Wind, etc.)
- chambers of commerce
Re: Actalis: Insufficient Serial Number Entropy
#3What surprises me is that people want OV certificates, since to my knowledge they are no different to DV certs in all applications...
Re: Actalis: Insufficient Serial Number Entropy
#4On one hand, this incident was a massive amount of work by probably thousands of people to replace all the revoked certificates. Certificates which are perfectly good for communication and do not pose any significant security risk.
On the other hand, allowing a CA to violate the BR's without pain will just encourage others to do so.
Re: Actalis: Insufficient Serial Number Entropy
#5What surprises me is that people want OV certificates, since to my knowledge they are no different to DV certs in all applications...
Sounds like a good insurance policy where your CA will risk their root program participation, and the managers their jobs to keep your certificates unrevoked for months:
> we have met a lot of resistances and compliances from the enterprise customers, mainly public entities, to whom we have wrongly responded by giving more time. Four months to replace some certificates is more than enough.
> As managing director I have just decided some organization and role changes with immediate effect: I have removed the SSL infrastructure and Operation managers
Re: Actalis: Insufficient Serial Number Entropy
#6Cases like this seem to confirm the approach LetsEncrypt took of only issuing certificates of a somewhat-short lifetime, which kind-of forces a user to fully automate the handling of certificates (monitoring expiration, taking measures to request a new cert in time, deploying the new cert,...).
The practice of issuing certificates with a (sometimes very) long lifetime, from one year and up, results in a situation where such automation is not strictly required, and complex bureaucratic processes can be put in place to replace certs, which becomes a major issue when 'emergency' revocations are necessary. I'd argue such bureaucratic processes don't even increase 'security', because in the end they rely on people performing manual operations (often with more rights granted than strictly required), whilst an automated system can be more easily vetted, tested, and locked down.
Re: Actalis: Insufficient Serial Number Entropy
#7What surprises me is that people want OV certificates, since to my knowledge they are no different to DV certs in all applications...
It's like people buying homeopathy or magic water in bottles.
If you have a good sales pitch and a customer who knows little about the product you're selling you can sell all kinds of nonsense.
"Cheap DV is good enough for private webpages, but for a serious webpage you need at least OV" makes little sense, but sounds good enough for many.
Re: Actalis: Insufficient Serial Number Entropy
#8Aside from the necessity of enforcing good security policy here, it's brutal to observe the situation Actalis was stuck in based on the thread's ongoing comments. They clearly got themselves into bad/unsustainable deals with big customers where they made promises that couldn't be fulfilled in these circumstances, so their choices were to (likely) lose those customers + harm their customers' users, or to risk getting kicked out of the root program. And if they don't play their cards right it's possible they BOTH lose their customers and get booted out of the root program eventually anyway. Not a fun situation to be in, especially because in this case it sounds like they got screwed by a bug in third-party software and not specifically due to bad internal processes.
Re: Actalis: Insufficient Serial Number Entropy
#9For context: This issue affected a large number of CAs because it was an issue in a widely used free CA operation software (EJBCA).
Re: Actalis: Insufficient Serial Number Entropy
#10On one hand, this incident was a massive amount of work by probably thousands of people to replace all the revoked certificates. Certificates which are perfectly good for communication and do not pose any significant security risk. On the other hand, allowing a CA to violate the BR's without pain will just encourage others to do so.
> Certificates which are perfectly good for communication and do not pose any significant security risk.
Is it so? I remember that in 2008 someone was able to create a rouge CA certificate because of the predictability of serial numbers[1]. It was a different time: we still used md5, but are you sure the limited entropy used to generate serial numbers does not pose any security risk?