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Is It Time For an Open Source Certificate Authority?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Apr 29, 2007 09:22 AM
from the definitely-time-for-ice-cream dept.
from the definitely-time-for-ice-cream dept.
cagnol writes "So far there are three free ways to get a free certificate to sign your email and receive encrypted communications: Thawte, Comodo and CAcert.
Thawte's root certificate is in mainstream browsers. Thawte's interface is good and the web of trust allows for increased security by verifying people's identity. However Thawte is not open-source; worse: it is owned by VeriSign. Comodo's root certificate is in mainstream browsers too but there is no web of trust and their forms are not always working.
CAcert is the closest to an open-source certificate authority but is not open-source and it seems that parts of the system are shaky. CAcert provides a web of trust. Unfortunately, CAcert's root certificate is not in mainstream browsers.
Don't you think it is time for a true open-source certificate authority? Should this community be related to the Mozilla Foundation and comply, since day one, with the requirements to get a root certificate in Firefox?"
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Zimmerman has it right . (Score:5, Insightful)
I've fell out of love with public-key signature schemes as a means of proving authenticity. There are a few problems with the idea in general:
I think Zimmerman, with his ZPhone program, has got it right. Really, all you're interested in for E-mail or VoIP is not whether the person really is Simon Johnson, of Widnes, based in the United Kingdom who is 23 years old with a pet dog called Thornton. You're actually interested in whether this Ckwop guy I'm speaking to now is the same guy as I spoke to last-time.
When you weaken your security requirement to this position, you can remove a staggering amount of complexity. You can cut out all the CAs, all the X.509 certificates and ASN.1 implementations etc. What you're left with is Diffie-Helman and AES in CCM mode. You can implement this in a couple of thousand lines of provably correct code and your done.
The real way to solve the "identification problem" with web-sites is to change the way credit-cards work. You have a secure token that outputs a different string every thirty seconds. RSA have made these but they're very expensive for no explicable reason, the banks would develop an open-standard in my model to drive down prices. When you pay for something, you submit your credit-card along with the token's value. The transaction will only be authorised if the token's value matches what the bank thinks that value should be.
That way, phishers only have one shot to take your money. Sure, they could make a mock payment page but the auth-code is only going to work once. I think this would destroy the cost effectiveness of phishing for credit-card numbers. That said, identity theft would still be an issue.
Simon
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Re:Zimmerman has it right . (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Let's say you buy something off the net, then call a month later and declare the transaction as fraudulent.... IMMEDIATELY they yank the cash out of the merchant's account, send you a cute l
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You make purchase.
Vendor sends you paypal invoice.
You pay paypal invoice.
Paypal charges your card.
Paypal transfers money to merchant
Merchant sends you product
Works like a charm.
Except I hate paypal.
Sure wish Visa/MC/Amex would just implement this directly:
You make purchase
Vendor sends you Visa "Net" Invoice
I log into Visa "Net" and authorize it.
Visa transfers money to mercant and charges may card.
Oh wait... they did. Its called "Verifie
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Very Large Prime Numbers (Score:2)
Two points.
1) To be a cert authority, don't you need at least a medium-sized farm of supercomputers to mine very large prime numbers [<=, say, 2^4096] from the greater ether [wikipedia.org] of non-primes? And ain't that gonna require some pretty serious investment $$$'s?
2) A little off-topic, but what happens in RSA [wikipedia.org] if you cheat, and use non-primes as your keys? [Often the math will still work, but sometimes it won't - and what goes wrong if it doesn't?]
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To be a cert authority, don't you need at least a medium-sized farm of supercomputers to mine very large prime numbers [
A CA doesn't need to generate a lot of primes, it needs to generate two. The product of these is then the public key. A CA only really needs a single certificate (a certificate is a public key and some data about the owner, signed by the private key). This is then used to sign the ones their customers provide. OpenSSL includes everything you need in order to be a CA. You generate your public and private key pair with it, your customers can generate theirs and the certificate signing requests, and you can sign their certificates with it.
Having the CA generate your certificates would be a very bad idea. At no point should your CA (or anyone else) have access to your private key. Roughly speaking, a CA works by having providing customers with some data that can be attached to the certificate (and including a hash of the certificate) that is encrypted using the CA's private key. Someone downloading the certificate who has the CA's certificate can use the public key from that to decrypt the signature from the certificate, and verify that the CA believes that the certificate is valid.
A little off-topic, but what happens in RSA if you cheat, and use non-primes as your keys?
Then you get nonsense out. RSA is based on modulo arithmetic and only works correctly if you have no common factors. For certain messages, you could create non-prime keys that would work, but it would be a lot more effort to find them. The only keys that work for all messages are primes.
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Exactly, and if you want to be a CA you should be looking at very high security hardware such as the Chysalis or n-Cipher products which are FIPS 140-4 certified.
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Nobody actually reads the certificates.
Nobody has to if you trust the certificate authority. What use is reading it anyway, if it hasn't been signed by a CA/friend and can be tampered with?
Even if they did, they don't really mean anything anyway. How difficult is it to get a real certificate with fake credentials?
If a CA is worth its salt, nigh on impossible; that's what you pay those ridiculous prices for (at least, that's where the money should go). This is the main problem with an open CA; there are presumably fewer security checks that the person requesting the certificate is who he says he is.
Moreover, if the URL is similar enough to the target of your phish then your SSL certifcate may well be legitmate in every sense of the word but you trick people because the URL is close enough to a big brand's main domain.
That's a phishing problem, not a crypto problem.
I think Zimmerman, with his ZPhone program, has got it right. Really, all you're interested in for E-mail or VoIP is not whether the person really is Simon Johnson, of Widnes, based in the United Kingdom who is 23 years old with a pet dog called Thornton. You're actually interested in whether this Ckwop guy I'm speaking to now is the same guy as I spoke to last-time.
This is exactly what
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A couple more reasons why a free certification authority is not as useful or feasible as one might think:
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In reality... (Score:5, Insightful)
What do certs really mean anyways? Just because company.com has a legit cert from verisign doesn't mean they're a good company. It means that I'm talking with company.com. Big deal.
Tom
YES! The government! (Score:3, Interesting)
secretaryofstate.state.us or departmentofcommerce.state.us
you should recognize who it is
Far more paperwork and verification is done to incorporate (business licenses.) They have to commit tougher crimes to sneak off with a corporation or LLC. You have multiple parties interested such as the IRS and secretary of state who look bad if dummy corps are floating around (you don't mess with the IRS gangsters.)
Certs allow for multiple signings if I'm remembering correctly. There is no reason
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Advertise it for other than e-commerce. (Score:3, Interesting)
So if an open source CA is set up, it would be good for it to give more prominence to other uses of certificates, such as S/MIME, starttls for mail servers, for VPN authentication etc.
Re:Advertise it for other than e-commerce. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't really understand what the original poster meant by saying CACert is not open source. Open source doesn't really apply to something like a certificate authority, because they are not providing software. Anyone can get a CACert certificate at no cost. All you have to do is show two forms of government-issued ID (one with a photo) to an existing member. The more people who assure you in this way, the better the certificate you can get, and eventually you are allowed to start assuring people yourself. The problems I see with CACert are:
Parent
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I don't really understand what the original poster meant by saying CACert is not open source.
Well this [cacert.org] is the license, and it seems to not allow us to modify and redistribute the source.
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A completely open source CA would allow red
What is the question? (Score:5, Insightful)
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New question: Is it possible for a Open Source CA system to exists, as this would help ensure these qualities?
Sorry, didn't preview (Score:2)
Root certificate inclusion is expensive (Score:5, Informative)
http://wiki.cacert.org/wiki/InclusionStatus [cacert.org]
Summary: Lots of open source browsers already have the cert; Mozilla/Firefox will have it soon. Internet Explorer (and apparently Apple's Safari) won't have it unless they come up with a way to pay for the $75,000+ plus $10,000 a year for a AICPA WebTrust audit.
Certificates are a scam (Score:3, Insightful)
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Everybody knows it's a meaningless number? Your grandma knows that, does she? Very few people know anything about certificates at all. All they know is that if they go to Amazon's secure pages, a little padlock appears and they've
Thwaite, eh? (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks for proving a key point:
Thwaite [thwaite.com]
Thawte [thawte.com]
Parent
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If someone buys a certificate, you can conduct an investigation and trace it back to the person who made the purchase, and from there to the authorizaer. If you buy some sort of Verisign cert with a stolen credit card, they'll revoke the cert once the chargeback comes through the CC.
An open-source CA doesn't make sense, as you cannot enforce the security standards.
We already have (Score:5, Insightful)
Main use would be code-signing (Score:3, Informative)
It's also already possible to get high quality free/beer personal identification certificates for example the Thawte Web Of Trust who issue personal certs based on real-world check of national ID such as passport.
What we really need from an open CA is something you cannot to my knowledge get elsewhere which is reliable code-signing certificates without spending hundreds of dollars.
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CAcert also offers free, personal certificates based exclusively on WoT checking, and Class3 certificates for code-signing, it's similar to Thawte's model except for the free Class3 certificates [cacert.org].
The big hurdle seems to be that the Mozilla Foundation won't include the CAcert root certificate in the browser because CAcert doesn't pay them (unlike all the other root authorities).
Why OpenSource? (Score:2, Interesting)
Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
Shuttleworth (Score:2)
am I missing something here? (Score:2)
I didn't think open source needed that kind of thing.
When it comes to installing things via browser I prefer firefox's 'authorise this domain' thing, which is independent of certificates.
perhaps the reason there's no open source equivalent of these certificates is that its never come up as a problem.
I may
Re:am I missing something here? (Score:4, Informative)
You're welcome to teach my grandmother how to personally audit every line of source code for every program she ever installs.
Certificates have other uses than blob signing. If nothing else, the current infrastructure of "web" certificates would allow you to verify that the mozilla.org you're about to download and run executable code from is mozilla.org and not some leet h4xxor who owned your ISP's DNS server. They're also supposed to be able to verify that it's Amazon.com Inc. you're about to give your credit card number to and you're not really at a carefully cloaked amazonn.com but in practice that kind of protection isn't dependable.
I wish the Mozilla foundation would get a cert; AFAICT they don't have one and it freaks me out whenever I download an extension....
-:sigma.SB (the paranoid)
Parent
Encryption and authentication are conflated (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that if you want encryption, you either buy a certificate or you have the user presented with a misleading dialogue box that suggests that you are not trustworthy ... or rather the reverse is not true: just because you have a certificate does not mean that you are trustworthy.
Joe Sixpack does not understand the difference - which is only good for the profits of Versign and friends.
It would be nice if the two could be somehow unlinked.
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How do you get the "Trust" part? (Score:3, Informative)
Open Source CAs are pretty straightforward. All the code is available, and people are already doing it. The difficult part is establishing the trust model. The root CA needs to be well managed. But, more difficult is the process for issuing new certificates. If you just give cert's out without strong validation of who you're giving it to, your trust model is worthless. If anyone can go in and freely get a cert, what confidence do you have that the cert holder is not a "bad guy"?
That's why commercial CA's, like Verisign,cost money, and provide a real service. They do try to verify the organization they give cert's to. It may not be perfect,and many people complain about how strong that validation is. I can imagine what those people would think about an open source CA, and their level of validation before providing certs.
Absolutely Yes (Score:2, Informative)
Verisign, Comodo, and others have a big scam going on. Whoever wants to conduct secure business
Why some don't consider caCert open (Score:3, Interesting)
Pasting for those to lazy to follow the link.
Rich Freeman wrote:
>
> It just seems like as an organization we [The Mozilla Foundation]
> should be trying to foster open source projects.
Whoa, there. I'd just like to point out that CaCert is not an open source
project in any sense of the term. It uses open source software *internally* to
provide a free (as in beer) service, but CaCert distributes no free (as in
*freedom*) software, and no software that could even remotely be considered
open source. Just the opposite in fact, see the license here, on their site:
http://www.cacert.org/src-lic.php [cacert.org]
It clearly states that you:
1. may NOT modify the source code [...]
2. may NOT make copies of the source code [...]
3. may NOT give, sell, loan, distribute, or transfer the source code files
to anyone else, an, my favorite:
4. may NOT use [CaCert] software created for any purpose or reason other than
verifying that there are no unknown vulnerabilities or the like or otherwise
making your own assessment of the integrity of the source code and the security
features of the CaCert software
Furthermore, below it goes on: "All rights not expressly granted to you
[editorial comment: which would be "none"] in these license terms are reserved
by CAcert. CaCert retains ownership of all copyrights and other intellectual
property rights throughout the world in the CAcert source code and software.
You agree that CAcert will be given a perpetual non-exclusive rights to any and
all derived code, and you hereby assign rights in any modifications you make to
the source code and in any bug reports you submit to CAcert."
This just may be the single most disgusting and ill-advised hybrid software
license I have ever read. The author apparently seeks to keep the software
100% proprietary, guarding it from "competitors", and protecting potential
future licensing revenue, while simultaneously benefiting from the efforts the
open source developer community to fix its bugs, and attest that it is not
malware, for free.
Although I wrote an impassioned comment (#12 above, of 161 so far!)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21524 3#c12 [mozilla.org] in *support* of
CaCaert, uh, 4 years ago now, and was a CaCert user and Assurer, I discontinued
my involvement because the source code was released by the founder only months
later, after much prompting and delay, and when it was finally unveiled, these
onerous licensing restrictions were "slipped in" with zero community
discussion.
When I asked why the code was not made open source, the founder described his
perceived threat that if it was made open source, then other free CA's would
start popping up out of nowhere to run our code and to compete with CaCert and
he felt that this would decrease CaCert's chances of getting its root cert into
Mozilla, and then IE.
This seemed a paranoid and protectionist attitude and I've no longer
participated in the Assurer program or the CaCert community since, though I
have monitored the mailing lists. After the founder's recently announced
resignation, perhaps the new board of directors (or whatever governing body
structure they adopt) will revisit this anti-competitive, closed source
position.
I had though a free CA would be a good thing, and if one is good, then two is
better, and hundred would be fantastic! So if they all *do* pop up, and share
code and development effort, I believe that all will benefit and perhaps,
someday, all will be accepted by all the browsers, and Verisign and the sma
This is idiotic (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea is that verisign and pals spend a non-zero amount of time verifying you are who you say you are. Such a non-zero amount of time costs money. Hence the certificate costs money. Whether it is priced right or not is driven only by demand and production. Deal with it, or make your own.
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Re:Great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea is sound enough, it just doesn't go far enough.
Certificates and the technology surrounding them provides two things, one of them useful, one of them harmful. The useful thing is encryption. This means that as your data goes from point A to point B, it is very, very difficult to make any sense of. This is useful because often, as in the case of when we share our credit card data with some other entity, that is as far as we meant to share it and the encryption erases one of the situations where it is highly vulnerable to interception by others. We definitely want encryption.
The harmful thing is the illusion of "identity." This is 100% harmful, and on several fronts. First, the idea that you "know" who, or where, you are "locking certificates" with is illusory. No mechanism within the process positively or reliably identifies where, or which, computer you are connecting with, only that the certificate at hand has, at some point in the last year or more, been issued by a "certificate authority" that was convinced to some degree that at the time the certificate was issued there was somebody at a phone number and an address, possibly with a business, possibly not. They could have moved 20 minutes after the certificate was issued, and they'd have [certificate expiration time] to fraud up a storm if they so chose. In no way does the actions of the certificate "authority" serve to determine if that entity had nefarious intentions, or if the transaction you are entering into at any one time is legitimate. So you don't know who, or where, you are "locking certificates" with, and nothing the "certificate authority" does even begins to help you out in this manner. Despite very expensive marketing campaigns claiming precisely the opposite, gaining the consumer's trust with glossy, high end advertising.
But things are even worse, because with that illusion of "trust", the impression that the consumer no longer has any reason to check out the business is quite strong; this is partially a consequence of the method, but it is also a marketing lie told to consumers, and there the responsibility rests upon the promulgators of the scam, the "certificate authorities" themselves.
The fact is, as a consumer, you have to determine the legitimacy of the business yourself, and if you don't do that, there isn't a single thing that the "certificate authorities" have done, or can do, that will reduce your risks.
Now we come to the idea that to be useful, certificates have to be issued by a certificate authority. This is entirely false in terms of service, but entirely true because there is a huge scam going on.
Service-wise, a vendor can produce their own certificate, 100% as effective at encryption as anything they can get from the "certificate authorities." That certificate is 100% capable of working with any browser and protecting data during transfer to the connected party as well as anything they might get from a "certificate authority." So effective encryption 100% identical to what everyone uses now doesn't require a "certificate authority." Period.
Scam-wise, not the certificate authorities, but the browser vendors (though certainly encouraged by the "certificate authorities"), have created a situation where if the certificate you have cannot be traced in origin to one of the "certificate authorities", then the browser will pop up a warning and scare the dickens out of the consumer, thereby eroding your ability to do business. Consumers don't understand what is going on, all they know is they got a WARNING OMG WTF.
Therefore, to do e-commerce, a vendor must use a certificate from a "certificate authority" or they will have shot themselves in the foot. It would be the work of only a few moments for each of the browsers to remove these untrue, scam warnings; at that point, any properly generated certificate would work to provide encryption, consumers would stop getting these baseless warnings about "identity" t
Parent
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This isn't much of an issue in meatspace, but on the Internet the work you did to determine whether a business is acceptably safe is wasted if you end up at a typo squatter's site.
The value of a third-party certificate, limited by the relatively weak checking and the fact that virtually no customers understand it, is that although anyone could register bofa.com and be imposs
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As I said, it is up to us to take responsibility for what we are doing. Who typed the address in wrong? And since the answer is the user - us - then whose fault would that be? Not the legitimate businesses, and not even the CAs; No, it is the ours. And my precise point is that we should be careful with what we do, the certs don't help in any way to ensure we are wher
PGP != CA (Score:3, Informative)
PGP (and GPG) are systems using public/private key pairs. They are used to encrypt/decrypt or sign data from one point to another in a transmission.
The thing that you are sure is that given one public key, only the corresponding private key in the pair could process the data in the opposite direction. (Completely independent of where that other key is).
CA are certificate. They certify that the person using a given key IS a person with characteristics specified in the certificate.