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Do the SSL Watchmen Watch Themselves?
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Jan 02, 2009 09:02 PM
from the barbers-with-a-good-haircut dept.
from the barbers-with-a-good-haircut dept.
StrongestLink writes "In an intriguing twist on the recent Comodo CA vulnerability discussed here last week, security researcher Mike Zusman today revealed that three days prior to StartCom's disclosure of a flaw in a Comodo reseller's registration process, he discovered and disclosed an authentication bypass flaw to StartCom in their own registration process that allowed an attacker to submit an authorized request for any domain. During a month which was marked by the continuing paradigm shift to SSL-verified holiday shopping, the Chain of Trust continues to run off the gears, and Bruce Schneier is even commenting publicly that SSL's site validation mission isn't even relevant. What lies ahead for the billion-dollar CA industry?"
Related Stories
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Perfect MITM Attacks With No-Check SSL Certs 300 comments
StartCom writes "In a previous article I reported about Man-In-The-Middle attacks and spotlighted an example showing that they really happen. MITM attacks just got easier. In the attack described previously, untrusted certificates from an unknown issuer were used. Want to make the attack perfect with no error and a fully trusted certificate? No problem, just head over to one of Comodo's resellers. Screenshots and disclosure provided at the link."
Submission: Do The SSL Watchmen Watch Themselves? by Anonymous Coward
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Let governments handle SSL (Score:5, Insightful)
SSL certificates are one area best served by government. Bear with me here,
SSL certificates are the online version of your driver's license or your passport. We entrust our governments to provide us with reliable, trustworthy forms of identification. We know that if we see a driver's license or a passport, we can be reasonably certain the person holding said identification is who they claim.
It is becoming increasingly clear that SSL certificates issued by private industry cannot be trusted. Since private industry issues them, there are real standards for how one qualifies for a certificate. A $20 SSL cert from Godaddy is just as valid of identification as a $500 one from Verisign. Worse, the private industry has a conflict of interest. Their business makes money by issuing certificates to paying customers, not rejecting customers for bad information. The more stringent their policy, the more applicants they reject, and the less money they make. It is simple math, they have to make it as easy to get an SSL certificate as possible or go under. (The bond rating industry suffers from a different, but somewhat similar conflict of interest, actually)
Who then should issue certificates? The only entity that doesn't have to make money--your governments. Ideally you should be able to walk into whatever agency issues photo identification in your country and somehow get an SSL certificate issued. Businesses and non-profits could get them issued by checking a box on the form they use to set up a corporation or LLC.
Letting the government deal with this has many extra benefits. For starters, we could make SSL certificates fall under the same kinds of laws that govern passports or drivers licenses. If you forge one, or enter fake information, you could be charged under the same laws that faking a drivers license fall under. For second, if done right, good governments would issue these for virtually nothing and maybe protocols like S/MIME would finally get widespread adoption.
What about open source projects who currently cannot afford SSL certs? Well, if the government does it, they could file as a non-profit and get one for free (or reduced cost).
How would this work from a technical standpoint? How would browsers deal with a long list that has every countries certificate authority? Dunno, but it seems it wouldn't be a big problem. It is a technical problem though, so we can solve it somehow.
What international agency would regulate this? Who regulates passports? Dunno, but seems to me we already have a long history of internationally recognized identification--both for business and personal use. Why not task those guys with SSL certificates? This is more of a political problem, and isn't as easy to solve as the technical bits.
Bottom line, I know we all seem to hate more government, but SSL certificates are one thing governments should be doing, not private industries. It might create a new class of problems, but I suspect the new problems will be much less severe than the ones we have now.
Re:Let governments handle SSL (Score:5, Funny)
I can't wait to see the phishing websites validated by the Nigerian government's CA.
Parent
Re:Let governments handle SSL (Score:4, Insightful)
Your trust of government is simply astonishing after what the Bush administration has been up to for the last eight years especially considering all those slashdot stories concerning fumbling incompetence on the part of certain governments... The problem wish computer security isn't private industry, it's that there are few direct consequences for companies that produce faulty security systems, banks with shoddy security etc.- legally granted limited liability is a problem, Once they find their own heads on the chopping block after a security flaw is found they'd be a lot more keen on solving the problem.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Hey now, don't belittle the strengths of a bureaucracy because of Bush. There are certain things it can do well, licensing is one of them. It's not perfect (not hard to get a fake ID) but its good enough (moderately difficult to get a GOOD fake ID). Plus, then you know for sure that someone is checking on the security of the certificates because that's 50% of their job.
Now if only they'll make it so where there is a road, there is pipe (for the most part) and get some of the boonie yahoos some decent DSL
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Plus, then you know for sure that someone is checking on the security of the certificates because that's 50% of their job.
Yes, and there are also supposed to be people making laws that agree with the constitution and striking down unconstitutional ones, and people that make sure patents are valid before they get approved. But in both of them they fail in their jobs.
And think about the ways that governments would abuse this system. For example AT&T might not have a decently secured site, but because they agreed to wiretap they might give them a certificate. On the other hand a site that sells materials disagreeing wit
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Don't be so sure:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;50110485 [computerworld.com.au] they [at least the UK] seem to be fairly adept at losing things, if they screw up big time you still pay for it.. when a company screws up bad enough at least people might have a chance to look elsewhere- no, I think the solution here is to make use of that horrible trait of human nature- greed, well at least enli
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. As an end-user (businesses refer to you as a consumer), you expect
that the website you are interacting with is who you *trust* them to be.
And as the end-user, you expect that the reason you trust the site is because
you have the lock showing in your browser, and you believe the SSL system
is trustable.
Yet, as the end-user, what have you personally seen as evidence
that the https protocol using SSL is really trustable?
Most people have seen nothing.
And yet, here someone says the government should be tr
Re:Let governments handle SSL (Score:4, Insightful)
So, after wading patiently thru your treatise, it would seem you elected not to answer the question, which would explain your warmth towards politicos, at least
Parent
Nope. Government AND private companies (Score:5, Interesting)
It's better to use private companies with government oversight.
I now live in Ukraine and we have such a system. Government licenses private companies to work as certification centers and mandates that only certain (strong) crypto algorithms must be used.
As a result, I can use my private key to sign my tax report for IRS (or tax report for my company). IRS in turn uses its own key to sign their letters.
That's pretty cool, if you think about it.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Low broadband access rates,
Err, you do know that most of it is because the population of the USA is spread across a large area whereas just about any country in Europe (minus Russia) would fit within our borders? If the USA had roughly the same everything just scaled down to the size of a mid-sized state, I'm sure the USA would have the highest broadband access rates in the world.
Re:Nope. Government AND private companies (Score:5, Insightful)
OH boy, the 'but the US is huge' argument that comes up every time broadband in the US is discussed. I'd buy that if our metro areas were chocked full of fiber speeds and just the rural areas were slow. The fact is that even in our largest metro areas the US broadband is horrid.
A recent study [speedmatters.org] shows that even our smalled state, Rhode Island, with population density of over 1000 per square mile, has an average speed of only 6.7 Mbps. If you can't make that dense of an area high speed there is something seriously wrong with our system. Namely the Telco lobby arm is so strong that their gov't sanctioned monopoly remains and speeds don't improve.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sweden, Finland, Norway and Canada whose population density is lower than the US yet have higher broadband penetration seem to suggest that theory may not be entirely accurate.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
So you have some governments that issue high-quality reliable certificates.
And some corrupt ones which can be bought for peanuts.
So someone has to choose which root certificates to trust.
Someone, probably being the browser makers.
So what would it solve?
That is a technical problem (Score:2)
You'd have the browser show which country issued the certificate. Use a flag, use something. Firefox already does this by using a tooltip.
Plus, unlike private companies, we all have a sense of which countries certificates we may or may not trust. A user would get suspicious if "bofa.com" was using a certificate issued by Nigeria or "tesco.com" had a certificate that wasn't issued in the UK. What the fuck is the difference between a certificate issued by Thwarte vs. Verisign? Beats me!
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps if the browser stored every certificate the first time it was seen, then flagged the user when it was changed (combined with relying on certificate chains and the like) we wouldn't be having so many issues with MiTM.
Re: (Score:2)
So we need some way to rate CA quality...
Also, we can consider using money to fix this problem. For example, we can make all CAs put a big sum of money into an escrow account to be given to the first person who shows that CA doesn't perform 'due diligence' while issuing certificates.
Re:Let governments handle SSL (Score:4, Interesting)
It is becoming increasingly clear that SSL certificates issued by private industry cannot be trusted... Who then should issue certificates? The only entity that doesn't have to make money--your governments.
The problem with your idea is, even though you're correct that private industry cannot be trusted in this matter, the government cannot be trusted in this matter either.
These are technical flaws, not policy flaws - mistakes are happening due to software errors, NOT because some executive decided that allowing anyone to have a certificate without verification would be a great idea. I may trust the government's intentions, but experience suggests that they won't develop a system like this in-house, but contract it out to the lowest bidder, who is likely to have far less experience with this sort of thing than the current players.
For starters, we could make SSL certificates fall under the same kinds of laws that govern passports or drivers licenses. If you forge one, or enter fake information, you could be charged under the same laws that faking a drivers license fall under.
Pretty much all current spam is illegal under the CAN-SPAM act, so spammers could be charged under that law. They're not. I have no confidence that fake SSL certs would be prosecuted.
Parent
You might be wrong (Score:2)
Do governments crack down on people who fake their passports? If so, what is their motivation for doing so? How would their motivation for cracking down on SSL forgeries be any different?
Re: (Score:2)
How would their motivation for cracking down on SSL forgeries be any different?
You can't transport someone into a country with a fake SSL cert.
Re: (Score:2)
Who then should issue certificates? The only entity that doesn't have to make money--your governments.
Specifically, I would opt for Notary Public, maybe as a specially trained office, but the function is nearly identical.
Re: (Score:2)
Lastly, trusting the government not to cock this up relies on all countries doing the same thing and it relies on governments sorting their acts out and stop fucking things up as virtually every government seems to do.
A Better "Web of Trust" (Score:2)
This is how a web of trust should work. People trust certain sites to issue certificates. As certain sites gain trust, more people want to get certificates from them, etc. I might trust my friend Bob, but there is no reason you should. If a bank or e-commerce site wants t
Re:Let governments handle SSL (Score:5, Insightful)
The **last** thing I want is for my government to be the entity that issues the requisite public/private key pairs to the private institutions and companies with whom I do business. My business is **my** business - and not the government's business - until a **legitimate** search warrant or indictment says otherwise. And even then, it's still **my** business [wikipedia.org].
As the article posting indicates, SSL is built around a Chain of Trust. People buy SSL certificates from the likes of VeriSign, Thawte, Equifax, etc., because they are well-known and (ostensibly) trustworthy organizations.
I, for one, do not entirely trust my government. I don't trust VeriSign and crew all that much, either, but their reputations are a strong motivation for them to do their jobs reasonably well, and provide products that perform as advertised. To do otherwise would damage their reputations, resulting in lost customers and weaker profit margins.
Most governments, on the other hand, don't care much about their reputations, and have little regard for profit margins (just look at the US Government's annual budget deficit). They therefore have no compunction against using excuses such as "national security" and "protect the children" to provide (at best) or mandate (at worst) inferior solutions to technological problems.
Admittedly, some companies - like AT&T [wikipedia.org], for instance - are so large and well-entrenched that they sometimes bow to the mandates of government, and little heed the damage done to their reputations because of it.
But most companies are not that large, and can ill afford to lose face in the marketplace. Reputation is their bread-and-butter, so they do what's in their own best interests, which may even coincide with their customers' best interests.
Parent
Re:Let governments handle SSL (Score:4, Informative)
without ever seeing your private key
Why would they need your private key? As long as they can sign any key as being valid for being 'you' they can make their own signed public/private key pair purporting to be you and MITM any communications to you. To get around that you'd still need out-of-band exchanges of the keys in which case the government signing serves no purpose.
In addition, the web of trust needs to be more configurable in any case.
Without a doubt.
Parent
Which Government? (Score:2, Insightful)
You have placed your trust in the government. However which one?
Most governments would with the best of intentions try to do the right thing. However some would not. Some would down right look at this as a cash cow. It would be ripe for the picking of corruption and miss use. With next to no legal recourse.
So who governs the government?
I would contend that this belongs in the hands of grander body. The UN or blocks of countries, the EU, NAFTA, African Union, G8,9,10,11(What ever it is now). etc. At le
Re: (Score:2)
Ideally, more than one the UN+ a local country competing would be better than either on their own.
Re: (Score:2)
The more stringent their policy, the more applicants they reject, and the less money they make. It is simple math, they have to make it as easy to get an SSL certificate as possible or go under. (The bond rating industry suffers from a different, but somewhat similar conflict of interest, actually)
It's never that simple, clearly, because there is another factor called "trust". If you let in too many false positives, you lose the trust hierarchy and are pushed out of business by the other (more stringent) competitors. Who will put the government out of business when their sloppiness leads to disasters(as it uniformly has when dealing with security)? We trust the government locally because federal/state docs are produced with other federal/state documentation - we have 'faith' in the authentication mec
Re: (Score:2)
>> We know that if we see a driver's license or a passport, we can be reasonably certain the person holding said identification is who they claim.
>> but seems to me we already have a long history of internationally recognized identification--both for business and personal use.
Apparently no. That's the reason the travel to USA is now a PITA with all that added biometric registrations.
And for developing countries, the passports never were enough: because immigration laws, most require visa applica
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Their business makes money by issuing certificates to paying customers, not rejecting customers for bad information. The more stringent their policy, the more applicants they reject, and the less money they make. It is simple math.....
Who then should issue certificates? The only entity that doesn't have to make money--your governments.
Sir. I am not sure where you live but here in America we have seen countless changes made by various government agencies just so they can grab more tax money for there already inflated budgets.
Allow me to weave a tale for my fellow readers. My very first job was in a paper and printing supply warehouse. Things were great. I worked there for about 6 months before I got a rather strange call. It was a customer of ours who placed regular orders for pens and toner and the like. She said she was going to be plac
Re: (Score:2)
Your overall point is rather silly, but this in particular stuck out:
Worse, the private industry has a conflict of interest. Their business makes money by issuing certificates to paying customers, not rejecting customers for bad information. The more stringent their policy, the more applicants they reject, and the less money they make. It is simple math, they have to make it as easy to get an SSL certificate as possible or go under. (The bond rating industry suffers from a different, but somewhat similar co
Re: (Score:2)
Let me clarify my last statement:
You make it, there is no guarantee that someone won't end up breaking it, or find some flaw or way around the system.
Paradigm Shift? (Score:3, Funny)
demontrate control of the domain in question (Score:3, Insightful)
Why don't they use the method Google uses to verify control of a domain (and hence ownership)?
The CA should require a unique file (containing a serial number) to be posted to a specific location on the website. Failing that you should be able to receive mail to an arbitrary email address at the domain.
CAs who don't employ a technical measure (such as above) to verify domain ownership *prior* to issuing a cert would be taken out of the list of trusted CAs.
Re: (Score:2)
I believe StartCom and probably the other free providers do something like this. StartCom is in Firefox by default, by the way.
Re: (Score:2)
A brute force attack upon a server which gives you the ability to receive email through it or place files on it does not mean you have legal "control" over the domain.
OK, it tends to indicate it but it is not any real assurance.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Kaminsky's DNS attack -- and the BGP hack, for that matter -- demonstrate pretty clearly why being able to masquerade as a particular host to the CA is not sufficient to prove you are actually the proper owner of that domain.
Re: (Score:2)
The domain has to be registered to someone, and the path to companies who hold the "someone" information can be made trusted. You don't have to issue a whois query and hope that the information hasn't been tainted.
For the issuing of SSL certificates, which essentially protect against network-level hacks, being susceptible to network-level hacks is a pretty big deal.
We need multiple tiers (Score:4, Insightful)
Need a two tiered system.
The world is so fucked up right now as far as censorship and snooping. We need encryption, everywhere, right now.
Tier 1:
"httpe" that acts similar to SSH - big warning on key changes. Known key can be included in html links even from untrusted sites (such as from a google search results page) for a cautionary warning with no loss of security. No prompt for a new site. Prompt if it changes. Prompt if a link gives a 'known' key different from the given one.
Very easy to gradually deploy.
Tier 2:
Well-known certs for the root nameservers. Stick self-signed cert in DNS records. Sign DNS responses. Imposes a chain of trust type requirement on lesser nameservers.
Tier 3:
The fancier certs being passed around these days which are supposedly hyper deluxe verified. Actual monetary cost involved here. Determine a magic solution to make at least a few of the CAs trustworthy.
It was vaporware anyways (Score:5, Insightful)
The "industry" provided no value - it merely allowed you to pretend you were somehow secure, above and beyond the actual SSL part. Smoke and mirrors. If this "industry" dies, it will be a market correction, nothing more.
Bruce is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
"SSL protects data in transit but the problem isn't eavesdropping on the transmission. Someone can steal the credit card on some server somewhere. The real risk is data in storage. SSL protects against the wrong problem," [Schneier] said.
I respect Bruce, but I think if you say something true enough times, you lose sight of the fact that in this case it may not actually be a valid point. While credit card theft is a major problem, Phishers frequently target bank account login credentials--- which are not stored all over the place. In this case, SSL is one of the primary protections keeping you from all kind of hell (losing your credit card is a pain in the butt, but usually it's insured... losing your banking credentials can be a huge disaster). Now imagine that instead of a few rubes being conned by Phishing emails, you had millions of relatively savvy customers at a large ISP diverted to a fake Bank of America site (perhaps with help from insiders at the ISP). The losses could be substantial.
Again, Bruce is right about one problem but not necessarily about every problem (and I can't help but notice that he works for a storage company...)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, no, they're not stored every place. Usually, they're stored on the user's web browser or in some other similar system. As I recall from the paper on The Internet Auditing Project, their SSH security was broken because someone had the password on their Windows box and the Windows box was broken into. Also bear in mind that there were many stories in 2008 of servers being cracked, leading to the loss of hundreds of thousands, occasionally millions, of credit card numbers. So whilst I agree with you that
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's mostly popular to get bank credentials directly from the user's machine via malware. Jacking SSL isn't as successful.
Taking a harder line on certs. (Score:5, Interesting)
There are really three tiers of SSL certs being sold:
Current browsers don't distinguish between #1 and #2. They should. "Domain control only validated" certs are enough to secure some social networking site or blog, but not good enough to send someone a credit card number. If they're taking your money, the cert should contain enough info to allow you to find and sue them.
Our SiteTruth [sitetruth.com] system distinguishes between #1 and #2, because we're looking for business identity. It's a useful way to filter out the "bottom feeders".
The problems with bogus SSL cert issuance seem to be, so far, confined to the "Domain control only validated" certs. This is an additional good reason to distinguish between them and the better tiers.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I lost faith in the CAs and the certs they sign early on. I was at a sort of b2b expo (The dot-com boom was just barely beginning but nobody knew it).
I met a representative from a CA that I won't identify, but I'm sure you've heard of them. He came prepared to give 'why you need a cert and https' sales pitch to various sorts of people from CEO to sales to CTO to techie.
He wasn't (apparently) prepared to discuss trust and authentication in any depth. When he told me (paraphrased) that they "KNOW
Re:Sorry to go off-topic (Score:5, Informative)
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Latin for "who will watch the watchers".
Parent
Re:Sorry to go off-topic (Score:4, Funny)
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Latin for "who will watch the watchers".
So did you know that phrase before it was used on Star Trek: TNG?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I sort of tuned out TNG after a while. I didn't realize it was used in there. Also, I don't know if they used the Latin or just a rough translation in Enemy of the State.
One year of high school Latin did it for me.
ILLEGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM!
bailout?, Not what I was thinking, but ... (Score:2)
I was thinking more along the lines of jail time. Scams that take money under false pretenses often do result in jail time.
But, then I thought about the recipients of the current bailouts, and bailouts do seem to be an alternative to jail time.
You could be right.