6 ms·

> How long before Symantec gets an NSL demanding an appliance that can mint bogus certs on the fly for dropbox.com, facebook.com, twitter.com, etc...? If the b

by agwa 10y ago

> How long before Symantec gets an NSL demanding an appliance that can mint bogus certs on the fly for dropbox.com, facebook.com, twitter.com, etc...? If the bogus certs are not logged in Certificate Transparency, they will be rejected by Chrome: https://security.googleblog.com/2015/10/sustaining-digital-certificate-security.html https://security.googleblog.com/2015/10/sustaining-digital-c... If they are logged in Certificate Transparency, then the world will know, the offending certificates will be immediately blacklisted, and Symantec will be booted from root programs. With the ongoing advancements in Certificate Transparency, your faith in the Internet PKI should be growing, not waning.

criddell 10y ago
From the link you posted: > However, we were still able to find several more questionable certificates using only the Certificate Transparency logs and a few minutes of work. We shared these results with other root store operators on October 6th, to allow them to independently assess and verify our research. So finding questionable certificates is trivially easy, but nobody ever bothers to look? What good is that?
- agwa 10y ago
  "Nobody"? Google monitors for their domains. So does Facebook. I'll bet a lot of other high value sites are monitoring too but haven't said so publicly. As for everyone else, give it some time. The ecosystem is still very young and we're still developing tooling.
  - criddell 10y ago
    I'm happy that Google and Facebook are discovering fraudulent certs. When they pop up, hopefully those companies aren't prevented from going public with the information. Are there any end-user tools? When I open twitter.com, I would love for my browser (or my phone if I'm using an app) to tell me that the certificate fingerprint has changed unexpectedly since the last time I visited.
    - mynewtb 10y ago
      There is certificate patrol or something like that. It is very verbose and will annoy you.
    - schoen 10y ago
      If you don't mind the risk of false positives (detecting changes that are legitimate), you can get that information from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/certificate-patrol/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/certificate-p...
- pfg 10y ago
  It's a fairly new project (in "internet standard/security technology" years), first introduced in 2013. CT Monitoring/Auditing is basically a group effort, being most effective when everyone from domain owners, browser vendors to CAs use it. There are usually no easy and instant solutions to complex problems, but it's getting there.
- technion 10y ago
  On the subject of bothering to look, I built this service to answer that: https://ctadvisor.lolware.net https://ctadvisor.lolware.net
  - criddell 10y ago
    Very cool. Do you know if Lets Encrypt is monitoring on behalf of their users? It seems like that should be part of the job. Why are all these tamper detection tools targeted to domain owners rather than end users?
    - technion 10y ago
      I don't really see how Lets Encrypt could monitor on behalf of their users. If a CT log shows <randomCA> created a certificate for my domain, I know it's unauthorised for the reason that I did not choose to authorise it. Lets Encrypt cannot assume they are the only company that I deal with.
      - criddell 10y ago
        oh yeah, that's a good point. I didn't think that one through.
criddell 10y ago
Now that I think about this more, I'm wondering how the certificate transparency program can be protected. The certificate information would have to be submitted out-of-band to be sure that it hasn't been tampered with, right? It wouldn't make sense to communicate about certificate security using infrastructure that depends on the same technology. I was thinking about this because I was wondering if you could use secure dns to store certificate fingerprints. That doesn't make sense though because secure dns also depends on PKI.

by agwa 10y ago

criddell 10y ago

From the link you posted: > However, we were still able to find several more questionable certificates using only the Certificate Transparency logs and a few minutes of work. We shared these results with other root store operators on October 6th, to allow them to independently assess and verify our research. So finding questionable certificates is trivially easy, but nobody ever bothers to look? What good is that?

agwa 10y ago
"Nobody"? Google monitors for their domains. So does Facebook. I'll bet a lot of other high value sites are monitoring too but haven't said so publicly. As for everyone else, give it some time. The ecosystem is still very young and we're still developing tooling.
- criddell 10y ago
  I'm happy that Google and Facebook are discovering fraudulent certs. When they pop up, hopefully those companies aren't prevented from going public with the information. Are there any end-user tools? When I open twitter.com, I would love for my browser (or my phone if I'm using an app) to tell me that the certificate fingerprint has changed unexpectedly since the last time I visited.
  - mynewtb 10y ago
    There is certificate patrol or something like that. It is very verbose and will annoy you.
  - schoen 10y ago
    If you don't mind the risk of false positives (detecting changes that are legitimate), you can get that information from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/certificate-patrol/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/certificate-p...
pfg 10y ago
It's a fairly new project (in "internet standard/security technology" years), first introduced in 2013. CT Monitoring/Auditing is basically a group effort, being most effective when everyone from domain owners, browser vendors to CAs use it. There are usually no easy and instant solutions to complex problems, but it's getting there.
technion 10y ago
On the subject of bothering to look, I built this service to answer that: https://ctadvisor.lolware.net https://ctadvisor.lolware.net
- criddell 10y ago
  Very cool. Do you know if Lets Encrypt is monitoring on behalf of their users? It seems like that should be part of the job. Why are all these tamper detection tools targeted to domain owners rather than end users?
  - technion 10y ago
    I don't really see how Lets Encrypt could monitor on behalf of their users. If a CT log shows <randomCA> created a certificate for my domain, I know it's unauthorised for the reason that I did not choose to authorise it. Lets Encrypt cannot assume they are the only company that I deal with.
    - criddell 10y ago
      oh yeah, that's a good point. I didn't think that one through.

criddell 10y ago

Now that I think about this more, I'm wondering how the certificate transparency program can be protected. The certificate information would have to be submitted out-of-band to be sure that it hasn't been tampered with, right? It wouldn't make sense to communicate about certificate security using infrastructure that depends on the same technology. I was thinking about this because I was wondering if you could use secure dns to store certificate fingerprints. That doesn't make sense though because secure dns also depends on PKI.