12 ms·

WoSign's secret purchase of StartCom: WoSign threatened legal actions

191 points by 0x0 10y ago

creshal 10y ago
StartCom has always been scummy. We've created hundreds of certificates in clear violation of their ToS and they ignored it after we payed some hush money; and then there's the whole "asking for money to revoke certificates affected by heartbleed" affair. And StartEncrypt. Both should be revoked.
- onli 10y ago
  The whole CA system should be abolished. The only thing needed is certificates for domain control, as LE does. We need one or two non-profit organizations for that who do that work transparently. Remove the market from where should be none.
  - thesimon 10y ago
    >The only thing needed is certificates for domain control, as LE does EV certs are quite useful for special sites like banking though.
    - creshal 10y ago
      Why? As long as there's a single rogue CA that lets people print EV certs without due diligence, the whole system is a farce.
      - verroq 10y ago
        Not with CT and pinning.
        mjevans 10y ago
        At that point why have EV instead of actually doing real security and prompting the user to verify the certificate (and remembering what they approved)?
        thesimon 10y ago
        I don't think my mother knows how to verify the certificate and certificate chain.
        Kadin 10y ago
        Unless your mother knows not to go to a site without an EV certificate, it doesn't really matter that much. The certificate pinning is valuable in terms of preventing MITMs by rogue CAs, but the EV itself doesn't seem to really add much.
        stephenr 10y ago
        > Unless your mother knows not to go to a site without an EV certificate "Make sure it says <company name> in green at the top" is much easier than "ok now check any intermediary certs, and of course make sure they have the right fingerprint"
  - Arnt 10y ago
    What we have is DANE and 0 nonprofits. Instead you add RRs in the domain (which you control, right?).
    - drdaeman 10y ago
      > domain (which you control, right?) You never control a domain - ICANN, your TLD registry and your immediate domain registrar do. So, technically, it's just replacing one trust vector with another. However, given that we don't have a proper crypto in DNS (not even DNSSEC which many don't like and urge to abolish), it would be terrible. Anyone who can feed you spoofed DNS responses (i.e. starting from a cafe hotspot) would be able to impersonate just anything.
      - okket 10y ago
        > You never control a domain Then don't use DNS if you can't trust it? You have to trust at some point. Or create your own infrastructure and convince others to trust you, if you want more than a private network. > Anyone who can feed you spoofed DNS responses The tendency goes towards running your own local DNS resolver. It was not possible in the 90s, but since then both the network and computer got a lot faster and smarter. DNSSEC has also evolved quite a bit and is the best we will get for long time. I really encourage to have a look again before dismissing it outright. http://blog.easydns.org/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/ http://blog.easydns.org/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
        drdaeman 10y ago
        > Then don't use DNS if you can't trust it? Same with CAs, but I believe it's easier to distrust a rogue CA than a rogue name registry. I mean, if there's a news that some .example TLD is in bed with NSA, Chinese government and Russian FSB - there isn't much we can do about that, isn't it? And I guess most businesses won't go as far as changing their domain name. At the same time, on most devices I saw, distrusting a CA wasn't terribly complicated. And can be done by a browser or OS vendor, with a version upgrade, as well. > http://blog.easydns.org/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/ http://blog.easydns.org/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/ Thanks for the link. Looks like an interesting reading.
- lima 10y ago
  Yet, StartCom's free certificates were the reason my sites have had SSL certificates for years.
  - NoGravitas 10y ago
    I moved my personal site from StartSSL (which I had used for years) to Let's Encrypt a few months ago. It was really painless, and I recommend it.
  - creshal 10y ago
    Not that positive if StartCom also gave others free certificates for your sites.
    - lima 10y ago
      My experience with StartCom was that they were incredibly responsive (Eddy himself answered some of my customer support tickets, sometimes within 20 minutes late at night) and they manually checked every single certificate request and even refused one. I requested a certificate for a company website and they wanted a letter of agreement from the CEO. Went with a paid DV certificate since that was too much effort. Now, after the whole WoSign controversy I'd be reluctant to ever use their services again, but I just wanted to point out that I was a happy user and later customer (I paid for wildcard certs) for years without any issues.
      - creshal 10y ago
        > I requested a certificate for a company website and they wanted a letter of agreement from the CEO. Went with a paid DV certificate since that was too much effort. Just should've kept pestering him, I ended up paying twice the regular fee and were allowed to print as many class 2 "verified" certificates as we wanted to. By their own ToS we shouldn't even have been class 1 verified, as a whole team of admins was "impersonating" our CEO for years.
- tajen 10y ago
  Someone asked 2 days ago how customers could be careful about their CA being revoked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12391308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12391308 > How? I've got no way to judge the security / responsibility of any CA. (...) You can't blame the CA customers for this. To which I answered: > One sign is that if Symantec has issued rogue certificates, and Google publishes the problem, then it's time to leave. I'd say it's valid for StartSSL now as well...
- bloopletech 10y ago
  I have just read through the mailing list thread referenced in the article, and with the important caveat that I am not an expert in this space, it seems that WoSign has failed to comply with the basic requirements a CA has to meet to be trusted by the major browsers. And compounding these failures, Richard Wang (apparently the managing director of WoSign) either doesn't grasp, or is intentionally trying to minimise the severity of the failures. Compounding the situation more, it seems that WoSign may have acquired StartCom. If true, this seems to be a much larger story, because of the (probable but not yet proven) concern that any failures WoSign is exhibiting, StartCom will exhibit too. Also Richard Wang seems to want to keep the nature of the relationship between WoSign and StartCom as vague and secret as possible. This is concerning because, in the case of CAs in particular, if they haven't done anything wrong, why are they trying to hide it? The other thing I didn't realise until I read the thread is that this situation seems to be currently unfolding - there are posts on the thread from Richard Wang dated September 2nd.
131hn 10y ago
I'll never trust anything that is owned/managed by a chinese company. I'll most certainly switch all my corpo certs to another CA (Let’s Encrypt has no plans to issue EV or OV certificates at this time. ...) Where should i go ?
- scrollaway 10y ago
  If you need EV or code signing, or anything that Let's Encrypt doesn't provide, DigiCert is wonderful.
  - tallanvor 10y ago
    I agree, DigiCert has been very easy to work with. That said, it's really time for them to drop the price on their standard certificates.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - tomjen3 10y ago
      They charge nearly 200 bucks for a year certificate. They must be mental.
      - phonon 10y ago
        Though interestingly, their EV cert pricing is quite competitive. https://www.digicert.com/ev-ssl-certification.htm https://www.digicert.com/ev-ssl-certification.htm
    - arthur2e5 10y ago
      Boring addition: 139 mail ("important user" listed on WoSign's [comparison] before the page's [removal]), azure.cn (who used CNNIC before switching to WoSign), and cnnic.cn (yes, CNNIC root CA) all switched to DigiCert for their sites. Great alternative it seems like. [comparison]: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20160828045112/https://www.wosign.com/about/WoSign_ForeignCA_compare.htm http://wayback.archive.org/web/20160828045112/https://www.wo... [removal]: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/k9PBmyLCi8I/IfPpEaUiDQAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/...
ascorbic 10y ago
Now that LetsEncrypt exists there's no excuse for anyone to use StartCom. They've had a whiff of dodginess for ages, and their customer service is among the rudest I've known. This should be the final straw. Their root needs removing from browsers. Give their existing customers a year's warning.
- bkor 10y ago
  Wildcard domains aren't supported by Let's Encrypt last I checked. StartCom provided GNOME with a free account which can create certificates (including the wildcard ones and so on). Those are pretty much mandatory in certain cases (secure Bugzilla attachment hosting).
  - creshal 10y ago
    > Wildcard domains aren't supported by Let's Encrypt last I checked. But with ACME, the need for wildcard certs is strongly reduced. If you don't need dynamic, on-the-fly subdomain creation, it's trivial to have Let's Encrypt generate certs with all the subdomains you need (especially now that the limits are much higher than during beta).
    - sirn 10y ago
      I believe that's exactly the use case of secure Bugzilla attachment hosting the OP mentioned. IIRC, it will generate the subdomain on the fly using ticket ID in the form of bug12345.bugzilla.example.com to host the attachment.
      - creshal 10y ago
        Ah, interesting. Haven't worked with Bugzilla for years, didn't know they added this.
  - bruo 10y ago
    I agree with you, there is no alternative to StartCom right now in wildcard certs. While GNOME got a free account to get those certs, the last time i checked is still the cheapest way to get wildcard certificates (60 usd for unlimited wildcard certs). It also removes the complexity of having to deploy let's encrypt certificates every X months without storing the LE's account key online. But if they release certificates for anybody claiming to be you there is no advantage in this area.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
VMG 10y ago
How to disable CAs on firefox (thanks user nmc): The GUI way: https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:UserCertDB#Deleting_a_Root_Certificate https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:UserCertDB#Deleting_a_Root_Certi... The CLI way: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/285831 http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/285831 Chrome/Chromium: search "certificate" in settings to get to the certificate manager, edit trust settings for certificates.
- imglorp 10y ago
  How can laypeople know which certs can currently be trusted? Is there a list of ratings somewhere, or maybe a whitelist of some kind?
  - svenfaw 10y ago
    I'm working on such a project. The ratings are based on a few well-defined criteria. Stay tuned!
    - rocqua 10y ago
      How do I stay tuned? Sounds quite interesting.
    - joepie91_ 10y ago
      Potentially useful to that end: https://git.cryto.net/joepie91/ca-incidents https://git.cryto.net/joepie91/ca-incidents
- mtgx 10y ago
  Don't forget to disable them in Android (and iOS?), too.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Remember that editing the root CA store is not possible on Android Nougat anymore, to prevent MitM proxies for adblocking or debugging apps you didn't develop.
mtgx 10y ago
WoSign seems to give away all the signs of malicious CA. Why haven't browser vendors banned them (both) already?
xoa 10y ago
I reluctantly stopped all usage and recommendation of StartSSL last year after concerning information came up about a shift to Chinese ownership/control due to their hosting by Qihoo 360 (previous discussed on HN [1]), which went poorly in the context of both their lack of transparency and their long standing insistence that certain keys be generated in the browser rather then a user supplied CSR. But it really was reluctant because their actual model was fantastic and how I desperately wish other CAs operated. They charged only for the actions that actually take human time: manual identity verification. Machine verification was always free, but then there was the option to get basic identity verified for a reasonable price (getting a level 2 cert), then an organization, and then a more extensive organization verification. At each step once you had a given level of verification done you could then get certs without further payment for the validity period, in stark contrast to the artificial expense CAs normally add. In an ideal world cryptographic authentication would be part of the standard services offered by government, and in fact authentication should be a core function of government period, but that is not the case. And no, Let's Encrypt is not a full substitute unfortunately, as it offers only SSL certs. GPG has poor mobile and native platform support compared S/MIME. So I do think it's a bummer that StartCom is toast. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11107740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11107740 Edited to add: just to be clear, they absolutely had their flaws all along too, primarily in terms of charging for revocations which rightly earned criticism. But I still wish a better organization would take the good bits and improve rather then the entire thing vanishing into the annals of history. I feel like we're really treading water when it comes to authentication, despite it being an ever more critical part of life. All the math and basic tech needed to solve it correctly and in a user friendly way has been around for at least a decade or two at this point, yet most people and organizations still send messages with no real authentication (which in turn is the direct root of much spam and scams), password use (and resultant problems) is still near universal standard practice, etc.
- BillinghamJ 10y ago
  This was the final straw on StartSSL for me. :( I have now dropped my ongoing EV verification with them (has taken 7 months so far!) in favor of CertSimple, and we've also moved all non-EV to LetsEncrypt/AWS.
prometheanfire 10y ago
They are the only cert provider that will let me do a wildcard san cert for not outrageous costs :(. .example.com .bugs.example.com (the star is only for one level) example2.com *.example3.com
ramblenode 10y ago
It doesn't seem like browsers are willing to revoke certificates from these dangerous CAs, but what about a compromise that flags some certificates as less trustworthy?--a certificate tier, if you will. I'm envisioning a warning page in the style of Firefox's "This Connection is Untrusted" that would require the user to consent before proceeding to the page. Or removing the lock icon if that's too intrusive. It wouldn't break websites but it would bring attention to websites' choice of security and probably spur action from those affected. The whole system needs an overhaul but we also need a stopgap.
- rocqua 10y ago
  I think this is definitely needed to keep CAs viable, but this requires cross-signing to be much easier. It should also be possible to get signed certificates by many CAs. Without this, it would be quite difficult to ensure you can serve a customer a valid certificate. At the same time with much more cross-signing, trust would be established much better.
justinclift 10y ago
Damn, we (sqlitebrowser.org) recently went through the process of obtaining a MS code signing certificate... from StartCom. (so we can sign our release binaries) sigh
devy 10y ago
I call for a detailed investigation over WoSign's purchase of StartCom and the current status of StartCom. If StartCom is deemed untrusted in connection with WoSign, it should be revoked as well. I further call for all current users of WoSign or StartCom to switch to Let's Encrypt as soon as possible. First off, it's impractical for all StartCom/WoSign customers to switch to LE because LE doesn't offer wildcard and EV TLS certificates, neither do they offer certificates that are valid more than 90 days. Second of all, there are 175 root certificates[1] (close to a hundred CAs) trusted by Mozilla, why does this blogger targets the one and only CA in China; go above and beyond digging into private business deals to prove his point and trying so hard to gather up public support to revoke WoSign's root certificates? I mean, sure WoSign was pretty bad in those incidences of certificate mis-issurances and have had some really shitty practices exposed (I suspect incompetence might also contributed), but is WoSign the ONLY one out there who does these shitty practices in the CA business? We don't know, until someone's look into it. But publicly shaming a single CA doesn't make all of us securer, rising awareness and promote security best practices do. PS: if you read the rest of his blog posts in Chinese (resource links ), you would most certainly agree that the blogger is A) knows Chinese really well and B) is a political dissident. So is there any hidden motive of why the blogger did what s/he had done? Personal revenge? You guess is as good as mine. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:IncludedCAs https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:IncludedCAs
- EnFinlay 10y ago
  I think you're right, this blogger is focusing their attention on this CA. Even though you're probably correct, it's irrelevant. Every CA should be able to stand up to whatever scrutiny people choose to put them under. Just because this person is not targeting all of them does not make what he finds LESS valid. If he's making stuff up, then yeah, that's obviously it's a problem. To Straw Man you, it's crazy to say "I'll ignore these facts because the messenger has a bias".
kgc 10y ago
To un-trust on OS X: 1. Open Keychain 2. Search for Startcom (3 results) 3. Double click each certificate 4. Open Trust section (expand small arrow) 5. Select "Never Trust" for the first option.

191 points by 0x0 10y ago

StartCom has always been scummy. We've created hundreds of certificates in clear violation of their ToS and they ignored it after we payed some hush money; and then there's the whole "asking for money to revoke certificates affected by heartbleed" affair. And StartEncrypt. Both should be revoked.

onli 10y ago
The whole CA system should be abolished. The only thing needed is certificates for domain control, as LE does. We need one or two non-profit organizations for that who do that work transparently. Remove the market from where should be none.
- thesimon 10y ago
  >The only thing needed is certificates for domain control, as LE does EV certs are quite useful for special sites like banking though.
  - creshal 10y ago
    Why? As long as there's a single rogue CA that lets people print EV certs without due diligence, the whole system is a farce.
    - verroq 10y ago
      Not with CT and pinning.
      - mjevans 10y ago
        At that point why have EV instead of actually doing real security and prompting the user to verify the certificate (and remembering what they approved)?
        thesimon 10y ago
        I don't think my mother knows how to verify the certificate and certificate chain.
        Kadin 10y ago
        Unless your mother knows not to go to a site without an EV certificate, it doesn't really matter that much. The certificate pinning is valuable in terms of preventing MITMs by rogue CAs, but the EV itself doesn't seem to really add much.
        stephenr 10y ago
        > Unless your mother knows not to go to a site without an EV certificate "Make sure it says <company name> in green at the top" is much easier than "ok now check any intermediary certs, and of course make sure they have the right fingerprint"
- Arnt 10y ago
  What we have is DANE and 0 nonprofits. Instead you add RRs in the domain (which you control, right?).
  - drdaeman 10y ago
    > domain (which you control, right?) You never control a domain - ICANN, your TLD registry and your immediate domain registrar do. So, technically, it's just replacing one trust vector with another. However, given that we don't have a proper crypto in DNS (not even DNSSEC which many don't like and urge to abolish), it would be terrible. Anyone who can feed you spoofed DNS responses (i.e. starting from a cafe hotspot) would be able to impersonate just anything.
    - okket 10y ago
      > You never control a domain Then don't use DNS if you can't trust it? You have to trust at some point. Or create your own infrastructure and convince others to trust you, if you want more than a private network. > Anyone who can feed you spoofed DNS responses The tendency goes towards running your own local DNS resolver. It was not possible in the 90s, but since then both the network and computer got a lot faster and smarter. DNSSEC has also evolved quite a bit and is the best we will get for long time. I really encourage to have a look again before dismissing it outright. http://blog.easydns.org/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/ http://blog.easydns.org/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
      - drdaeman 10y ago
        > Then don't use DNS if you can't trust it? Same with CAs, but I believe it's easier to distrust a rogue CA than a rogue name registry. I mean, if there's a news that some .example TLD is in bed with NSA, Chinese government and Russian FSB - there isn't much we can do about that, isn't it? And I guess most businesses won't go as far as changing their domain name. At the same time, on most devices I saw, distrusting a CA wasn't terribly complicated. And can be done by a browser or OS vendor, with a version upgrade, as well. > http://blog.easydns.org/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/ http://blog.easydns.org/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/ Thanks for the link. Looks like an interesting reading.
lima 10y ago
Yet, StartCom's free certificates were the reason my sites have had SSL certificates for years.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  I moved my personal site from StartSSL (which I had used for years) to Let's Encrypt a few months ago. It was really painless, and I recommend it.
- creshal 10y ago
  Not that positive if StartCom also gave others free certificates for your sites.
  - lima 10y ago
    My experience with StartCom was that they were incredibly responsive (Eddy himself answered some of my customer support tickets, sometimes within 20 minutes late at night) and they manually checked every single certificate request and even refused one. I requested a certificate for a company website and they wanted a letter of agreement from the CEO. Went with a paid DV certificate since that was too much effort. Now, after the whole WoSign controversy I'd be reluctant to ever use their services again, but I just wanted to point out that I was a happy user and later customer (I paid for wildcard certs) for years without any issues.
    - creshal 10y ago
      > I requested a certificate for a company website and they wanted a letter of agreement from the CEO. Went with a paid DV certificate since that was too much effort. Just should've kept pestering him, I ended up paying twice the regular fee and were allowed to print as many class 2 "verified" certificates as we wanted to. By their own ToS we shouldn't even have been class 1 verified, as a whole team of admins was "impersonating" our CEO for years.
tajen 10y ago
Someone asked 2 days ago how customers could be careful about their CA being revoked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12391308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12391308 > How? I've got no way to judge the security / responsibility of any CA. (...) You can't blame the CA customers for this. To which I answered: > One sign is that if Symantec has issued rogue certificates, and Google publishes the problem, then it's time to leave. I'd say it's valid for StartSSL now as well...
bloopletech 10y ago
I have just read through the mailing list thread referenced in the article, and with the important caveat that I am not an expert in this space, it seems that WoSign has failed to comply with the basic requirements a CA has to meet to be trusted by the major browsers. And compounding these failures, Richard Wang (apparently the managing director of WoSign) either doesn't grasp, or is intentionally trying to minimise the severity of the failures. Compounding the situation more, it seems that WoSign may have acquired StartCom. If true, this seems to be a much larger story, because of the (probable but not yet proven) concern that any failures WoSign is exhibiting, StartCom will exhibit too. Also Richard Wang seems to want to keep the nature of the relationship between WoSign and StartCom as vague and secret as possible. This is concerning because, in the case of CAs in particular, if they haven't done anything wrong, why are they trying to hide it? The other thing I didn't realise until I read the thread is that this situation seems to be currently unfolding - there are posts on the thread from Richard Wang dated September 2nd.

131hn 10y ago

I'll never trust anything that is owned/managed by a chinese company. I'll most certainly switch all my corpo certs to another CA (Let’s Encrypt has no plans to issue EV or OV certificates at this time. ...) Where should i go ?

scrollaway 10y ago
If you need EV or code signing, or anything that Let's Encrypt doesn't provide, DigiCert is wonderful.
- tallanvor 10y ago
  I agree, DigiCert has been very easy to work with. That said, it's really time for them to drop the price on their standard certificates.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - tomjen3 10y ago
    They charge nearly 200 bucks for a year certificate. They must be mental.
    - phonon 10y ago
      Though interestingly, their EV cert pricing is quite competitive. https://www.digicert.com/ev-ssl-certification.htm https://www.digicert.com/ev-ssl-certification.htm
  - arthur2e5 10y ago
    Boring addition: 139 mail ("important user" listed on WoSign's [comparison] before the page's [removal]), azure.cn (who used CNNIC before switching to WoSign), and cnnic.cn (yes, CNNIC root CA) all switched to DigiCert for their sites. Great alternative it seems like. [comparison]: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20160828045112/https://www.wosign.com/about/WoSign_ForeignCA_compare.htm http://wayback.archive.org/web/20160828045112/https://www.wo... [removal]: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/k9PBmyLCi8I/IfPpEaUiDQAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/...

ascorbic 10y ago

Now that LetsEncrypt exists there's no excuse for anyone to use StartCom. They've had a whiff of dodginess for ages, and their customer service is among the rudest I've known. This should be the final straw. Their root needs removing from browsers. Give their existing customers a year's warning.

bkor 10y ago
Wildcard domains aren't supported by Let's Encrypt last I checked. StartCom provided GNOME with a free account which can create certificates (including the wildcard ones and so on). Those are pretty much mandatory in certain cases (secure Bugzilla attachment hosting).
- creshal 10y ago
  > Wildcard domains aren't supported by Let's Encrypt last I checked. But with ACME, the need for wildcard certs is strongly reduced. If you don't need dynamic, on-the-fly subdomain creation, it's trivial to have Let's Encrypt generate certs with all the subdomains you need (especially now that the limits are much higher than during beta).
  - sirn 10y ago
    I believe that's exactly the use case of secure Bugzilla attachment hosting the OP mentioned. IIRC, it will generate the subdomain on the fly using ticket ID in the form of bug12345.bugzilla.example.com to host the attachment.
    - creshal 10y ago
      Ah, interesting. Haven't worked with Bugzilla for years, didn't know they added this.
- bruo 10y ago
  I agree with you, there is no alternative to StartCom right now in wildcard certs. While GNOME got a free account to get those certs, the last time i checked is still the cheapest way to get wildcard certificates (60 usd for unlimited wildcard certs). It also removes the complexity of having to deploy let's encrypt certificates every X months without storing the LE's account key online. But if they release certificates for anybody claiming to be you there is no advantage in this area.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

VMG 10y ago

How to disable CAs on firefox (thanks user nmc): The GUI way: https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:UserCertDB#Deleting_a_Root_Certificate https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:UserCertDB#Deleting_a_Root_Certi... The CLI way: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/285831 http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/285831 Chrome/Chromium: search "certificate" in settings to get to the certificate manager, edit trust settings for certificates.

imglorp 10y ago
How can laypeople know which certs can currently be trusted? Is there a list of ratings somewhere, or maybe a whitelist of some kind?
- svenfaw 10y ago
  I'm working on such a project. The ratings are based on a few well-defined criteria. Stay tuned!
  - rocqua 10y ago
    How do I stay tuned? Sounds quite interesting.
  - joepie91_ 10y ago
    Potentially useful to that end: https://git.cryto.net/joepie91/ca-incidents https://git.cryto.net/joepie91/ca-incidents
mtgx 10y ago
Don't forget to disable them in Android (and iOS?), too.
- kuschku 10y ago
  Remember that editing the root CA store is not possible on Android Nougat anymore, to prevent MitM proxies for adblocking or debugging apps you didn't develop.

mtgx 10y ago

WoSign seems to give away all the signs of malicious CA. Why haven't browser vendors banned them (both) already?

xoa 10y ago

I reluctantly stopped all usage and recommendation of StartSSL last year after concerning information came up about a shift to Chinese ownership/control due to their hosting by Qihoo 360 (previous discussed on HN [1]), which went poorly in the context of both their lack of transparency and their long standing insistence that certain keys be generated in the browser rather then a user supplied CSR. But it really was reluctant because their actual model was fantastic and how I desperately wish other CAs operated. They charged only for the actions that actually take human time: manual identity verification. Machine verification was always free, but then there was the option to get basic identity verified for a reasonable price (getting a level 2 cert), then an organization, and then a more extensive organization verification. At each step once you had a given level of verification done you could then get certs without further payment for the validity period, in stark contrast to the artificial expense CAs normally add. In an ideal world cryptographic authentication would be part of the standard services offered by government, and in fact authentication should be a core function of government period, but that is not the case. And no, Let's Encrypt is not a full substitute unfortunately, as it offers only SSL certs. GPG has poor mobile and native platform support compared S/MIME. So I do think it's a bummer that StartCom is toast. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11107740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11107740 Edited to add: just to be clear, they absolutely had their flaws all along too, primarily in terms of charging for revocations which rightly earned criticism. But I still wish a better organization would take the good bits and improve rather then the entire thing vanishing into the annals of history. I feel like we're really treading water when it comes to authentication, despite it being an ever more critical part of life. All the math and basic tech needed to solve it correctly and in a user friendly way has been around for at least a decade or two at this point, yet most people and organizations still send messages with no real authentication (which in turn is the direct root of much spam and scams), password use (and resultant problems) is still near universal standard practice, etc.

BillinghamJ 10y ago
This was the final straw on StartSSL for me. :( I have now dropped my ongoing EV verification with them (has taken 7 months so far!) in favor of CertSimple, and we've also moved all non-EV to LetsEncrypt/AWS.

prometheanfire 10y ago

They are the only cert provider that will let me do a wildcard san cert for not outrageous costs :(. .example.com .bugs.example.com (the star is only for one level) example2.com *.example3.com

ramblenode 10y ago

It doesn't seem like browsers are willing to revoke certificates from these dangerous CAs, but what about a compromise that flags some certificates as less trustworthy?--a certificate tier, if you will. I'm envisioning a warning page in the style of Firefox's "This Connection is Untrusted" that would require the user to consent before proceeding to the page. Or removing the lock icon if that's too intrusive. It wouldn't break websites but it would bring attention to websites' choice of security and probably spur action from those affected. The whole system needs an overhaul but we also need a stopgap.

rocqua 10y ago
I think this is definitely needed to keep CAs viable, but this requires cross-signing to be much easier. It should also be possible to get signed certificates by many CAs. Without this, it would be quite difficult to ensure you can serve a customer a valid certificate. At the same time with much more cross-signing, trust would be established much better.

justinclift 10y ago

Damn, we (sqlitebrowser.org) recently went through the process of obtaining a MS code signing certificate... from StartCom. (so we can sign our release binaries) sigh

devy 10y ago

I call for a detailed investigation over WoSign's purchase of StartCom and the current status of StartCom. If StartCom is deemed untrusted in connection with WoSign, it should be revoked as well. I further call for all current users of WoSign or StartCom to switch to Let's Encrypt as soon as possible. First off, it's impractical for all StartCom/WoSign customers to switch to LE because LE doesn't offer wildcard and EV TLS certificates, neither do they offer certificates that are valid more than 90 days. Second of all, there are 175 root certificates[1] (close to a hundred CAs) trusted by Mozilla, why does this blogger targets the one and only CA in China; go above and beyond digging into private business deals to prove his point and trying so hard to gather up public support to revoke WoSign's root certificates? I mean, sure WoSign was pretty bad in those incidences of certificate mis-issurances and have had some really shitty practices exposed (I suspect incompetence might also contributed), but is WoSign the ONLY one out there who does these shitty practices in the CA business? We don't know, until someone's look into it. But publicly shaming a single CA doesn't make all of us securer, rising awareness and promote security best practices do. PS: if you read the rest of his blog posts in Chinese (resource links ), you would most certainly agree that the blogger is A) knows Chinese really well and B) is a political dissident. So is there any hidden motive of why the blogger did what s/he had done? Personal revenge? You guess is as good as mine. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:IncludedCAs https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:IncludedCAs

EnFinlay 10y ago
I think you're right, this blogger is focusing their attention on this CA. Even though you're probably correct, it's irrelevant. Every CA should be able to stand up to whatever scrutiny people choose to put them under. Just because this person is not targeting all of them does not make what he finds LESS valid. If he's making stuff up, then yeah, that's obviously it's a problem. To Straw Man you, it's crazy to say "I'll ignore these facts because the messenger has a bias".

kgc 10y ago

To un-trust on OS X: 1. Open Keychain 2. Search for Startcom (3 results) 3. Double click each certificate 4. Open Trust section (expand small arrow) 5. Select "Never Trust" for the first option.