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Mozilla shipping SSL root certificate, has no idea how it got there
- benwerd 17y agoWhoops! So much for open source allowing for greater scrutiny and security. It mostly does, of course. But greater transparency also means you need excellent auditing and tracing procedures. This highlights the potential dangers, as well as the daftness of the current trust-based security model.
- jws 17y agoThe same RSA 1024 certificate is in Mac OS X. Perhaps they kept a record of where it came from.
- gamache 17y agoIf a public discussion on what could be a massive internet authentication breakdown does not constitute "greater scrutiny and security", I wonder what does.
- rbanffy 17y ago> Whoops! So much for open source allowing for greater scrutiny and security. There are two certificates from the same CA. Microsoft ships one of them. Are you willing to vouch for every certificate Microsoft ships with Windows? Are you sure their process is flawless? Are you absolutely sure their code shows all certificates they trust and there is no sneaky unlisted CA in their whole HTTPS stack?
- jacquesm 17y ago> Whoops! So much for open source allowing for greater scrutiny and security. I think you're jumping to conclusions here. For one it did get detected, secondly the theory is that faults are detected earlier and fixed faster, not that they don't occur at all. So no matter how long this has been in the wild, the question is how long it would have been there if it had not been open source. My guess is in this particular case just as long, but there are many other cases besides this one.
- smackfu 17y agoMy gut says that it is a RSA mistake. That they shipped a wrong certificate way back in 2002.
- dfranke 17y agoIt's more likely than not that there's a harmless explanation for this one, but with the rash of these stories lately I think it's past time to declare that the PKI trust model is broken.
- Torn 17y agoCan anyone find the link to that recent article / guide on registering a likely-looking address at a webmail provider then scamming a root certificate for that domain? The article gave the impression that some CA's are a bit too happy to issue root certs, and he mentioned he's been blogging about the whole SSL trust system being broken for quite a few years now.
- SomeCallMeTim 17y agoWhat troubles me is that no one has tried actually looking for sites that use this cert. If any valid sites are signed using this cert, then it's a simple matter of asking them who they paid for certification. It's of course harder to prove that NO sites use this cert. If there's a way to craft a Google query that searches for sites signed by a particular cert, that could go some distance to indicating whether it's been used and where.
- aw3c2 17y agoBrowsers should provide a function that monitors certificates for changes and alerts the user if (if he wants to).
- patio11 17y agoThis introduces a decision your typical user is not competent to make ("should I enable this setting?") and yet another error message they will quickly learn to ignore.
- seven 17y agoI agree. But imho this is no reason to not include the suggested feature. There are so many settings and warnings that a common user does not understand. This new one would not scare any users away I guess. They will just ignore it. I would be very happy to notice that my browser suddenly uses a different certificate to validate the certificate of one of my servers.
- aw3c2 17y agoYes, it should be similar to disabling cookies or javascript. Or tinkering with other options. A default for the "normals" but power to people who know what they are doing.
- chunkyslink 17y agoCould someone please explain to me what this means ?
- IgorPartola 17y agoShort and dirty version: example.com has a certificate that is verified by a certificate authority (CA). Since there are lots of CA's, your browser cannot verify them all. However, it can verify a CA's certificate using another CA's certificate. A root CA is one whose certificate is included with the browser and is considered a trusted and secure source of identity information. Needless to say that compromising root CA's certificates in browsers is a big deal. On the other hand this particular instance in all likelyhood is simply a matter of human error, not a malicious attack. Longer version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_certificate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_certificate
- cnvogel 17y agoThe current SSL security model assumes that certification authorities are thorough with the checks they perform on people applying for certificates, so that I -as an example- cannot pose as your bank and obtain your credentials by fraud. Furthermore browsers ought to be meticulous about which certification authorities they trust and include in their liste of trusted root-CAs. If you'd trust anyone certifying someone else's identity, what would be the point in the first place? Now if someone managed to sneak in a rogue CAs public key into a major webbrowser (and it currently doesn't look like it's the case here) it would undermine the whole SSL security model because the entity controlling the CAs private key would be able to generate arbitrary certificates. These days they are not only used to authenticate webservers (or other kind of servers) but also to make sure that downloaded code is genuine. So indeed a CA that is trusted but about which no one really knows where it's coming from is indeed a big deal.
- idm 17y agoMozilla ships with a root certificate, and they don't know who has the private key portion. Therefore, some rogue could be signing SSL certificates, executing man-in-the-middle attacks, or something else. These rogue certificates would be trusted automatically by Mozilla browsers.
- idm 17y agoCirca 2002, the rogue cert was checked into the mozilla dev CVS by the Man ... in the middle.
- maukdaddy 17y agoI double-checked and it looks like it was actually checked in by the Man...in the mirror.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- dasrecht 17y agoUh... thats not good... and our gov-CA is hanging in the cert approval proces since... about a year now. strange world
- more_original 17y agoIt looks like the certificate can easily be deleted manually: Preferences > Advanced > View Certificates.
- dasrecht 17y agoyes this sould not be the core of the problem. its important to know _who_ owns the debatable CA. This gives a great Mitm Vector if i'ts a malicious CA
- wallflower 17y agoIs it possible to do a web crawl scan of https and SSL certs and find out which certificates have this questionable one as their root?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- zppx 17y agoThe associated bugzilla ticket was posted here on hacker news earlier today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1244164 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1244164 Resuming the matter, the SSL system is broken, as it works today, one of the messages clearly states: Both "RSA Security 1024 V3" and "RSA Security 2048 V3" are shown as valid in Apple's System Roots. Microsoft's list includes "RSA Security 2048 V3", but not "RSA Security 1024 V3". Has someone checked if they are included in Opera and Chrome as well?
- rbanffy 17y ago> Has someone checked if they are included in Opera and Chrome as well? My copy of Chrome doesn't seem to have it. As always, YMMV.
- ilitirit 17y agoIt seems that the problem is that the certificate file name does not match its contents. http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg151195.html http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.or...
- _delirium 17y agoHmm, it looks like that bug's still open with no responses, 4 yrs later: http://bugs.debian.org/351745 http://bugs.debian.org/351745
- mbrubeck 17y agoActually, that Debian bug is about a different CA file "RSA_Root_Certificate_1.pem" that is owned by Valicert but contains "RSA" in the filename, probably because it uses the RSA-SHA signature algorithm. The Debian bug also refers to "RSA_Security_1024_v3.pem" which is the one Mozilla is discussing, and whose filename and contents refer to RSA Security, Inc. But the Debian bug offers that as an example of a good certificate!
- hy3lxs 17y agoThe person who started this thread added a message: 'I have received email from official representatives of RSA confirming that RSA did indeed create the "RSA Security 1024 V3" root certificate that is currently included in NSS (Netscape/Mozilla) and also in Apple's root cert store.' So sounds like there hasn't been some rogue root cert out there for the last 9 years. Good to see that root certs are rogue until proven valid, though.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- stretchwithme 17y agomaybe what is needed is an additional mechanism that browsers can use to verify that a CA is the correct one for a particular domain name.