5 ms·

Apple's response to the WoSign incidents

133 points by abritishguy 10y ago

oneplane 10y ago
Seems like a sensible response. I do wonder how they will know what certificates are currently signed by WoSign, as they stated that individual certificates will still be trusted somehow.
- dan1234 10y ago
  I think they're only trusting certificates that were published in transparency logs before 2016-09-19. You can check that log at https://crt.sh https://crt.sh
- vtlynch 10y ago
  Apple will continue to trust existing certs from WoSign (provided they are CT logged). New certs will not be trusted. mac OS will make this decision by first looking at signatures. It will receive the "end-entity" certificate (a cert for a specific site, like example.com) and while checking the chain, will see that there is a signature from the "WoSign CA Free SSL Certificate G2 intermediate CA" certificate. It will then look at the "notBefore" date listed in the certificate, which tells you when the certificate was issued. If it is a new certificate, it will not be trusted. If the certificate is preexisting (presumably issued before 9/19/16) it will be trusted ONLY if the certificate is CT logged. It will know if this is the case by looking for an SCT belonging to that certificate. The SCT will either be embedded directly in the certificate, or provided with the certificate during the SSL handshake (this is known as "stapling").
  - xnyhps 10y ago
    > If the certificate is preexisting (presumably issued before 9/19/16) it will be trusted ONLY if the certificate is CT logged. It will know if this is the case by looking for an SCT belonging to that certificate. The SCT will either be embedded directly in the certificate, or provided with the certificate during the SSL handshake (this is known as "stapling"). I doubt they'll do it this way. WoSign has only been embedding SCTs for all certificates since July and I wouldn't count on many webservers implementing SCT stapling. I expect Apple to ship a whitelist of hashes of certs that should be trusted instead.
l2dy 10y ago
I came across this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204132 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204132 earlier today.
vtlynch 10y ago
Couple notes for people less familiar with the Internet PKI/CA industry: 1. WoSign (who also owns StartCom) violated all sorts of industry standards. The worst of them was circumventing the SHA-1 deprecation by backdating an SSL certificate. 2. Now all the root programs (Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Google) need to decide how they will react to this. 3. Mozilla proposed dis-trusting all new WoSign/StartCom certificates and giving them a chance to re-apply as a trusted CA in a year. This is only their proposed action, and they have not totally committed to it. 4. Apple has now said they will take similar action to Mozilla. Apple will block a specific intermediate certificate: "WoSign CA Free SSL Certificate G2" But they will continue to "trust individual existing certificates" if they had been published to Certificate Transparency logs by September 19th. While I have not personally confirmed this, my understanding is that there are other Wosign certificates that are trusted on Apple via cross-signing. So this seems like an incomplete solution - in the sense that some WoSign certificates (mainly the commercial certificates they sell, vs the ones they give away for free) will remain unaffected in anyway. (Someone more familiar with the specifics of the Apple root store may be able to provide more clarity here) 5. Google and Microsoft have not yet committed to any action yet. Google will certainly make a detailed public announcement when they are ready. 6. Mozilla is meeting with QiHoo (a chinese tech company which owns a majority stake in WoSign). It is expected that Mozilla will make a final decision following this meeting.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  > But they will continue to "trust individual existing certificates" if they had been published to Certificate Transparency logs by September 19th. This seems even more sensible than Mozilla's existing proposal to trust the certificate notBefore date until proof of further backdated certificates.
  - hannob 10y ago
    >> But they will continue to "trust individual existing certificates" if they had been published to Certificate Transparency logs by September 19th. > This seems even more sensible than Mozilla's existing proposal to trust the certificate notBefore date until proof of further backdated certificates. The question is how they'll actually do that. This was discussed in the moz-sec-policy-thread and people came to the rough conclusion that there are just too many wosign/startcom certificates to whitelist them in any reasonable way.
mrweasel 10y ago
That should serve as a clear warning to other certificate authorities. Behave or you will be ruined. For most CAs having either Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft or Google remove your root certificate will drive customers away to the point where you might as well close up shop.
- glasz 10y ago
  nobody has been ruined just yet. and when i look at how sheepishly slow mozilla reacts my guess is nobody will ever really get thrown out of that club. what they've done is clear. it's been misconduct as a ca. untrust them. done. fuck you.
  - oasisbob 10y ago
    Representatives of Google, Apple, and Mozilla have all dismissed the suitability of a fast reactionary nuclear approach. There are plenty of innocent sites who use WoSign/Startcom certificates. It's easy to be flippant when you're not actually responsible for a browser which users use, and need to worry about adverse side-effects. You kill WoSign overnight and you now have millions of users habituated to ignoring TLS errors, and now know how to override internal browser security settings. Hope it was worth it.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Previously on HN, Mozilla's response to WoSign (also a good summary of what they'd done wrong): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12582534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12582534
byuu 10y ago
Sorry if this is obvious to others, but just to be clear ... As it's widely reported that WoSign has taken over StartCom's infrastructure, this implies that StartCom StartSSL Free certificates going forward won't be trusted by Apple either, correct? It also sounds a little strange to only call out the free certificates. Are they going to allow new paid OV/EV (and what they call 'IV') certificates to remain valid?
- oasisbob 10y ago
  My read on the announcement is that they won't be taking action against the StartCom CA & intermediates at this time. The WoSign existing-certs exemption probably involves a whitelist they're shipping along with the OS. A lot of the feasibility discussions on this approach have centered on the size of the required whitelist [1]. Taking the same approach with StartCom may not be possible due to the scale. Also, StartCom certificates don't have the same coverage in the Certificate Transparency logs - so the certificate dating is problematic. Hmmm, thinking about this now, if I were Wosign, I would be having a fire sale on StartCom. Selling the brand immediately (maybe to an existing competent CA) and asking the trust store operators for understanding (probably conditioned on full CT reporting) might be a way to recoup some losses out of all this mess. Representatives of Qihoo 360, StartCom, and Mozilla are meeting in London next week. I'm very curious what they will be discussing. [2] [1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/O_oCZafjfF4/fiOUpeeEEAAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/... [2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/1XI3Y7PJ1Uc/exSBjnFzFQAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/...
- nsgi 10y ago
  There are plenty of other ways to get a free certificate, e.g. Let's Encrypt AWS Certificate Manager cPanel's AutoSSL CloudFlare Symantec Encryption Everywhere Not to mention the certificates that can be bought very cheaply through resellers e.g. PositiveSSL.
Animats 10y ago
The John Ringo approach, from "Citadel". A Chinese supplier cut corners on the gold plating of a contact and caused a major accident. The response: "The supplier, Qua Tang Electronics, is blacklisted. Find every person associated, every member of the board, every senior officer, and blacklist any company they are associated with as well. With something like this, and the Chinese, there is no overkill. Be wildly unaimed in your fire. Nuke first, ask questions afterward. Make the pain as widespread as possible."
fowl2 10y ago
Interesting that Apple's root program is effectively anonymous– sent from a group alias and signed off as a program.

133 points by abritishguy 10y ago

Seems like a sensible response. I do wonder how they will know what certificates are currently signed by WoSign, as they stated that individual certificates will still be trusted somehow.

dan1234 10y ago
I think they're only trusting certificates that were published in transparency logs before 2016-09-19. You can check that log at https://crt.sh https://crt.sh
vtlynch 10y ago
Apple will continue to trust existing certs from WoSign (provided they are CT logged). New certs will not be trusted. mac OS will make this decision by first looking at signatures. It will receive the "end-entity" certificate (a cert for a specific site, like example.com) and while checking the chain, will see that there is a signature from the "WoSign CA Free SSL Certificate G2 intermediate CA" certificate. It will then look at the "notBefore" date listed in the certificate, which tells you when the certificate was issued. If it is a new certificate, it will not be trusted. If the certificate is preexisting (presumably issued before 9/19/16) it will be trusted ONLY if the certificate is CT logged. It will know if this is the case by looking for an SCT belonging to that certificate. The SCT will either be embedded directly in the certificate, or provided with the certificate during the SSL handshake (this is known as "stapling").
- xnyhps 10y ago
  > If the certificate is preexisting (presumably issued before 9/19/16) it will be trusted ONLY if the certificate is CT logged. It will know if this is the case by looking for an SCT belonging to that certificate. The SCT will either be embedded directly in the certificate, or provided with the certificate during the SSL handshake (this is known as "stapling"). I doubt they'll do it this way. WoSign has only been embedding SCTs for all certificates since July and I wouldn't count on many webservers implementing SCT stapling. I expect Apple to ship a whitelist of hashes of certs that should be trusted instead.

l2dy 10y ago

I came across this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204132 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204132 earlier today.

vtlynch 10y ago

Couple notes for people less familiar with the Internet PKI/CA industry: 1. WoSign (who also owns StartCom) violated all sorts of industry standards. The worst of them was circumventing the SHA-1 deprecation by backdating an SSL certificate. 2. Now all the root programs (Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Google) need to decide how they will react to this. 3. Mozilla proposed dis-trusting all new WoSign/StartCom certificates and giving them a chance to re-apply as a trusted CA in a year. This is only their proposed action, and they have not totally committed to it. 4. Apple has now said they will take similar action to Mozilla. Apple will block a specific intermediate certificate: "WoSign CA Free SSL Certificate G2" But they will continue to "trust individual existing certificates" if they had been published to Certificate Transparency logs by September 19th. While I have not personally confirmed this, my understanding is that there are other Wosign certificates that are trusted on Apple via cross-signing. So this seems like an incomplete solution - in the sense that some WoSign certificates (mainly the commercial certificates they sell, vs the ones they give away for free) will remain unaffected in anyway. (Someone more familiar with the specifics of the Apple root store may be able to provide more clarity here) 5. Google and Microsoft have not yet committed to any action yet. Google will certainly make a detailed public announcement when they are ready. 6. Mozilla is meeting with QiHoo (a chinese tech company which owns a majority stake in WoSign). It is expected that Mozilla will make a final decision following this meeting.

JoshTriplett 10y ago
> But they will continue to "trust individual existing certificates" if they had been published to Certificate Transparency logs by September 19th. This seems even more sensible than Mozilla's existing proposal to trust the certificate notBefore date until proof of further backdated certificates.
- hannob 10y ago
  >> But they will continue to "trust individual existing certificates" if they had been published to Certificate Transparency logs by September 19th. > This seems even more sensible than Mozilla's existing proposal to trust the certificate notBefore date until proof of further backdated certificates. The question is how they'll actually do that. This was discussed in the moz-sec-policy-thread and people came to the rough conclusion that there are just too many wosign/startcom certificates to whitelist them in any reasonable way.

mrweasel 10y ago

That should serve as a clear warning to other certificate authorities. Behave or you will be ruined. For most CAs having either Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft or Google remove your root certificate will drive customers away to the point where you might as well close up shop.

glasz 10y ago
nobody has been ruined just yet. and when i look at how sheepishly slow mozilla reacts my guess is nobody will ever really get thrown out of that club. what they've done is clear. it's been misconduct as a ca. untrust them. done. fuck you.
- oasisbob 10y ago
  Representatives of Google, Apple, and Mozilla have all dismissed the suitability of a fast reactionary nuclear approach. There are plenty of innocent sites who use WoSign/Startcom certificates. It's easy to be flippant when you're not actually responsible for a browser which users use, and need to worry about adverse side-effects. You kill WoSign overnight and you now have millions of users habituated to ignoring TLS errors, and now know how to override internal browser security settings. Hope it was worth it.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

Previously on HN, Mozilla's response to WoSign (also a good summary of what they'd done wrong): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12582534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12582534

byuu 10y ago

Sorry if this is obvious to others, but just to be clear ... As it's widely reported that WoSign has taken over StartCom's infrastructure, this implies that StartCom StartSSL Free certificates going forward won't be trusted by Apple either, correct? It also sounds a little strange to only call out the free certificates. Are they going to allow new paid OV/EV (and what they call 'IV') certificates to remain valid?

oasisbob 10y ago
My read on the announcement is that they won't be taking action against the StartCom CA & intermediates at this time. The WoSign existing-certs exemption probably involves a whitelist they're shipping along with the OS. A lot of the feasibility discussions on this approach have centered on the size of the required whitelist [1]. Taking the same approach with StartCom may not be possible due to the scale. Also, StartCom certificates don't have the same coverage in the Certificate Transparency logs - so the certificate dating is problematic. Hmmm, thinking about this now, if I were Wosign, I would be having a fire sale on StartCom. Selling the brand immediately (maybe to an existing competent CA) and asking the trust store operators for understanding (probably conditioned on full CT reporting) might be a way to recoup some losses out of all this mess. Representatives of Qihoo 360, StartCom, and Mozilla are meeting in London next week. I'm very curious what they will be discussing. [2] [1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/O_oCZafjfF4/fiOUpeeEEAAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/... [2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/1XI3Y7PJ1Uc/exSBjnFzFQAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/...
nsgi 10y ago
There are plenty of other ways to get a free certificate, e.g. Let's Encrypt AWS Certificate Manager cPanel's AutoSSL CloudFlare Symantec Encryption Everywhere Not to mention the certificates that can be bought very cheaply through resellers e.g. PositiveSSL.

Animats 10y ago

The John Ringo approach, from "Citadel". A Chinese supplier cut corners on the gold plating of a contact and caused a major accident. The response: "The supplier, Qua Tang Electronics, is blacklisted. Find every person associated, every member of the board, every senior officer, and blacklist any company they are associated with as well. With something like this, and the Chinese, there is no overkill. Be wildly unaimed in your fire. Nuke first, ask questions afterward. Make the pain as widespread as possible."

fowl2 10y ago

Interesting that Apple's root program is effectively anonymous– sent from a group alias and signed off as a program.