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It's not about a lack of support for SHA-256 on the CA side. But backdated SHA-1 certs are in demand because they allow other systems to keep working, systems l
by 0x0 10y ago
It's not about a lack of support for SHA-256 on the CA side. But backdated SHA-1 certs are in demand because they allow other systems to keep working, systems like embedded/PoS computers that lack support for SHA-256, while simultaneously dodging errors on modern browsers that only allow SHA-1 certs if they were issued before a certain date.
Wosign was certainly capable of issuing SHA-256 certificates. But the customers needed SHA-1 certificates with a backdated issue timestamp. And Wosign was willing to fake the issue timestamp on new certificates, probably a lucrative market because no other reputable CA would be willing to do so.
- koolba 10y ago> Wosign was certainly capable of issuing SHA-256 certificates. But the customers needed SHA-1 certificates with a backdated issue timestamp. So they had a special side deal to get backdated certs? There's no way they were doing this for everybody or for "regular price" right?
- dogma1138 10y agoDoesn't matter they violated the chain of trust, the fact that they took extra money to do this doesn't make it any more or less of an offense. EDIT: Was reading out of date info :) ~~However like some one else pointed out out of the discussion in the group looks like it was a technical bug, which is still bad, but at least not maliciously bad.~~ Gah HN why you still no do markdown....
- kuschku 10y agoInterestingly, several western sites also have side deals to get SHA1 certs backdated or otherwise whitelisted, including Google and CloudFlare.
- 0x0 10y agoThis is a very interesting allegation. Do you have a link to any such backdated or whitelisted certificates? Where is the whitelist, and how does it work? Does all major SSL libraries, browsers, http clients (openssl, libressl, polarssl, gnutls, microsoft, apple, java, etc etc) implement the same whitelist?
- pfg 10y agoA common approach is to get SHA-1 certificates signed by roots that have been pulled from various root programs, but are still (likely) present on outdated devices that do not support SHA-2 (like XP <= SP2). I think CloudFlare is using one of Comodo's removed roots[1] for this purpose. Once a root certificate has been pulled from a root program, they stop being in scope for the root program policies and the Baseline Requirements (at least that's the common interpretation), which would prohibit SHA-1 issuance from those roots. There's been some discussion about changing this. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1208461 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1208461
- 0x0 10y agoSo the allegation that "western" sites somehow do similar shady deals falls flat on its face, because the Wosign situation is all about the actions of a trusted CA. There is no comparison between trusted CAs and other random/untrusted/removed CAs.
- pfg 10y agoI'm sure plenty of "western" sites have attempted to get similar deals (FWIW, Tyro, one of the companies that got SHA-1 certificates from WoSign, is based in Australia), but I'm not aware of any other CA incidents like this one. Other CAs seem to either use pulled roots or go through the proper exception process for SHA-1 issuance in the CA/B Forum. No one else has been caught backdating SHA-1 certificates to my knowledge. (For now?) (Symantec accidentally signed a SHA-1 certificate from a publicly-trusted root while preparing their SHA-1 issuance exception application, but that's not quite as bad, I guess.)