69 ms·

New trusted root certificates added to Windows in unannounced update

168 points by svenfaw 10y ago

grandalf 10y ago
What's the best way to audit one's own computer for root certs that perhaps should not be trusted?
- nowayyeah 10y ago
  Switch to debian? You can't audit everything on your OS, you have to trust somebody. I trust debian.
  - geofft 10y ago
    Why do you trust Debian? (I say this as a happy Debian user/sysadmin/occasional package maintainer). In particular, it's a volunteer-run organization in which it's not unusual at all to volunteer to maintain a package as part of your day job that uses a package, and where a large amount of discretion is given to the individual package maintainer, until they choose to hand maintenance to someone else. This is perfect for an organization who wants to push security configuration weaknesses. Even if you can't get a back door in, you can certainly default to code that you have privately found vulnerabilities in, or compile with or without certain options, add third-party patches that are pretty questionable, or add CAs that are particularly easy to coerce. None of these actions look weird at all, they just look like someone who is putting work into their package and caring about doing Debian-specific work to make it work well. In particular, until relatively recently, the Debian ca-certificates package included the CAcert root cert, which was in very few other root stores, and the SPI one, which was in no other stores. It's also the case that Debian accepts binary packages built on the developer's personal machine (and this used to be required until very recently), so it's very easy to straight-up upload a backdoor that isn't in the source. (This might have changed recently, but I believe this was true at least as recently as the last stable release.)
    - mattnewton 10y ago
      I trust people doing it largely for themselves and the community reputation _more_ than I trust people who are expected to deliver more returns every year in a stagnating market.
      - nixos 10y ago
        The problem is getting a bad actor into a large community is quite easy if funds aren't an issue. You think the NSA (or FSB, or whatever) can't pay for someone to maintain nginx or apache?
        mattnewton 10y ago
        That's totally fair, but I hope that each of those organizations has a vested interest of exposing each other; at the very least it's in the NSA's charter to protect American businesses against attacks, I have no idea if they feel this is an effective way though. So yes, it's risky. But Microsoft has all those disadvantages too, even though it's harder to get moles inside it's easier to have their stuff undetected (and in the case of the NSA it might even be done with full cooperation). Plus, the market share makes them a bigger target. Outside probably hypotheticals, what we know for certain is that microsoft is attempting to monetize their new windows on the back of user's data.
        lallysingh 10y ago
        They have more incentive to use the vulnerabilities themselves and send out patch sets to critical systems.
        nixos 10y ago
        While I mentioned the NSA, really the bigger threat is a guy (or hacker group) who wants to pull off a million dollar heist. The NSA can get into (practically) anything and everything. To get a job at MS, you have to have a real life reputation. Once you get in, there will be others analyzing your code, and your bug may not make it to release. To insert a bug into Debian, become a packager and you're done. Access to one of the most popular server (the important stuff is here) OSs (Debian, Ubuntu) on the web. You're busted? Create another account and start over.
  - 0x0 10y ago
    Debian had some fairly dubious CAs included for almost 10 years, so they're not without fault. Looks like they've cleaned up - and at least their processes are fairly transparent. https://lwn.net/Articles/590879/ https://lwn.net/Articles/590879/
  - dfc 10y ago
    Another nice thing about Debian's certificate package is that debconf will prompt you to accept each new certificate if you have debconf set to show low priority questions. I have not seen anything similar in other distributions or OSX.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Export and compare to Mozilla CA list. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/security-group/certs/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secu... Google anything that is not on it (and is not MSFT).
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    Note that not all are trusted for the web: some are limited to other environments only. See especially the CKA_TRUST_* attributes.
- oxguy3 10y ago
  On OS X, open the app Keychain Access and look at the System Roots keychain -- you can see all the root certs there. For Windows: Have never done this myself, but the link mentions a tool called RCC that lists root certs and highlights potentially suspect ones I guess? No clue if this is legit, use at own risk: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/rcc-check-your-systems-trusted-root-certificate-store.373819/ https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/rcc-check-your-syste...
- mey 10y ago
  Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Manage Computer Certificates Search for Manage Computer Certificates (Win 8 and up) This will open an app, look in Trusted Root Certification Authorities If you should trust an authority is a tricky question. Typically you trust your OS and let them decide (which is what's going on here). See https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc751157.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc751157.aspx and https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt171474.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt171474.aspx for what their process is supposed to be
  - mey 10y ago
    One additional note, most applications in Windows by proxy follow this OS level list of trusted certificates. Notable exceptions are Java and Firefox which maintain their own CA repositories in their installations.
    - friendzis 10y ago
      This is the reason I hate JVM from sysadmin/devops perspective. It tries to manage things that should be left to OS (CAs, fonts, time, etc.). It's not too big of a problem for end user applications with package manager maintained JVM, but if you want to use JVM for any kind of daemon (application server, database, messaging system) your sysadmin has to become jvmadmin too. It would not be such a bad thing if you really, really wanted to manage system per application if there was "fallback to OS" option. But then again moderately sized applications have been run in their own virtual machines for quite some time and these days containers are pretty prevalent solution for self containing even small applications.
  - sbierwagen 10y ago
    Trusted Root Certification Authorities and Third-Party Root Certification Authorities only show me a couple dozen roots each, https://snag.gy/pLwe3q.jpg https://snag.gy/pLwe3q.jpg where https://hexatomium.github.io/2016/10/11/unannounced-root-cert-update/ https://hexatomium.github.io/2016/10/11/unannounced-root-cer... says that Microsoft trusts 356 roots total, a list being here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/31634.microsoft-trusted-root-certificate-program-participants-v-2016-april.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3... Most notably for me, the list doesn't show any of the foreign roots, Agencia Notarial de Certificación, Autoridad Certificadora Raíz Nacional de Uruguay, etc. Are they kept anywhere else? EDIT: According to the author, Manage Computer Certificates will only show you that a trusted root exists after you've used it. Trusted roots that you've never used are invisible: http://hexatomium.github.io/2015/08/29/why-is-windows/ http://hexatomium.github.io/2015/08/29/why-is-windows/ The test he provides still works: "OpenTrust Root CA G3" won't show up in Manage Computer Certificates until you visit https://www.opentrust.com/ https://www.opentrust.com/ So, Manage Computer Certificates is useless for untrusting roots Microsoft trusts for you.
mey 10y ago
Microsoft has gotten really bad about describing what it is doing and planning on doing with the Windows 10 generation. They've been called out on it before, but I haven't seen much from them in a formal way over the last year. Individual teams in the company may do an excellent job, but overall the bar is low.
- ersii 10y ago
  Were they really any better prior to Windows 10 though? I remember trying to read the Windows 7 updates, but they were always seemed very... light on material.
  - mey 10y ago
    There at least existed KB articles with patch details ahead of a patch being dropped. I've routinely tried to dig up a newly deployed Windows bundle at home on a machine not running the Insider Program and hit 404s pulling up the KB number.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      In a surprising development today, Microsoft was accused of moving too fast and bre^H^H^H failing to document things. HN commenters expressed nostalgia for the MS patch days of yore.
      - userbinator 10y ago
        "At least we had MSFT" was the sentiment before Win10. For many, they were one of the few remaining companies that weren't "moving too fast". It was a great time, when people could actually use more of their time on computers for doing other things besides chasing the update/upgrade treadmill.
      - Dylan16807 10y ago
        It still takes them a long time to make patches; there's plenty of time to write notes. Releasing on a different schedule does not make it harder to document. You're implying it's a tradeoff, and it's not. They just dropped the ball.
merb 10y ago
> Trusting new CAs is always a big deal well half of the list aren't _new_ CAs more like additional root certs.
- SeriousM 10y ago
  ... And the other half is new. What's your point again?
  - merb 10y ago
    well I didn't said that it's good or bad, I just said that they are "familiar"? not sure why they even add more CAs since they already have one, some of them with way more than 8 years left. they didn't had ECC certificates tough.
kpil 10y ago
Irrelevant - it's way beyond repair. There is virtually nil chance that none of the root CAs are compromised or influenced, or at least influenceable by a criminal organisation or group. I also doubt that all governmental organisations that have the opportunity to legally influence the CAs have full control of all their employees and that they are not vulnerable to criminals. I also doubt that the governmental organisations of the usual suspected countries involved in government funded industrial espionage are not able to influence CAs - in order to target information in other countries. Actual lawful interception is inevitably possible - but it's a good thing so it can be ignored. Actual political espionage can also be ignored, as it is unlikely to happen to normal people and companies and nearly impossible to avoid without considerate resources. But the first three scenarios are probable, and can cause serious economical harm, and can't be fixed without changing the whole current infrastructure.
- eeZi 10y ago
  > Irrelevant - it's way beyond repair. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try, since we're not getting rid of if anytime soon. Google's Certificate Transparency is a great approach.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - developer2 10y ago
    I think the point the parent was making is that it is likely that one or more of the most prevalent certificate authorities' private keys have been compromised - whether voluntarily provided to government, or obtained by criminals via dubious methods. Once the private keys are compromised, all bets are off. No database - whether maintained by Google or anyone else - puts a dent in such a problem. It's one thing to track inauthentic certificates; it's quite another to discover someone silently decrypting traffic with a copy of the private key. Edit: My response brings up an interesting question I hadn't considered before. With the certificate chain, is it required to have the private keys for the entire chain in order to be able to decrypt the stream? If someone has the certificate authority top-level certificate, can they decrypt a domain's certificate without having its private key as well as any intermediates? If not then it'd be true that the primary concern with a top-level private key being compromised is illegitimate certificates being signed, in which case Google's attempt to combat that with Certificate Transparency isn't half bad.
yakult 10y ago
Would it be possible to replace MS's CA list with e.g. Firefox's entirely? Would that break things?
- walrus01 10y ago
  you can manually delete and import root CAs in the windows 10 CA trust store: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754841(v=ws.11).aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754841(v=ws.11...
  - userbinator 10y ago
    I believe I've read somewhere that that's not all of them, there's more hardcoded in various system files.
ourmandave 10y ago
Do they mean the Windows 10 update that has bogged my system and failed once a day for the last two weeks? That update? =(
- neppo 10y ago
  does your main drive have more than 20GB free space? If not, the update will fail.
  - DocTomoe 10y ago
    Wouldn't it be lovely if they checked that before they did the whole download/install/making the user wait for 15 minutes dance?
mtgx 10y ago
And this is happening as soon as Microsoft makes it so that you can't pick and choose updates anymore. Yeah, it doesn't look suspicious at all. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/microsoft-no-more-pick-and-choose-patching/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/microsoft-no-more-pick-a...
- peteretep 10y ago
  > Yeah, it doesn't look suspicious at all. Could you expand on what you think Microsoft's dastardly plan here is?
  - jwtadvice 10y ago
    To continue to trade access to corporations' and private computers' the world over for political and economic advantage to the intelligence and treasury communities. Honestly I don't know whether this particular CA addition is a good example of the sorts of backdoors that Microsoft is known to insert on behalf of intelligence and police organizations. I think the parent was perhaps being a bit flippant?

168 points by svenfaw 10y ago

grandalf 10y ago

What's the best way to audit one's own computer for root certs that perhaps should not be trusted?

nowayyeah 10y ago
Switch to debian? You can't audit everything on your OS, you have to trust somebody. I trust debian.
- geofft 10y ago
  Why do you trust Debian? (I say this as a happy Debian user/sysadmin/occasional package maintainer). In particular, it's a volunteer-run organization in which it's not unusual at all to volunteer to maintain a package as part of your day job that uses a package, and where a large amount of discretion is given to the individual package maintainer, until they choose to hand maintenance to someone else. This is perfect for an organization who wants to push security configuration weaknesses. Even if you can't get a back door in, you can certainly default to code that you have privately found vulnerabilities in, or compile with or without certain options, add third-party patches that are pretty questionable, or add CAs that are particularly easy to coerce. None of these actions look weird at all, they just look like someone who is putting work into their package and caring about doing Debian-specific work to make it work well. In particular, until relatively recently, the Debian ca-certificates package included the CAcert root cert, which was in very few other root stores, and the SPI one, which was in no other stores. It's also the case that Debian accepts binary packages built on the developer's personal machine (and this used to be required until very recently), so it's very easy to straight-up upload a backdoor that isn't in the source. (This might have changed recently, but I believe this was true at least as recently as the last stable release.)
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    I trust people doing it largely for themselves and the community reputation _more_ than I trust people who are expected to deliver more returns every year in a stagnating market.
    - nixos 10y ago
      The problem is getting a bad actor into a large community is quite easy if funds aren't an issue. You think the NSA (or FSB, or whatever) can't pay for someone to maintain nginx or apache?
      - mattnewton 10y ago
        That's totally fair, but I hope that each of those organizations has a vested interest of exposing each other; at the very least it's in the NSA's charter to protect American businesses against attacks, I have no idea if they feel this is an effective way though. So yes, it's risky. But Microsoft has all those disadvantages too, even though it's harder to get moles inside it's easier to have their stuff undetected (and in the case of the NSA it might even be done with full cooperation). Plus, the market share makes them a bigger target. Outside probably hypotheticals, what we know for certain is that microsoft is attempting to monetize their new windows on the back of user's data.
        lallysingh 10y ago
        They have more incentive to use the vulnerabilities themselves and send out patch sets to critical systems.
        nixos 10y ago
        While I mentioned the NSA, really the bigger threat is a guy (or hacker group) who wants to pull off a million dollar heist. The NSA can get into (practically) anything and everything. To get a job at MS, you have to have a real life reputation. Once you get in, there will be others analyzing your code, and your bug may not make it to release. To insert a bug into Debian, become a packager and you're done. Access to one of the most popular server (the important stuff is here) OSs (Debian, Ubuntu) on the web. You're busted? Create another account and start over.
- 0x0 10y ago
  Debian had some fairly dubious CAs included for almost 10 years, so they're not without fault. Looks like they've cleaned up - and at least their processes are fairly transparent. https://lwn.net/Articles/590879/ https://lwn.net/Articles/590879/
- dfc 10y ago
  Another nice thing about Debian's certificate package is that debconf will prompt you to accept each new certificate if you have debconf set to show low priority questions. I have not seen anything similar in other distributions or OSX.
dogma1138 10y ago
Export and compare to Mozilla CA list. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/security-group/certs/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secu... Google anything that is not on it (and is not MSFT).
- gsnedders 10y ago
  Note that not all are trusted for the web: some are limited to other environments only. See especially the CKA_TRUST_* attributes.
oxguy3 10y ago
On OS X, open the app Keychain Access and look at the System Roots keychain -- you can see all the root certs there. For Windows: Have never done this myself, but the link mentions a tool called RCC that lists root certs and highlights potentially suspect ones I guess? No clue if this is legit, use at own risk: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/rcc-check-your-systems-trusted-root-certificate-store.373819/ https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/rcc-check-your-syste...
mey 10y ago
Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Manage Computer Certificates Search for Manage Computer Certificates (Win 8 and up) This will open an app, look in Trusted Root Certification Authorities If you should trust an authority is a tricky question. Typically you trust your OS and let them decide (which is what's going on here). See https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc751157.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc751157.aspx and https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt171474.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt171474.aspx for what their process is supposed to be
- mey 10y ago
  One additional note, most applications in Windows by proxy follow this OS level list of trusted certificates. Notable exceptions are Java and Firefox which maintain their own CA repositories in their installations.
  - friendzis 10y ago
    This is the reason I hate JVM from sysadmin/devops perspective. It tries to manage things that should be left to OS (CAs, fonts, time, etc.). It's not too big of a problem for end user applications with package manager maintained JVM, but if you want to use JVM for any kind of daemon (application server, database, messaging system) your sysadmin has to become jvmadmin too. It would not be such a bad thing if you really, really wanted to manage system per application if there was "fallback to OS" option. But then again moderately sized applications have been run in their own virtual machines for quite some time and these days containers are pretty prevalent solution for self containing even small applications.
- sbierwagen 10y ago
  Trusted Root Certification Authorities and Third-Party Root Certification Authorities only show me a couple dozen roots each, https://snag.gy/pLwe3q.jpg https://snag.gy/pLwe3q.jpg where https://hexatomium.github.io/2016/10/11/unannounced-root-cert-update/ https://hexatomium.github.io/2016/10/11/unannounced-root-cer... says that Microsoft trusts 356 roots total, a list being here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/31634.microsoft-trusted-root-certificate-program-participants-v-2016-april.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3... Most notably for me, the list doesn't show any of the foreign roots, Agencia Notarial de Certificación, Autoridad Certificadora Raíz Nacional de Uruguay, etc. Are they kept anywhere else? EDIT: According to the author, Manage Computer Certificates will only show you that a trusted root exists after you've used it. Trusted roots that you've never used are invisible: http://hexatomium.github.io/2015/08/29/why-is-windows/ http://hexatomium.github.io/2015/08/29/why-is-windows/ The test he provides still works: "OpenTrust Root CA G3" won't show up in Manage Computer Certificates until you visit https://www.opentrust.com/ https://www.opentrust.com/ So, Manage Computer Certificates is useless for untrusting roots Microsoft trusts for you.

mey 10y ago

Microsoft has gotten really bad about describing what it is doing and planning on doing with the Windows 10 generation. They've been called out on it before, but I haven't seen much from them in a formal way over the last year. Individual teams in the company may do an excellent job, but overall the bar is low.

ersii 10y ago
Were they really any better prior to Windows 10 though? I remember trying to read the Windows 7 updates, but they were always seemed very... light on material.
- mey 10y ago
  There at least existed KB articles with patch details ahead of a patch being dropped. I've routinely tried to dig up a newly deployed Windows bundle at home on a machine not running the Insider Program and hit 404s pulling up the KB number.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    In a surprising development today, Microsoft was accused of moving too fast and bre^H^H^H failing to document things. HN commenters expressed nostalgia for the MS patch days of yore.
    - userbinator 10y ago
      "At least we had MSFT" was the sentiment before Win10. For many, they were one of the few remaining companies that weren't "moving too fast". It was a great time, when people could actually use more of their time on computers for doing other things besides chasing the update/upgrade treadmill.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      It still takes them a long time to make patches; there's plenty of time to write notes. Releasing on a different schedule does not make it harder to document. You're implying it's a tradeoff, and it's not. They just dropped the ball.

merb 10y ago

> Trusting new CAs is always a big deal well half of the list aren't _new_ CAs more like additional root certs.

SeriousM 10y ago
... And the other half is new. What's your point again?
- merb 10y ago
  well I didn't said that it's good or bad, I just said that they are "familiar"? not sure why they even add more CAs since they already have one, some of them with way more than 8 years left. they didn't had ECC certificates tough.

kpil 10y ago

Irrelevant - it's way beyond repair. There is virtually nil chance that none of the root CAs are compromised or influenced, or at least influenceable by a criminal organisation or group. I also doubt that all governmental organisations that have the opportunity to legally influence the CAs have full control of all their employees and that they are not vulnerable to criminals. I also doubt that the governmental organisations of the usual suspected countries involved in government funded industrial espionage are not able to influence CAs - in order to target information in other countries. Actual lawful interception is inevitably possible - but it's a good thing so it can be ignored. Actual political espionage can also be ignored, as it is unlikely to happen to normal people and companies and nearly impossible to avoid without considerate resources. But the first three scenarios are probable, and can cause serious economical harm, and can't be fixed without changing the whole current infrastructure.

eeZi 10y ago
> Irrelevant - it's way beyond repair. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try, since we're not getting rid of if anytime soon. Google's Certificate Transparency is a great approach.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- developer2 10y ago
  I think the point the parent was making is that it is likely that one or more of the most prevalent certificate authorities' private keys have been compromised - whether voluntarily provided to government, or obtained by criminals via dubious methods. Once the private keys are compromised, all bets are off. No database - whether maintained by Google or anyone else - puts a dent in such a problem. It's one thing to track inauthentic certificates; it's quite another to discover someone silently decrypting traffic with a copy of the private key. Edit: My response brings up an interesting question I hadn't considered before. With the certificate chain, is it required to have the private keys for the entire chain in order to be able to decrypt the stream? If someone has the certificate authority top-level certificate, can they decrypt a domain's certificate without having its private key as well as any intermediates? If not then it'd be true that the primary concern with a top-level private key being compromised is illegitimate certificates being signed, in which case Google's attempt to combat that with Certificate Transparency isn't half bad.

yakult 10y ago

Would it be possible to replace MS's CA list with e.g. Firefox's entirely? Would that break things?

walrus01 10y ago
you can manually delete and import root CAs in the windows 10 CA trust store: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754841(v=ws.11).aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754841(v=ws.11...
- userbinator 10y ago
  I believe I've read somewhere that that's not all of them, there's more hardcoded in various system files.

ourmandave 10y ago

Do they mean the Windows 10 update that has bogged my system and failed once a day for the last two weeks? That update? =(

neppo 10y ago
does your main drive have more than 20GB free space? If not, the update will fail.
- DocTomoe 10y ago
  Wouldn't it be lovely if they checked that before they did the whole download/install/making the user wait for 15 minutes dance?

mtgx 10y ago

And this is happening as soon as Microsoft makes it so that you can't pick and choose updates anymore. Yeah, it doesn't look suspicious at all. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/microsoft-no-more-pick-and-choose-patching/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/microsoft-no-more-pick-a...

peteretep 10y ago
> Yeah, it doesn't look suspicious at all. Could you expand on what you think Microsoft's dastardly plan here is?
- jwtadvice 10y ago
  To continue to trade access to corporations' and private computers' the world over for political and economic advantage to the intelligence and treasury communities. Honestly I don't know whether this particular CA addition is a good example of the sorts of backdoors that Microsoft is known to insert on behalf of intelligence and police organizations. I think the parent was perhaps being a bit flippant?