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The foundation of a more secure web: Google Trust Services
- asdfasdfasdfa12 10y agoI think SSL certificates need to be replaced. Security can NOT be designed with the 'good guy' in mind. if it can be broken at all we need an alternative.
- satai 10y agoThe certificates are OK. The issue is the way they are signed and distributed. Lots of issues with the current PK infrastructure is limited by the certificate transparency.
- lclarkmichalek 10y agoThe certificates have their own, independent problems (who thinks x509 is a good format?)
- sitkack 10y agoThe NSA
- asdfasdfasdfa12 10y agoit is too hard for me to believe that root ca's have not been compromised when anyone working at these companies could likely easily take it without anyone noticing. I do not think transparency has anything at all to do with it. I think an encryption solutions that cannot be 'broken' for decryption is far more required than one that has the 'good guy' in mind. I do not find it an acceptable solution for critical data.
- satai 10y agoNot any transparency. Certificate transparency. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency
- asdfasdfasdfa12 10y agoI think we are talking on different lines of thought. I am not concerned with certificate transparency... as the article you point out says it can take a long time [years] before it is found to be compromised. the fact of the matter is, if ssl decryption is possible on the fly, we need a different solution for encryption, this include the use of credit card chip. an encryption scheme cannot be designed to be broken and expect everything to be 'secure' EDIT: I am not being allowed to reply. excuse me, I think you need to read what I wrote more carefully. I do not care about certificate transparency. I must not be communicating clearly I will try again.. I am not referring to the ability to issue a new certificate. I'm talking about the ability to perform SSL decryption without the end user knowing. you do not need to issue a new certificate to do this, you just need the end user to have trusted a new root CA... which brings us to this article where another company is issuing a root CA. do you trust everyone in your 'trusted root ca's on your computer? Here are some ways to untrust certs [0][1]and another conversation on this [2] [0]http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/285784/untrusting-an-intermediate-ca-in-linux http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/285784/untrusting-an... [1] https://blog.filippo.io/untrusting-an-intermediate-ca-on-os-x/ https://blog.filippo.io/untrusting-an-intermediate-ca-on-os-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781915
- satai 10y agoYou can pretty much trust all the root CAs that provide Certificate Transparency. If such a CA went evil such an event would be detected.
- satai 10y agoPlease read it more carefuly: "One of the problems with digital certificate management is that fraudulent certificates take a long time to be spotted, reported and revoked by the browser vendors. Certificate Transparency would help by making it impossible for a certificate to be issued for a domain without the domain owner knowing."
- amalag 10y agoThe main issue I see is ease of MITM for corporate environments. In a corporate environment a trusted root is installed, then an appliance can intercept all SSL certs and re-create the trust chain to introduce their own trusted root so they can read all SSL traffic and your browser says "SECURE". That is broken IMO.
- asdfasdfasdfa12 10y agoThis. Thank you for constructing the words I could not.
- zokier 10y agoIt is very difficult, if not impossible, to protect against attackers who are in a position where they are able to install their root cert to your browser. If they can do that, then they can do a lot more also. At least in the current system such tampering is generally easily detectable.
- closeparen 10y agoIt's broken that device owners can make them behave according to their intentions? Shall we eliminate software freedom too? Otherwise companies can just install a fork of Firefox/Chrome with MITM support added back in to their managed endpoints.
- roywiggins 10y agoAre there any conceivable architectures where whoever owns the computer couldn't MITM themselves? If only for debugging purposes, which would immediately be used by corporate IT for the usual purpose.
- __jal 10y agoAs I see it, there are a number of issues that need to be cleared up before certs are anything more than snake-oil. Unfortunately, the economics of the current market-reality fight (tooth and nail) against doing so. (Note that I'm limiting this to browser certificate handling.) - We need clients to authenticate servers as well as the reverse. - Browsers need to allow better user control over certificates. I know the reasons why this isn't provided, and I don't care. Add a "reset to defaults" if you're worried about people breaking their browsers, but a sensible way for users to control whom they trust is important. See next point. - As of now, we have a pile of registries with near-zero public view into the operations of people with whom we're literally entrusting our bank accounts. Some of these are overtly in the control of nation-states, and many more are assumed to be at least covertly "assisting". Those of us with a problem with that (which should be everyone - even if you trust your friendly neighborhood intelligence agency, what about all the others?) need much better visibility into the operations of the CAs. I'd argue that they shouldn't even be for-profit operations, but that's not a huge point to me - the important points are knowing which ones are incompetent or compromised by their masters (which are the same thing in once sense, not not in others), and there are various paths to get there. To the browser apologists: is a balkanized web worse than one that cannot be trusted? And are your actions actively harming people by making them believe it is trustworthy when it is not?
- icebraining 10y agoNot an apologist, but a Devil's advocate: Being trustworthy means fulfilling the expectations of the party that is reliant on us, and which are based on what we promise. Currently, the CA system promises very little, with the general idea being that your data is safe from thieves and scammers; certainly not that your communications are safe from law enforcement. Therefore, they are mostly trustworthy. If you start telling people that you can say which CAs are free from interference from intelligence agencies and other top-level snoopers, you're making a much stronger promise, and therefore any flaws in your assessment are much more dangerous.
- zeveb 10y ago> The certificates are OK. No, the certificates are pretty terrible too. Take a look at Peter Gutmann's presentations, or read the SPKI RFCs. Among other things, certificates conflate identification, authentication & authorisation; they are based on a flawed, centralised, global phone book model; they are ASN.1; in one case, I believe that the meaning of a single flag has been inverted because of a mistake in a (Microsoft?) library that everyone has had to be bug-compatible with. Some folks think that XPKI is so broken precisely in order to discourage its use (others claim the same thing about IPsec). I don't actually think that's true, but sometimes when I'm banging my head against some stupidity in XPKI, I wonder. I really do.
- algesten 10y agoI have no love for most the major CAs I've interacted with, but this feels wrong, though I can't quite pin point why. Perhaps just a general feeling that all the internet eggs are being put, one by one, in one single alphabet basket.
- satai 10y agoLet's hope they stick to publishing all certificates into the certificate transparency list (Merkle tree).
- noinsight 10y agoThey should be - they're making certificate transparency logs mandatory in 2017 [1]. [1] https://casecurity.org/2016/11/08/google-certificate-transparency-ct-to-expand-to-all-certificates-types/ https://casecurity.org/2016/11/08/google-certificate-transpa...
- zokier 10y agoAs far as I can tell, this is more like Goog gathering their own eggs in their own basket. They are becoming more and more self-sufficient, but don't really seem that interested in taking over the whole market. As long as it stays that way, I don't mind much.
- serge2k 10y agoThey have the most popular browser, mobile OS, search engine. They operate popular public DNS servers too. They add this cert and they control a vast chunk of the internet.
- zokier 10y agoThis is different from all the things you mentioned by the virtue of not offering CA services to anyone (except themselves). So they are not really entering/disrupting any new market with this move.
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- reddiric 10y ago"If you are building products that intends to connect to a Google property moving forward you need to at a minimum include the above Root Certificates." The foundation of a more secure web apparently requires you to trust Google with the entire internet, using their properties as leverage to force it to be so.
- skybrian 10y agoYou may want to look into certificate transparency and who's supporting it.
- reddiric 10y agoThat's a different issue, and doesn't address what I wrote.
- zokier 10y agoActually it does address your point about trust; CT severely limits the amount of trust we need to place to any single participating CA, including now Google.
- skybrian 10y agoI think it's related? Since certificate transparency is a way of watching what's going on with all certificate providers (or at least the ones that use it), an organization that thinks Google's root is up to no good has a way of checking. It's after the fact, to be sure, but it matters for reputation.
- rmhrisk 10y agoGoogle has announced an effort to move all CAs to Certificate Transparency, here is a Threatpost piece on the topic - https://threatpost.com/google-to-make-certificate-transparency-mandatory-by-2017/121651/ https://threatpost.com/google-to-make-certificate-transparen.... They will already log their public certificates to CT and this will continue given their push for CT.
- jhugg 10y agoI love that you can just buy a CA and devices will trust the new owner. That’s not messed up or anything.
- geofft 10y agoHow could you design a system that works otherwise? Computer security is always about "this key says", not "this legal entity says".
- zokier 10y agoCertificate is more than just a key. Especially EV certs are pretty close to "this legal entity says". CAB forum could have made a policy that root CAs are non-transferable and should remain in complete independent control of the entity that created it.
- andy_ppp 10y agoPeer review and regular key rolling should be built into the system. It should not be based on "root" certificates rather something more like blockchain for generating security keys and each roll /session generates a new key. IANAEE but if building a currency is possible without it being possible to create fake money then it should be possible to protect websites in a similarly decentralised way.
- zokier 10y agoWe have peer review in current CA system in two forms; Certificate transparency being the more visible one, CAB forum operating more in the background.
- jonknee 10y agoWell you could do something like have browser vendors require a legally binding document that the ownership of a CA cannot change without notice (at which point they can reassess the CA). Not that hard actually since there are only a few browsers that matter.
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- zokier 10y agoIt feels like a new age of internet when we have stuff like Googles private .goog gtld with domains signed by Googles private Root CA. It's not strictly bad (and I'm not complaining), but it feels bit silly/weird/scary/... .
- mixedCase 10y agoMost of us adjudicate too much value to TLDs. It's an artificially scarce resource and most people here learned about the Internet when these TLDs were even scarcer.
- zokier 10y agoWell, personally I think that most of us adjudicate too little value to TLDs. The point of DNS is to be hierarchical instead of one flat space, so imho all legacy TLDs should have been immediately deprecated the day ccTLDs were introduced, and countries should have been endorsed to maintain second level hierarchy (somewhat like .uk had for some time). But of course that train left the station 30 years ago... in the current landscape I don't mind gTLDs any more than the general mess that is current DNS "hierarchy".
- TorKlingberg 10y agoMany websites are not country specific. They started somewhere and are headquartered somewhere, but it is not something users should need to remember.
- lmm 10y agoUsing the global TLDs for a global site is fine. But I wish there was a rule against using .com/.org/... domains for sites that are restricted to a single country (e.g. a shop that only ships to the USA should be under .us)
- dx034 10y agoThis is the case in nearly all countries except the US. In the UK, nearly all shops will have a .co.uk domain. In Germany .de domains, etc. It's just that .com is believed to be the US equivalent for that, not an international domain. That's also how large sites handle it. Amazon.com will lead you to the US page, not to an international section (e.g. where you could choose where to go).
- andy_ppp 10y agoI mean people don't trust Google's motives but I trust the certificate authorities less... How do we (or Google) know that the CIA and FBI can't create certificates from all the CAs because they have stolen/demanded the Root CA for them? If I was a TLA I'd want the ability to perfectly MITM anyone. I think these questions imply that there needs to be a better way to think about security and trust for web endpoints in the days of the state as a bad actor.
- hannob 10y ago> How do we (or Google) know that the CIA and FBI can't create certificates from all the CAs because they have stolen/demanded the Root CA for them? Well, we know they don't do this on scale, because we'd spot the rogue certs in the certificate transparency logs.
- lima 10y ago> How do we (or Google) know that the CIA and FBI can't create certificates from all the CAs because they have stolen/demanded the Root CA for them? Certificate Transparency.
- zabuni 10y agoWhich is why Google knew that someone issues a cert for their website: https://security.googleblog.com/2015/09/improved-digital-certificate-security.html https://security.googleblog.com/2015/09/improved-digital-cer... Might be part of the reason they are becoming their own CA.
- WildUtah 10y agoThat's why the NSA opened Let's Encrypt, isn't it?
- gcp 10y agoLet's Encrypt respects CT: https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=7395 https://crt.sh/?Identity=%25&iCAID=7395
- finid 10y agoThe proverbial fox guarding the hen house.
- Endy 10y agoAll I can say is this - what if I don't trust Google one iota?
- akjainaj 10y agoRemove the Google root certificates from your system once they deploy them.
- richardwhiuk 10y agoand don't visit any Google sites, which are the only ones deploying Google certificates.
- hobarrera 10y agoGoogle already has intermadiate CAs, so your browser is already trusting google anyway. This new CA doesn't change much in that respect.
- wbond 10y agoIt is interesting to see that Google decided to opt for NIST P-384 curve for the root certs it is going to have valid until 2036. Brian Smith has argued for supporting only P-256, P-384 and Curve25519: https://briansmith.org/GFp-0 https://briansmith.org/GFp-0. That said, Mozilla decided to continue to advertize support for P-521 for NSS (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1128792 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1128792). P-256 and P-384 are widely supported in various TLS libraries (SChannel, SecureTransport, OpenSSL, NSS), whereas Curve25519 doesn’t yet seem present in Microsoft or Apple’s libraries. I suppose with TLS 1.3 support perhaps we may see it implemented? Unfortunately it seems none of the NIST curves (P-*) are considered “safe” by DJB and Tanja Lange: https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/.
- tptacek 10y agoThe P-curves are "unsafe" (according to that rubric) in the sense that there are several ways to make mistakes writing curve libraries with them; you have to be more careful using them than you do with Curve25519.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- niftich 10y agoI don't think this is a bad thing. Instead of a third-party you trust (or rather, your user-agent trusts) vouching that Google's indeed Google, it's now Google vouching for itself, and you trust them by the virtue that they're Google. This ought not be surprising: presumably, who better to say that Google is indeed Google than Google itself? The reason everyone doesn't run a root CA is because it's difficult to coordinate trust between parties that may not know about each other ahead of time, and each and every root CA adds more maintenance burden on part of trust-stores. When I self-sign my cert, I am effectively my own root CA, but I lack a compelling value proposition for everyone to add it into their trust-stores, and of course there's the initial difficulty of me propagating my key fingerprint over a tamper-proof "out-of-band" channel ahead of time where you have assurance that it's coming from me. Google, on the other hand, is fairly easy to verify that they're indeed Google, considering they just published their public keys on their own website. By having a prior web property that's already trusted, they have bootstrapped the trust necessary for fingerprint distribution, and the rest should follow. When Google's CAs start issuing certs to non-Google parties, we can revisit the 'eggs-in-basket' question.
- wickedlogic 10y agoBut that is just it... "when" is not "if" here. There is a "when" it happens, and then a "when" we find out at some later point. Neither of those are reasonable "ifs". There will be tremendous pressure on them to do it for certain parties, or have it done on their behalf unwillingly, or possibly unknowingly.
- viraptor 10y ago> fairly easy to verify that they're indeed Google, considering they just published their public keys on their own website This doesn't prove anything, unless you already trust another CA which can vouch that you're looking at Google's site in the first place. Or by some sort of consensus with other people that you see the same key.
- pkulak 10y ago> When Google's CAs start issuing certs to non-Google parties, we can revisit the 'eggs-in-basket' question. I'm not really seeing the problem there, either. Unless we trust Google to do this less than we trust every other root CA. All evidence I've seen points to Google caring very much about internet security.
- scottm84 10y agoUnless they launch a satellite far from earth with locked keys on it, I don't see how this is anything more than a corporate NSL
- forrestthewoods 10y agoI don't trust Google.
- convales 10y agoOne more project that would be shut down in years to come , smells of publicity stunt.
- aduffy 10y agoYou can now have a website secured by a certificate issued by a Google CA, hosted on Google web infrastructure, with a domain registered using Google Domains, resolved using Google Public DNS, going over Google Fiber, in Google Chrome on a Google Chromebook. Google has officially vertically integrated the Internet.
- spullara 10y agoFunded mostly by you looking at Google Ads.
- cuckcuckspruce 10y agoAOL is dead, long live AOL!/s For serious though, there's not really any lock-in here (yet). You could replace everything from the certificate through the public DNS with GoDaddy and things would work just fine. I don't really see Google moving to close the web parts of this.
- viraptor 10y agoWe still need to make choices that guarantee it's the case in the future. We need to ensure we don't end up with environment as diverse as email where most people use Gmail, or Linux services which are all being rewritten under systemd, or many other cases where we voluntarily choose a monoculture that can force our choices in the future...
- gergles 10y agoI'm going to be 'that guy', but: Great, another page that requires JavaScript to display text. Hey, Google, you know what's more secure? Browsing plaintext sites without JavaScript.
- jarcoal 10y agoCouple of notes: * pki.goog does not enforce TLS * Why use .goog instead of .google?
- rmhrisk 10y agoSome PKI-related services can not, due to user agent behaviors and, do SSL, for example, consider OCSP; if to fetch an OCSP request you need to do an SSL connection and the library doing SSL does an OCSP check to verify the SSL cert you can end up in an infinite loop. While it would be ideal for that not to be the case, one has to build out infrastructure that supports the way UAs behave today.
- ygjb-dupe 10y agoHmm, I wonder if Alphabet will spin up a made at Google alternative to Let's Encrypt?
- rmhrisk 10y agoDisclosure: I am the author of that post and Product Manager for this project as well as other related work like Certificate Transparency and Key Transparency. While I can not say what Google will do in the future, I can say we are very supportive of Let's Encrypt. We have provided them funding and I personally act as an advisor to Let's Encrypt. In short, we love what Let's Encrypt is doing.
- ygjb 10y agoI do too, and I also think that if one reasonably well funded, free CA that has full transparency is great, then two would be awesome :D
- snowpanda 10y agoThey might, and then abandon the project a year later, like many other Google products.
- andmarios 10y agoNo real problem with Google running their own CA, but can't help but to think that the same people who provide the browser, the search engine and the OS, now also provide the certificates on who and what to trust. As much as we might trust Google, shouldn't there be something like separation of powers as a safeguard?
- niels_olson 10y agoThere is: they are intertwined with other regimes: * The international banking regime * The US legal regime for corporate purposes * Many other national regimes for operating purposes
- e12e 10y agoYou trust the hw vendor, the os vendor and the browser vendor - and you trust the CA. Google already had two out of four in many cases. You're not safe from the OS vendor by using a different browser, or CA.
- bassman9000 10y agoAre we going to see preferences in Chrome regarding certificates that link to a different root CA? /cynical off
- jfe 10y agolooks like the fox is guarding the hen-house.
- bexp 10y agoShort Summary by http://hn10.org http://hn10.org: If you are building products that intend to connect to a Google property moving forward you need to at minimum include the above Root Certificates. With that said even though we now operate our own roots, we may still choose to operate subordinate CAs under third-party operated roots. For this reason if you are developing code intended to connect to a Google property, we still recommend you include a wide set of trustworthy roots. Google maintains a sample PEM file at ( https://pki.goog/roots.pem https://pki.goog/roots.pem ) which is periodically updated to include the Google Trust Services owned and operated roots as well as other roots that may be necessary now, or in the future to communicate with and use Google Products and Services
- berry_sortoro 10y ago"Google Trust Services" is a oxymoron, just so you know in case you don't already.
- pk22 10y agoWhat's next? Chrome marking certificates not signed by Google CA as "Maybe not secure"?
- godmodus 10y agoi don't see how this is real security, considering trump's election and google's track record of bending to government demands. even more disappointing is their use of an NIST curve. but then again, government players plague every security system we have.
- vasco 10y agoYou're google and you still take a print screen of a spreadsheet instead of using an HTML table to display tabular information on a blog post.
- arca_vorago 10y agoI have thought for a good while now that DNS is the primary weakness of the current incantation of the internet as the public knows it. I think perhaps we should ponder the benifits of replacing it, and using raw IP's more often. In the meantime, DNSCurve would be a great start, vs the major issues I have found with DNSSec.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
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