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Intent to Deprecate and Remove: Trust in Existing Symantec-Issued Certificates

762 points by ehPReth 10y ago

NateyJay 10y ago
This is huge, Symantec owns about 15% of the SSL certificate market[1], and as stated in the article, has issued 30% of in-use certificates. No certificate authority of this size has ever been raked over the coals like this. [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certificate https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certif...
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Pretty much it will decide the question on whether or not the certificate system is even workable. My thesis is that either Symantec will not be able to respond (and so lose their ability to be a root certificate) in which case it will warn other root cert authorities to shape up or lose their business, or they will placate the Google and Chromium teams somehow and show that root cert authorities can be brought to bear. Or they will ignore Google, continue to create bad certs, and users will start getting instructed by sites that they have to manually add a root certificate in order to use they site, and the entire ecosystem will collapse.
  - makmanalp 10y ago
    I think it's likelier that Symantec will start a negative PR campaign, leading its users to yell at google to change things, perhaps calling this FUD. Whether that'll be effective is another question.
    - Canada 10y ago
      It would be pointless. Who would listen? The general public doesn't care about inside baseball. Site operators can't afford not to work perfectly with Chrome.
    - jasode 10y ago
      >Symantec will start a negative PR campaign, leading its users to yell at google to change things, It seems Google has the leverage, not Symantec. A PR awareness campaign is out-of-band information that's separate from the web surfer actually navigating to a site. Millions of users would see a scary message similar to "This site's security certificate is not trusted!"[1]. To prevent scary security popups, which is more likely? 1) The website owners abandon Symantec and switch to a Certificate Authority not flagged by Chrome or 2) Users get "educated" on Symantec's side of the story and manually add Symantec as a trusted root certificate. (Some can switch browsers but for many non-techies, that's a pain because they have all their bookmarks in Chrome -- and migrating them on mobile phone is not obvious.) [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+chrome+this+site%27s+security+certificate+is+not+trusted&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=google+chrome+this+site%27s+...
      - ergothus 10y ago
        or 3) Large websites using Symantec certs start telling users Chrome is "broken" and we find out if users will switch browsers, not care about the security, and/or complain to the sites. I definitely find any variation of #3 to be more likely than #2. I see it as a battle between #1 and #3.
        jasode 10y ago
        >Large websites using Symantec certs start telling users Chrome is "broken" I'm having a hard time thinking of a scenario where a large website concludes it's cheaper to convince web shoppers at ecommerce sites and web visitors at news sites to switch to Firefox/IE instead of the website just switching CA vendors. If you're a website that wants to put up zero friction between buyers submitting their credit-card info and pay you money, why try to "educate" them? If you're a website that wants visitors to see your ads next to your journalists' stories, why make it more difficult than it has to be? Does Symantec as a CA offer up extra benefits that no other CA has such that it makes sense to "train" web visitors to switch browsers? Of the millions of non-geeks that use Android phones, what % download and use Firefox instead of the default Chrome browser?
    - fooey 10y ago
      The PR campaign won't be targeting users, it'll be targeting business/site owners. A user might be annoyed that random sites stop working, but the people who operate those sites will see their traffic fall off a cliff. The only effective solution to stop the pain will be to switch to a new cert as quickly as possible, and that only hurts Symantec, not Google
    - kbenson 10y ago
      To which the response will inevitably be "Communication with the bank can't be trusted" and many people will read as "The bank can't be trusted". I think people will quickly come to the conclusion that the stakes are much higher for them if the bank can't be trusted when they have their money there, compared to the browser being too assertive, and will just move their money. Without definitive knowledge or a good understanding of all the intricacies, that's the safe decision. Banks know this. Like the CA system, the whole banking system only functions because of trust, and in the US that trust is backed by the government. They aren't going to let that erode. Regardless of whether all their back-end certs get updated, their customer facing ones will if needed.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      Yes. You can't just jeopardize a substantial portion of a large company's revenue stream like this and not expect retaliation. Guaranteed that unless the executive team steps in to reverse this, Google has made itself a few powerful enemies. Google is playing with fire here. I would expect Symantec and other major business who stand to be negatively affected, especially the extremely large ones that Symantec was accommodating by skirting some of the EV rules, will immediately start pushing for regulations around this process. That's the easiest way for large companies to control this kind of thing.
      - tracker1 10y ago
        "Norton Security Browser" a new free browser with internet security baked in...
  - SEJeff 10y ago
    Remember google has chrome AND android. I think they're big enough to win this battle if it comes down to that. Symantec is at the clear disadvantage.
    - cpncrunch 10y ago
      >Symantec is at the clear disadvantage. I'm not sure how they are at a disadvantage if they have supplied 30% of in-use certificates, and are responsible for 42% of all validations. While I don't condone Symantec's behaviour, I think google is being a bit hypocritical here. Have you ever tried reporting gmail spammers to google?
      - SEJeff 10y ago
        Sans maybe spear phishers, spam campaigns aren't generally ran by oppressive governments. MiTM certs with bogus certs absolutely are, and could result in jail / death. EFF ftw! https://ssd.eff.org/ https://ssd.eff.org/
        cpncrunch 10y ago
        I'm simply pointing out that both companies seem to think they can do what they want, due to having such large market share. Do we know that Symantec is being malicious, or just lazy like Google's response to spam?
        williamscales 10y ago
        This is a real security issue and spam isn't.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - zeveb 10y ago
    > Or they will ignore Google, continue to create bad certs, and users will start getting instructed by sites that they have to manually add a root certificate in order to use they site, and the entire ecosystem will collapse. IIRC that's Amazon's answer to 'how should a user install Amazon Prime on Android?' I don't know how successful they've been convincing users to allow installation of untrusted apps (I certainly haven't done it), but … probably more than a few have done it.
    - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
      Installing apps from other stores on Android is literally a checkbox away - but installing new root certs on computers is considerably harder, or impossible if your computer is locked-down (group policy, etc).
      - wiml 10y ago
        Installing new roots on Macs, iOS, and Android devices is really easy. It's mildly inconvenient on Linux desktops.
        victorhooi 10y ago
        It's actually no longer possible on Android, without jumping through significant hoops: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/07/changes-to-trusted-certificate.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/07/changes-to... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12061320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12061320 https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy/issues/2054 https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy/issues/2054 And it's really not the sort of thing your average non-technical user is likely to do - and trust me, having supported these users before, it's likely to go horribly wrong if you try providing steps for them.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      I did it... mainly for amazon's own apps.
  - gcp 10y ago
    users will start getting instructed by sites that they have to manually add a root certificate in order to use they site Or switch browsers. Google needs to (and will) play this so it ends up being unattractive for other browser vendors not to distrust Symantec as well.
    - kakarot 10y ago
      That's a good insight. Apple and Mozilla don't seem to mind making big decisions for their users on behalf of perceived security threats either, so I imagine only Edge will hold out for long time. Google probably won't lose any market share over this.
    - ballenf 10y ago
      Could actually dodgy sites then imitate bank websites, ask the same of users and then commit a MITM attack? I'd much rather be able to say -- 'no, never manually trust a cert', instead of 'well, ok, for now yes in this one case if you're sure there's no typos in the URL... What? Yeah, the text at the top in the little bar... argh'. I hope I'm missing something here, but even better I hope Symantec and banks get their acts together.
      - gcp 10y ago
        Could actually dodgy sites then imitate bank websites, ask the same of users and then commit a MITM attack? Technically, certificate pinning etc can prevent this, but in practice, yes, this is a possible attack vector. But it has little to do with CA validation. If the user understands how to verify the domain and security of the connection the attack doesn't work, and if he doesn't, the Google vs Symantec situation makes no difference either.
  - IgorPartola 10y ago
    It is workable. This gets brought up every time we have an issue like this. The problem is that existing CA's keep fucking up. But the system is clearly working: bad CA's get excluded. I think the likely result here is more widespread adoption of LE. The point is that CA's shouldn't be businesses.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      Mostly agreed... for the most part, EV certs are meaningless to most people. Wether it's LE, or otherwise.
  - endgame 10y ago
    > brought to bear I think the idiom you want is "brought to heel".
  - bashcoder 10y ago
    Maybe, but in the meantime I can't imagine a scenario where such a direct financial threat to a business isn't vigorously defended by Symantec. I'm not a lawyer, but certainly they must be working to determine if they have a legal basis for seeking an injunction against Google. They could even be building some sort of legal theory based on tortious business interference, contending that Google is doing irreparable harm by trying to come between Symantec and the expectations of its paying customers.
    - NickNameNick 10y ago
      That seems unlikely if Symantec have indeed violated the CA/B Forum Baseline Requirements that they already agreed to.
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  How is this different from StartCom except for size? Is the "too big to fail" enough of an argument here? Edit: Oh wait. Verisign and Thawte. Okay, that's some massive excrement on a collision course with the ventilation device.
  - poizan42 10y ago
    StartCom were blatently lying, I don't think Symantec have stooped that low.
    - interurban 10y ago
      Hard to say which is worse, the intentional lying or the fact that Symantec has repeatedly violated the BR's and root store policies despite the appearance of best efforts not to.
      - MertsA 10y ago
        Yeah seriously, every time Symantec slips up it seems like their response is some variant of "lol whoops, we didn't know we weren't supposed to issue certificates for entities other than the owner!"
- tajen 10y ago
  Am I the only one worried about LetsEncrypt becoming a monopoly? This move from Google is, indirectly, a huge service for them.
  - gcp 10y ago
    I don't see the link with LetsEncrypt here. Symantec doesn't give away free certs, and LetsEncrypt doesn't do EV.
  - dangrossman 10y ago
    If I'm reading the settings page right, Chrome trusts over 70 certificate issuers right now. Let's Encrypt is just one of those, and only issues a limited set of certificate types.
    - aeijdenberg 10y ago
      As I understand it, Chrome (unlike Firefox) does not ship its own root CA store - rather it defers to the root store of the operating system that it's running on. It does however apply some form of blacklist / additional restrictions over what the OS may allow.
  - jldugger 10y ago
    Arguably, they could just adopt LE technology wholesale. Shrinking cert lifetimes is compatible LE's already short cert lifetimes.
  - problems 10y ago
    I'd be quite happy if LetsEncrypt becomes a significant monopoly - they're following much better practices than many other CAs, they run on open source software and are generally operated in a much more transparent way than other CAs. By using stuff like Certificate Transparency Let's Encrypt makes it so their issuances are publicly auditable - much more than many other CAs are doing these days.
  - jsfitzsimmons 10y ago
    The implementation is open source. You can launch your own ACME server (valuable for testing), and use that. CAs implementing this technology obviously need to go through the same hoop-jumping in order to become trusted, but that's true of any strategy of starting a CA. The technology is available for any CA, existing or new, to copycat. And if they don't want to use the open source reference implementation, they can cleanroom an ACME server that works with all the existing clients that work with letsencrypt.
- beedogs 10y ago
  And none have ever deserved it more than Symantec.
mtgx 10y ago
I'd be very surprised if Symantec doesn't have some backroom deal with intelligence agencies, and not just in the U.S. either, especially since they've acquired BlueCoat - a "security company" known for selling surveillance tools to authoritarian regimes - and after they made the BlueCoat CEO the CEO of Symantec.
- dsl 10y ago
  Prior to the Symantec aquisition, VeriSign used to pitch just this thing as a product. AFAIK the usage was limited to DoD and a few mundane things. The IC wasn't interested because it was easier for them to just steal certificates or work around TLS completely.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    Interesting that it would be "so much easier" for the U.S. intelligence community to steal most certificates or work around TLS, when countries like Thailand, which have much fewer resources, prefer to get Microsoft to install their own root certificate for them in Windows. Perhaps this is what the IC meant as well, when it said there are other easier ways? Why bother with Verisign's solution, when they could have their own root certs in Windows? The CA system is such an untrustworthy mess. http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14381174/microsoft-thailand-government-surveillance-thai-censorship-encryption http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14381174/microsoft-thailan...
    - dsl 10y ago
      Because using your own CA is not deniable. You aren't allowed to move forward with any solution that may lead to attribution.
musicnarcoman 10y ago
> Intent to Deprecate and Remove: Trust in Existing Symantec-Issued Certificates When I read that something like this popped up in my head: "Google is using the nuclear option on Symantec. Neat!"
- Shanea93 10y ago
  Perhaps it's neat for you, I just found out that our newly issued EV certificate status is being revoked in the next build of Chrome, so our expensive EV certificates may as well be $5 StartSSL certificates. I imagine that there will be a lot of angry customers asking for refunds from Symantec/Verisign for certificates already issued which no longer conform to the offered product.
  - ChristianBundy 10y ago
    How recently did you renew? This has been in the works for over two years,I'm surprised that anyone is still giving them business.
    - Shanea93 10y ago
      We renewed recently, through our hosting provider who have Symantec in their certificate chain.
      - criddell 10y ago
        I would contact your hosting provider. They are going to have to find a new CA themselves and when they do, I would guess they would be willing to mint you a new EV cert.
  - hannob 10y ago
    I for one find it totally neat that people realize their expensive EV cert was a waste of money. Although that was true before, too. EV certs are a waste of money, the only thing they do is show a green bar. They don't improve security.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
stevecalifornia 10y ago
TLDR: Google has lost trust in Symantec's ability to properly validate certificates they issue. Chrome has a Root Certificate Policy that expects a CA to perform in a manner commensurate with the trust being placed in them and the Google team appears to see evidence that they are not living up to the standard laid out. They propose a gradual distrust of existing certificates by reducing the 'maximum age' of the certificates with each release of Chrome. EV certificates are proposed to have their EV indicators stripped immediately until Symantec, for one year, demonstrates sustained compliance.
- spelunker 10y ago
  The max time also starts at 33 months w/ Chrome 59 so thankfully they're giving plenty of time to either resolve the situation or have people switch CAs.
  - specialp 10y ago
    Not really. By the end of the year with their schedule Chrome 64 will be out with 9 month validity. Then who knows after that. So it is at the most 18 months.
    - spelunker 10y ago
      You're right. I didn't look into the Chrome release schedule so I just assumed they followed the max validity deprecation schedule. My mistake.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
  They're also planning on stripping EV status from their Certs too... that's going to be fun for a lot of banks.
  - jlgaddis 10y ago
    "effective immediately"
lukegb 10y ago
Google's also been looking to limit the maximum validity lifetimes in general through the CA/B Forum[1] in a ballot that ended up not passing (with hints[2] that Chrome would end up enforcing something similar itself even if it wasn't part of the Baseline Requirements). This seems to be indicative of the general indication that Chrome wants to head in anyway[3]. [1] https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2017-January/009373.html https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2017-January/009373.ht... [2] https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2017-February/009746.html https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2017-February/009746.h... - there was a more explicit post elsewhere but I can't find it in the archives right now [3] https://twitter.com/sleevi_/status/829804370900426752 https://twitter.com/sleevi_/status/829804370900426752
- zokier 10y ago
  > with hints[2] that Chrome would end up enforcing something similar itself even if it wasn't part of the Baseline Requirements Kinda undermines the idea of having a standards group if Google is going to strongarm the industry by doing their own thing anyways
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    "Baseline Requirements" sort of implies that what is specified is minimum, rather than exhaustive, rules, and that specific applications will have additional rules.
    - tialaramex 10y ago
      And they all do. Mozilla's rules are public so you can go read them, and indeed you can help write them. But most famously they required all CAs to disclose loads of stuff, and they require CAs to do lots of stuff in public where everybody can see it, not behind closed doors where we don't know what they're up to. Google's rules include lots of stuff about their Certificate Transparency idea, which has helped no end. Microsoft's rules famously include them getting a veto where they can order any CA to revoke a certificate or else leave their trust programme. They mostly use this to zap malware / phishing sites. Apple's rules forbid having lots of roots at once. Although apparently this didn't apply to Symantec, or various other people. Huh.
zie 10y ago
What is the chrome release schedule? i.e. what is the timeline for the 59 - 64 releases to happen? A quick google isn't getting me an answer(and I don't use Chrome, so don't really pay attention).
- prdonahue 10y ago
  What'd you search for? I typed in: chrome release schedule and this was the first link: https://www.chromium.org/developers/calendar https://www.chromium.org/developers/calendar.
  - zie 10y ago
    Thanks! My date math says: Chrome 59 (Apr 13, 2017) certs invalid after 2020-01-31 Chrome 60 (May 25th, 2017) certs invalid after 2019-09-09 Chrome 61 (Jul 20th, 2017) certs invalid after 2019-05-02 Chrome 62 (Aug 31st, 2017) certs invalid after 2018-12-09 Chrome 63 (Oct 12th, 2017) certs invalid after 2018-07-18
wasntme 10y ago
Are they just hoping to drive business to their new CA: Google Trust Services?
- pfg 10y ago
  That's unlikely, as they currently do not offer certificates to the general public. I imagine if they do at some point, it might be as part of something like their version of Amazon's ACM for their Cloud offerings, or for custom domains on sites like Blogger. I'd expect both to be free. They're also a platinum sponsor of Let's Encrypt.
  - ourcat 10y ago
    This happened recently with all my free StartSSL / Startcom certificates. I switched to LetsEncrypt. Also noticing Google and Mozilla's sponsorship.
    - gcp 10y ago
      Google and Mozilla were heavy sponsors of LetsEncrypt (in money and in Mozilla's case manpower too) because they wanted to push out HTTPS more, and mandate HTTPS for some new HTML features. That would have been problematic if certificates weren't free or convenient. In Mozilla's case, HTTPS is better for privacy. In Google's case, HTTPS makes it harder to substitude their ads.
shkkmo 10y ago
Is there a list anywhere of which EV cert providers use Symantec as a CA?
- revelation 10y ago
  From the Google link on Symantec root certs: http://pastebin.com/raw/nUEq5cFP http://pastebin.com/raw/nUEq5cFP Not sure if all of them issue EV.
  - jwarren 10y ago
    I extracted a readable list of cert providers: Equifax VeriSign TC TrustCenter GmbH RSA Data Security Equifax Secure Symantec Corporation GeoTrust Inc. Thawte Consulting cc thawte Thawte Consulting Equifax Secure Inc. TC TrustCenter for Security in Data Networks GmbH The USERTRUST Network Thawte Source here in case I screwed up or anyone wants to verify my terrible regex: https://gist.github.com/JodiWarren/376aebbf7ce6902b06766843f4d44dc7 https://gist.github.com/JodiWarren/376aebbf7ce6902b06766843f...
sandGorgon 10y ago
>All Symantec issued certificates. GeoTrust and Thawte are CAs operated by Symantec, simply afforded different branding. >While this list may need to be updated for some recently created roots, https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/net/data/ssl/symantec/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/net/... may accurately capture the state of impact Damn. There goes my certificate (Rapidssl). Anybody know what are the remaining, trustworthy certificate issuers ? No we cannot use LetsEncrypt for convenience reasons (we bake our certificate pub key in many places)
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  > No we cannot use LetsEncrypt for convenience reasons (we bake our certificate pub key in many places) Why does that matter? Pretty sure you don't have to change your public key to get or renew a Let's Encrypt cert.
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    we spawn our servers and scale them up and down. We terminate ssl internally to our applications which are on Docker. Letsencrypt is painful on docker. I dont mind paying 40$ per year for a wildcard ssl certificate.
    - gcr 10y ago
      Why not keep `/etc/ssl` inside a volume mounted by each docker container and run letsencrypt outside of docker? Each docker container doesn't need its own instance of letsencrypt; it just needs access to your key.
    - fomojola 10y ago
      If you use the DNS auth, its actually not bad: you can securely issue the certs on a different machine and just copy the PEM files to the right place. I used this with Route 53's API and it works quite well and is (in my opinion) superior to having to place files.
    - user5994461 10y ago
zie 10y ago
I was curious if this would affect my Symantec issued certs... according to my date math: Chrome 59 (Apr 13, 2017) +1023 days: 2020-01-31 Chrome 60 (May 25th, 2017) +837 days: 2019-09-09 Chrome 61 (Jul 20th, 2017) +651 days: 2019-05-02 Chrome 62 (Aug 31st, 2017) +465 days: 2018-12-09 Chrome 63 (Oct 12th, 2017) +279 days: 2018-07-18
- jstrom 10y ago
  If I'm reading the post right, it's stricter than that: > ...distrusting certificates whose validity period (the difference of notBefore to notAfter) exceeds the specified maximum. I.e., a certificate valid from 1/2015..1/2019 is distrusted as of Chrome 59. And the more lax restrictions only apply to certificates that have already been issued. Any one issued after Chrome 61 are held to the highest (9 mo) limit. > In addition, we propose to require that all newly-issued certificates must have validity periods of no greater than 9 months (279 days) in order to be trusted in Google Chrome, effective Chrome 61.
  - zie 10y ago
    I agree with the newly issued certs. The other, that's going to be painful, and a mess to figure out, if you are right.. and that's quite possible that you are. UGH. EDIT: Update, I'm not sure you are correct, I just downloaded the latest dev release (Version 59.0.3047.0 (Official Build) dev (64-bit)) and it accepts a rapidssl issued(symantec owned) cert valid for 1187 days, which would exceed the 1023 days. It's also possible it just hasn't made it into the release yet, I'll have to keep like a daily eye on this, and plan to replace much much sooner just in case.
    - hsivonen 10y ago
      > It's also possible it just hasn't made it into the release yet, The proposal was just made, so you shouldn't expect it to be reflected in code just yet.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
nikanj 10y ago
TLDR: for the next few months, expect to tell your relatives "just click yes on the big red warning dialog". Not sure if this is good conditioning.
- pfg 10y ago
  The schedule they're proposing tries to specifically avoid as much of this as possible. This is probably as close to "no impact for average users" as you can get if you don't want to accept that too-big-to-fail is a thing in the Web PKI.
praptak 10y ago
It's a bit scary how much power do browser creators wield. Even if it's being used for good.
- galdosdi 10y ago
  It's better than it used to be. We have 4 major browser vendors now, Apple (Safari and iOS), Microsoft, Google (Chrome and Android), and Mozilla, all of which have plenty of market share and none of which have most of it. There was a long period of many years when IE was king and anything else was irrelevant. There was also, even earlier than that, a period where Mosaic/Netscape/Mozilla and its kin were dominant. This is the best it's been in a long time in terms of no single browser maker controlling the market.
  - yuhong 10y ago
    Indeed, there was a set of roots IE 5.01/NT4 SP6/Win2000 and later trusted, and at that time only XP did automatic root cert update making them very valuable. Just before then, I think IE/SChannel only trusted VeriSign/Thawte/CyberTrust, and VeriSign bought Thawte just after IE 5.01 and NT4 SP6 was released.
- mayoff 10y ago
  It will be interesting to see what happens when a Chrome user can't access his bank web site because of this, and the bank tells her to switch to Firefox/IE/Safari.
Animats 10y ago
What's Mozilla doing?
- zie 10y ago
  like the post linked says, Mozilla(and the other browsers) have yet to announce/decide anything.
- gcp 10y ago
  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/kxs3kyqRqYU https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security... As far as I can tell, discussion about what to do with Symantec was ongoing, Google didn't think the outcome was going to be what they wanted, and then enacted a different policy on their own.
- dochtman 10y ago
  I was wondering the same thing. In previous cases, it seemed that Mozilla and Google acted as one, by working off the same NSS trust database. Has something about that changed? Apparently Google thinks Mozilla is moving to slow on this one?
tlrobinson 10y ago
I've often wondered: why is trust in CAs an all-or-nothing proposition (aside from EV certs), and why should my particular browser vendor have all the authority over who I should trust? For the vast majority of users that's probably just fine, but I would have thought that there'd be a browser or extension or something that allows security-conscious power users more fine-grained control over this by now. For example, I could subscribe to changes in CA trust levels from every major browser vendor, and if they don't agree my browser could show me a warning with an explanation. Or I could subscribe to feeds from other entities I trust, like the EFF. Or my security-conscious friends. Or if I decide I have lower trust in certificates issued by governmental CAs, or CAs in certain regions, I could mark them as lower trust. Basically a web of trust for CAs.
- andrewfong 10y ago
  > Or I could subscribe to feeds from other entities I trust, like the EFF. How would you validate that the EFF's feed is actually from the EFF? Assuming we're using existing SSL infrastructure, the browser would first need to trust the CA used by the EFF, which means we need an initial set of trusted CAs.
  - jf 10y ago
    > which means we need an initial set of trusted CAs. How would you validate that the initial set of trusted CA roots is actually from those CAs?
    - inglor 10y ago
      It ships with your operating system, which you physically obtain from another computer (with hardware like a USB drive or via internal network).
      - tscs37 10y ago
        But how to trust that this other computer has a good set of CAs?
marina8888 10y ago
Related: not valid certs should show a red warning after accepting them: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1349897 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1349897 is this for all the certs or just symantec certs?
Ajedi32 10y ago
Anyone have any more information on the incidents that triggered this response? I was able to find this article on Google's Security Blog: https://security.googleblog.com/2015/10/sustaining-digital-certificate-security.html https://security.googleblog.com/2015/10/sustaining-digital-c... But that's almost 2 years old. Have there been any more recent incidents that I'm unaware of?
- gcp 10y ago
  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.security.policy https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.security...
- agwa 10y ago
  https://www.mail-archive.com/dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org/msg05455.html https://www.mail-archive.com/dev-security-policy@lists.mozil...
  - pilom 10y ago
    TL;DR: in 2016 Symantec issued unauthorized certs for example.com (owned by ICANN) and a multi-domain cert with SANs for test1.com, test2.com, test3.com... even though those domains are each owned by very different organizations and did not all agree to have a common cert.
    - agwa 10y ago
      It's more than that. The ensuing thread uncovered that Symantec had exercised very lacking oversight over their partners (called Registration Authorities, or RAs) who were allowed to perform certificate validation on Symantec's behalf.
      - caf 10y ago
        ...and at least one of those RAs didn't seem to be doing any validation at all!
marina8888 10y ago
But why is https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certificate https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certif... saying Let’s Encrypt has 0.1% when https://letsencrypt.org/stats/ https://letsencrypt.org/stats/ says 32 million Fully-Qualified Domains Active? 32 million = 0.1% 32 000 million SSL certs? = 100% ? what?
- M2Ys4U 10y ago
  The Let's Encrypt roots were cross-signed by IdenTrust, who are number 2 in that table.
- magila 10y ago
  Judging by the explosive growth of IdenTrust, which cross-signs Let's Encrypt's certs, I'd guess that Let's Encrypt certs are being counted under IdenTrust.
- jaas 10y ago
  TLDR: Look at the IdenTrust numbers if you want to know the real Let's Encrypt numbers. Not many people use Let's Encrypt's own root for their validation chain when they use Let's Encrypt certificates. The Let's Encrypt root is not propagated widely enough across clients. We (Let's Encrypt) have a cross-signature from IdenTrust, that's what most people use because it's widely trusted. IdenTrust issuance is otherwise very small, so you can effectively consider the IdenTrust numbers in charts like this to be a proxy for Let's Encrypt. -Josh from Let's Encrypt
  - schoen 10y ago
    W³Techs also understates the fraction of "web sites" that use LE certs because it counts only the 10,000,000 top sites. But LE alone has current valid issuance covering over 30,000,000 subject names, most of which are small sites not in the top 10,000,000 sites by traffic volume or search engine ranking. https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/technologies https://letsencrypt.org/stats/ https://letsencrypt.org/stats/
justinclift 10y ago
Symantec being well... Symantec, I'd expecting them to lawyer up in order to delay, or outright block this. They're big enough to afford the higher end law firms likely needed too. :(
- daenney 10y ago
  They're not bigger than Google. And it's Google's browser and the open source Chromium project, so I'm having a hard time seeing how Symantec is going to get a judge to say anything along the lines of "I forbid any and all members of the Chromium project to commit anything to the codebase that would no longer treat Symantec issued certificates as before". Especially considering since plenty aren't under US jurisdiction nor necessarily employed by Google. Then they'd also have to strong arm Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft since they're rather likely to act too and at least the latter two don't disclose such changes until they've made them.
  - justinclift 10y ago
    Sure, it'd probably be an uphill battle. But, Symantec has generally shown little/no morals in past times when it comes to attempting to protect their business interests. Not really seeing why this would be different. :/
jwildeboer 10y ago
TL;DR Google prefers to override what the standards say about validity of certicates instead of what would be the logical thing: stop trusting Symantec root Certs. A dangerous precedent.
- ballenf 10y ago
  Can you elaborate? Having trouble parsing whether you think Google is over- or under-reacting.
- daenney 10y ago
  Google is divesting trust from Symantec but is doing it in a way that avoids hurting end-users and badly breaking the internet. They explicitly state why they don't just want to revoke it in one go and they have really decent arguments. What are yours? Aside from that, to the best of my knowledge the CA/B forum doesn't set forth any rules that require the immediate and complete removal of trust of a CA that is found to be in violation of the guidelines. I also don't see how they could, the best they could do is put out some form of recommendation but it's up to the parties that actually include the CAs to decide how they get removed, which is normally stipulated in the rules for inclusion in a Root Certificate bundle.
unabridged 10y ago
SYMC is at an all time high, and every one of their EV certificate customers is about to start talking to different security vendors. The Jan18, Jan19 near ATM puts are quite reasonably priced.
- phonon 10y ago
  Crazy! A third of SYMC's revenue might be going POOF! and the market is just shrugging?
  - beedogs 10y ago
    They'll all be caught by surprise and lose their shirts when Symantec releases their financials next quarter and the stock tanks. The market is full of ignorant people.
    - NickNameNick 10y ago
      Just remember that the market can afford to be wrong longer than you can afford to bet against it.
      - unabridged 10y ago
        Usually I agree, but SYMC is at an all time high and trading at 40x price per earnings. The price already implies a massive bet on increased profits, but there is no way that is going to happen.
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jwarren 10y ago
If anyone here hasn't realised, Symantec bought Verisign back in 2010 - who own many brand names, like GeoTrust, Equifax, Thawte etc. You can see a list of their roots certs here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/net/data/ssl/symantec https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/net/... In case you missed it at the bottom: > From Mozilla Firefox’s Telemetry, we know that Symantec issued certificates are responsible for 42% of certificate validations
- Minikloon 10y ago
  Symantec bought Verisign's authentication business, still two different companies. GeoTrust was started from buying Equifax's security business. Symantec bought GeoTrust. Symantec doesn't own the Equifax brand or company.
- ajasmin 10y ago
  Wasn't Verisign the very first CA business? How the mighty have fallen!
WestCoastJustin 10y ago
We need a service to check if your certs could be flagged as bad. Especially since this spans so many brands (Symantec, Equifax, VeriSign, GeoTrust, Thawte, etc). Something like, plug in the domain name, and it'll tell you if you need to update the cert.
- thenickdude 10y ago
  Since Google typically enacts the restricts through major Chrome updates, running the Beta version of Chrome can give you some early warning at least.
dantiberian 10y ago
Not much focus in the comments has been put on the 9-month certificate validity, but it seems like that is going to be almost as big a punishment for Symantec as the deprecation. Because dealing with SSL is so painful for some large corporates, being told that you have to go from a 3 year renewal schedule to a 9 month one would be enough to cause many to go looking elsewhere.
- thenickdude 10y ago
  Since certificate revocation is pretty much unworkable, reducing the maximum lifetime of certificates is probably a good thing for security in general.
TenOhms 10y ago
It amazes me how often Symantec is in the news about the same subject, yet they seem to be incapable of learning a lesson from it.
- abraae 10y ago
  As they say "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
  - johncolanduoni 10y ago
    I don't think that's the case here, I think Symantec understood perfectly but thought they were too big to get anything more than a slap on the wrist from Chrome. Chrome's previous sanctions on Symantec, though very helpful for those trying to evaluate Symantec and inconvenient to implement on Symantec's side, were not much of a threat to their business.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  If they were learning lessons from it, they wouldn't be in the news so much for it.
benchaney 10y ago
Good. The security of certificate system is dependent on an incentive model where misbehavior is punished with revocation. It is important not just because we shouldn't give individual authorities trust after they have demonstrated themselves untrustworthy (although that is an important factor), but also as a punitive measure to disincentive misbehavior.
voidlogic 10y ago
Unless Mozilla and IE goe along with this, effected orgs could just inform users that Chrome is not a supported browser? Have we heard from the other browser vendors?
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  "We now do not support the one browser that has over 50% of usershare." To me, that seems to be the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot...using the Tsar Bomba.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 10y ago
  If this also applies to Chrome on mobile, good luck telling almost all Android users to switch browsers.
- TOMDM 10y ago
  Let's be honest, switching your cert is a far cheaper option than the lost business of telling 50% of your users that they need to switch browsers. Whith ecommerce sites being so hyper focused on abandoned cart stats, this is the easiest change they'll make all year.
  - voidlogic 10y ago
    For ecommerce yes, but the people most impact here are prob. banks... and if somones back tells them they have to install and use FF or use Edge over Chrome, they will probably do it.
hughw 10y ago
"...pour encourager les autres"
- lucb1e 10y ago
  In English please?
  - fh973 10y ago
    Take a second look. It's just another dialect of Latin.
  - hughw 10y ago
    Byng's execution is referred to in Voltaire's novel Candide with the line "Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres" – "In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Minorca_(1756) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Minorca_(1756)
thenickdude 10y ago
It looks like the questions that Google/Mozilla asked Symantec and didn't like the answers to are posted here: https://knowledge.symantec.com/support/ssl-certificates-support/index?page=content&id=INFO4154 https://knowledge.symantec.com/support/ssl-certificates-supp... (Archive link: http://archive.is/Cq9VO http://archive.is/Cq9VO ) Really interesting reading!
- tialaramex 10y ago
  Because the process happens in the public newsgroup mozilla.dev.security.policy anyone with a legitimate interest in the Web PKI can ask questions during incidents like this or indeed during Mozilla's new CA application process. Some of the questions on that list are mine. I don't remember if representatives from Google or Mozilla explicitly told Symantec they needed to answer my questions, beyond a certain point it's implied that smart questions (and I hope mine are smart) should be answered regardless of who asks them. Other than Google and Mozilla, major trust stores mostly prefer to conduct their activities in private, so we don't know what (if anything) Symantec were asked by Microsoft, Apple, etc.
bandrami 10y ago
PKI is broken. The problem isn't the crypto, it's the wardens.
smartbit 10y ago
in chris palmer mar 23, 19:33 (9th answer) > Combined with the gradual move to certificates with shorter lifespans anyway (as a way of coping with problems like this, and with the difficulty of certificate revocation generally), automation is a necessity going forward. Interesting. What are the effects of automation? E.g. is it possible to automate the update of EV certs? Is this opinion fueled by the idea that websites should be hosted in the public cloud? What is OWASP's stance? Where can I find more on pro & con automated cert renewal? Around the time when Letsencrypt was introduced, there must have been someone who wrote an informed article/blog on automated cert renewal.
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kartickv 10y ago
Why not immediately begin treating these connections as plain HTTP? Don't show the padlock or "Secure". Don't fail the connection, so people will still be able to use the site, but don't present it as secure. This would be a stronger action than treating EV certs as non-EV, which only a few geeks will notice. Or reducing the maximum age of certificates.
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  As someone who just renewed a Symantec EV cert (for a pretty penny), this would super piss me off. The steps Google has laid out seem proportionate to me. It clearly gets the message across without unduly burdening 3rd parties like me. And it has nudged me to look at other CAs. Unfortunately the first good option I've looked at--Digicert--has also been publicly rapped on the knuckles by Ryan Sleevi this month.
  - kartickv 10y ago
    Pissing off Symantec customers is a necessary evil in this case. It's a sign that the strategy is working.
    - snowwrestler 10y ago
      Some Symantec customers are in a position to file a complaint with Google well over the heads of the Chrome cert team. Some have many $millions of transactions dependent on Symantec certs, and aggressive legal staff. Imagine if Chrome started reporting all Apple and Microsoft domains as insecure, with no warning. That's straying into very deep waters. To be clear: I support Google's action against Symantec, and it is causing me to look at other CAs. But I need time to make an orderly change.
      - kartickv 10y ago
        You can't compare Symantec with Apple and MS, since Apple and MS are competent. If you think someone might sue Google, on what basis? And Google is more than capable of defending itself. I agree about the time needed to make an orderly change, which is why I didn't propose that connections fail yet, only that they not be presented as secure in the UI.
fosco 10y ago
I do not know how to observe if this has been accepted, does it not require 3 others to approve and say 'looks good to me' to continue with this proposal? sorry if I missed this...
gigatexal 10y ago
I'd rather trust Google to be a/the defacto CA than some has been AV company.
acd 10y ago
Why trust central CA who say security charge for it but do not implement it? Why not instead use a distributed security model such as LetsEncrypt and Blockchain? The whole security model of the web is quite centralized maybe we need something more distributed? What if you had strong hashing on content, distributed webservers and distributed content?
WillyOnWheels 10y ago
Symantec thinks Google is being inflammatory. Symantec fired the people who made the test cert a couple of years ago. Here's Symantec's press release: Google’s statements about our issuance practices and the scope of our past mis-issuances are exaggerated and misleading. For example, Google’s claim that we have mis-issued 30,000 SSL/TLS certificates is not true. In the event Google is referring to, 127 certificates – not 30,000 – were identified as mis-issued, and they resulted in no consumer harm. We have taken extensive remediation measures to correct this situation, immediately terminated the involved partner’s appointment as a registration authority (RA), and in a move to strengthen the trust of Symantec-issued SSL/TLS certificates, announced the discontinuation of our RA program. This control enhancement is an important move that other public certificate authorities (CAs) have not yet followed.
- tialaramex 10y ago
  The 30 000 certificates don't have any documentation. The BRs require that a CA keeps documentation showing how they validated the Subject, because without that any CA could issue anything and then say "Er, I forget why, but it was definitely OK" and who can prove they were wrong? CrossCert wasn't able to produce any documentation for the certificates they got Symantec to issue. Maybe their dog ate it, or they kept it in the Recycle Bin on somebody's laptop and then mistakenly hit "Empty" one day. Most likely they simply never created the documentation at all, because Symantec had never asked them to produce it, so why bother? But that means we have no reason, other than a general sense that CrossCert appear to have been incompetent rather than malevolent, to believe any of those certificates was actually validated. On that basis they're mis-issued, and so Symantec revoked them. The 127 certificates discovered by investigators are clearly bogus, some aren't even for valid domain names, but the thousands of others weren't magically fine - we have no idea, and not having any idea is itself unacceptable. It is true that Symantec shut down their entire RA partner programme (the relationship with CrossCert and half a dozen others) without explicitly being told to do that, and personally I felt that might be enough, but Google clearly don't see it the same way.

762 points by ehPReth 10y ago

This is huge, Symantec owns about 15% of the SSL certificate market[1], and as stated in the article, has issued 30% of in-use certificates. No certificate authority of this size has ever been raked over the coals like this. [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certificate https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certif...

ChuckMcM 10y ago
Pretty much it will decide the question on whether or not the certificate system is even workable. My thesis is that either Symantec will not be able to respond (and so lose their ability to be a root certificate) in which case it will warn other root cert authorities to shape up or lose their business, or they will placate the Google and Chromium teams somehow and show that root cert authorities can be brought to bear. Or they will ignore Google, continue to create bad certs, and users will start getting instructed by sites that they have to manually add a root certificate in order to use they site, and the entire ecosystem will collapse.
- makmanalp 10y ago
  I think it's likelier that Symantec will start a negative PR campaign, leading its users to yell at google to change things, perhaps calling this FUD. Whether that'll be effective is another question.
  - Canada 10y ago
    It would be pointless. Who would listen? The general public doesn't care about inside baseball. Site operators can't afford not to work perfectly with Chrome.
  - jasode 10y ago
    >Symantec will start a negative PR campaign, leading its users to yell at google to change things, It seems Google has the leverage, not Symantec. A PR awareness campaign is out-of-band information that's separate from the web surfer actually navigating to a site. Millions of users would see a scary message similar to "This site's security certificate is not trusted!"[1]. To prevent scary security popups, which is more likely? 1) The website owners abandon Symantec and switch to a Certificate Authority not flagged by Chrome or 2) Users get "educated" on Symantec's side of the story and manually add Symantec as a trusted root certificate. (Some can switch browsers but for many non-techies, that's a pain because they have all their bookmarks in Chrome -- and migrating them on mobile phone is not obvious.) [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+chrome+this+site%27s+security+certificate+is+not+trusted&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=google+chrome+this+site%27s+...
    - ergothus 10y ago
      or 3) Large websites using Symantec certs start telling users Chrome is "broken" and we find out if users will switch browsers, not care about the security, and/or complain to the sites. I definitely find any variation of #3 to be more likely than #2. I see it as a battle between #1 and #3.
      - jasode 10y ago
        >Large websites using Symantec certs start telling users Chrome is "broken" I'm having a hard time thinking of a scenario where a large website concludes it's cheaper to convince web shoppers at ecommerce sites and web visitors at news sites to switch to Firefox/IE instead of the website just switching CA vendors. If you're a website that wants to put up zero friction between buyers submitting their credit-card info and pay you money, why try to "educate" them? If you're a website that wants visitors to see your ads next to your journalists' stories, why make it more difficult than it has to be? Does Symantec as a CA offer up extra benefits that no other CA has such that it makes sense to "train" web visitors to switch browsers? Of the millions of non-geeks that use Android phones, what % download and use Firefox instead of the default Chrome browser?
  - fooey 10y ago
    The PR campaign won't be targeting users, it'll be targeting business/site owners. A user might be annoyed that random sites stop working, but the people who operate those sites will see their traffic fall off a cliff. The only effective solution to stop the pain will be to switch to a new cert as quickly as possible, and that only hurts Symantec, not Google
  - kbenson 10y ago
    To which the response will inevitably be "Communication with the bank can't be trusted" and many people will read as "The bank can't be trusted". I think people will quickly come to the conclusion that the stakes are much higher for them if the bank can't be trusted when they have their money there, compared to the browser being too assertive, and will just move their money. Without definitive knowledge or a good understanding of all the intricacies, that's the safe decision. Banks know this. Like the CA system, the whole banking system only functions because of trust, and in the US that trust is backed by the government. They aren't going to let that erode. Regardless of whether all their back-end certs get updated, their customer facing ones will if needed.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Yes. You can't just jeopardize a substantial portion of a large company's revenue stream like this and not expect retaliation. Guaranteed that unless the executive team steps in to reverse this, Google has made itself a few powerful enemies. Google is playing with fire here. I would expect Symantec and other major business who stand to be negatively affected, especially the extremely large ones that Symantec was accommodating by skirting some of the EV rules, will immediately start pushing for regulations around this process. That's the easiest way for large companies to control this kind of thing.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      "Norton Security Browser" a new free browser with internet security baked in...
- SEJeff 10y ago
  Remember google has chrome AND android. I think they're big enough to win this battle if it comes down to that. Symantec is at the clear disadvantage.
  - cpncrunch 10y ago
    >Symantec is at the clear disadvantage. I'm not sure how they are at a disadvantage if they have supplied 30% of in-use certificates, and are responsible for 42% of all validations. While I don't condone Symantec's behaviour, I think google is being a bit hypocritical here. Have you ever tried reporting gmail spammers to google?
    - SEJeff 10y ago
      Sans maybe spear phishers, spam campaigns aren't generally ran by oppressive governments. MiTM certs with bogus certs absolutely are, and could result in jail / death. EFF ftw! https://ssd.eff.org/ https://ssd.eff.org/
      - cpncrunch 10y ago
        I'm simply pointing out that both companies seem to think they can do what they want, due to having such large market share. Do we know that Symantec is being malicious, or just lazy like Google's response to spam?
        williamscales 10y ago
        This is a real security issue and spam isn't.
        deleted 10y ago
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- zeveb 10y ago
  > Or they will ignore Google, continue to create bad certs, and users will start getting instructed by sites that they have to manually add a root certificate in order to use they site, and the entire ecosystem will collapse. IIRC that's Amazon's answer to 'how should a user install Amazon Prime on Android?' I don't know how successful they've been convincing users to allow installation of untrusted apps (I certainly haven't done it), but … probably more than a few have done it.
  - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
    Installing apps from other stores on Android is literally a checkbox away - but installing new root certs on computers is considerably harder, or impossible if your computer is locked-down (group policy, etc).
    - wiml 10y ago
      Installing new roots on Macs, iOS, and Android devices is really easy. It's mildly inconvenient on Linux desktops.
      - victorhooi 10y ago
        It's actually no longer possible on Android, without jumping through significant hoops: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/07/changes-to-trusted-certificate.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/07/changes-to... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12061320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12061320 https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy/issues/2054 https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy/issues/2054 And it's really not the sort of thing your average non-technical user is likely to do - and trust me, having supported these users before, it's likely to go horribly wrong if you try providing steps for them.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I did it... mainly for amazon's own apps.
- gcp 10y ago
  users will start getting instructed by sites that they have to manually add a root certificate in order to use they site Or switch browsers. Google needs to (and will) play this so it ends up being unattractive for other browser vendors not to distrust Symantec as well.
  - kakarot 10y ago
    That's a good insight. Apple and Mozilla don't seem to mind making big decisions for their users on behalf of perceived security threats either, so I imagine only Edge will hold out for long time. Google probably won't lose any market share over this.
  - ballenf 10y ago
    Could actually dodgy sites then imitate bank websites, ask the same of users and then commit a MITM attack? I'd much rather be able to say -- 'no, never manually trust a cert', instead of 'well, ok, for now yes in this one case if you're sure there's no typos in the URL... What? Yeah, the text at the top in the little bar... argh'. I hope I'm missing something here, but even better I hope Symantec and banks get their acts together.
    - gcp 10y ago
      Could actually dodgy sites then imitate bank websites, ask the same of users and then commit a MITM attack? Technically, certificate pinning etc can prevent this, but in practice, yes, this is a possible attack vector. But it has little to do with CA validation. If the user understands how to verify the domain and security of the connection the attack doesn't work, and if he doesn't, the Google vs Symantec situation makes no difference either.
- IgorPartola 10y ago
  It is workable. This gets brought up every time we have an issue like this. The problem is that existing CA's keep fucking up. But the system is clearly working: bad CA's get excluded. I think the likely result here is more widespread adoption of LE. The point is that CA's shouldn't be businesses.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    Mostly agreed... for the most part, EV certs are meaningless to most people. Wether it's LE, or otherwise.
- endgame 10y ago
  > brought to bear I think the idiom you want is "brought to heel".
- bashcoder 10y ago
  Maybe, but in the meantime I can't imagine a scenario where such a direct financial threat to a business isn't vigorously defended by Symantec. I'm not a lawyer, but certainly they must be working to determine if they have a legal basis for seeking an injunction against Google. They could even be building some sort of legal theory based on tortious business interference, contending that Google is doing irreparable harm by trying to come between Symantec and the expectations of its paying customers.
  - NickNameNick 10y ago
    That seems unlikely if Symantec have indeed violated the CA/B Forum Baseline Requirements that they already agreed to.
Piskvorrr 10y ago
How is this different from StartCom except for size? Is the "too big to fail" enough of an argument here? Edit: Oh wait. Verisign and Thawte. Okay, that's some massive excrement on a collision course with the ventilation device.
- poizan42 10y ago
  StartCom were blatently lying, I don't think Symantec have stooped that low.
  - interurban 10y ago
    Hard to say which is worse, the intentional lying or the fact that Symantec has repeatedly violated the BR's and root store policies despite the appearance of best efforts not to.
    - MertsA 10y ago
      Yeah seriously, every time Symantec slips up it seems like their response is some variant of "lol whoops, we didn't know we weren't supposed to issue certificates for entities other than the owner!"
tajen 10y ago
Am I the only one worried about LetsEncrypt becoming a monopoly? This move from Google is, indirectly, a huge service for them.
- gcp 10y ago
  I don't see the link with LetsEncrypt here. Symantec doesn't give away free certs, and LetsEncrypt doesn't do EV.
- dangrossman 10y ago
  If I'm reading the settings page right, Chrome trusts over 70 certificate issuers right now. Let's Encrypt is just one of those, and only issues a limited set of certificate types.
  - aeijdenberg 10y ago
    As I understand it, Chrome (unlike Firefox) does not ship its own root CA store - rather it defers to the root store of the operating system that it's running on. It does however apply some form of blacklist / additional restrictions over what the OS may allow.
- jldugger 10y ago
  Arguably, they could just adopt LE technology wholesale. Shrinking cert lifetimes is compatible LE's already short cert lifetimes.
- problems 10y ago
  I'd be quite happy if LetsEncrypt becomes a significant monopoly - they're following much better practices than many other CAs, they run on open source software and are generally operated in a much more transparent way than other CAs. By using stuff like Certificate Transparency Let's Encrypt makes it so their issuances are publicly auditable - much more than many other CAs are doing these days.
- jsfitzsimmons 10y ago
  The implementation is open source. You can launch your own ACME server (valuable for testing), and use that. CAs implementing this technology obviously need to go through the same hoop-jumping in order to become trusted, but that's true of any strategy of starting a CA. The technology is available for any CA, existing or new, to copycat. And if they don't want to use the open source reference implementation, they can cleanroom an ACME server that works with all the existing clients that work with letsencrypt.
beedogs 10y ago
And none have ever deserved it more than Symantec.

mtgx 10y ago

I'd be very surprised if Symantec doesn't have some backroom deal with intelligence agencies, and not just in the U.S. either, especially since they've acquired BlueCoat - a "security company" known for selling surveillance tools to authoritarian regimes - and after they made the BlueCoat CEO the CEO of Symantec.

dsl 10y ago
Prior to the Symantec aquisition, VeriSign used to pitch just this thing as a product. AFAIK the usage was limited to DoD and a few mundane things. The IC wasn't interested because it was easier for them to just steal certificates or work around TLS completely.
- mtgx 10y ago
  Interesting that it would be "so much easier" for the U.S. intelligence community to steal most certificates or work around TLS, when countries like Thailand, which have much fewer resources, prefer to get Microsoft to install their own root certificate for them in Windows. Perhaps this is what the IC meant as well, when it said there are other easier ways? Why bother with Verisign's solution, when they could have their own root certs in Windows? The CA system is such an untrustworthy mess. http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14381174/microsoft-thailand-government-surveillance-thai-censorship-encryption http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14381174/microsoft-thailan...
  - dsl 10y ago
    Because using your own CA is not deniable. You aren't allowed to move forward with any solution that may lead to attribution.

musicnarcoman 10y ago

> Intent to Deprecate and Remove: Trust in Existing Symantec-Issued Certificates When I read that something like this popped up in my head: "Google is using the nuclear option on Symantec. Neat!"

Shanea93 10y ago
Perhaps it's neat for you, I just found out that our newly issued EV certificate status is being revoked in the next build of Chrome, so our expensive EV certificates may as well be $5 StartSSL certificates. I imagine that there will be a lot of angry customers asking for refunds from Symantec/Verisign for certificates already issued which no longer conform to the offered product.
- ChristianBundy 10y ago
  How recently did you renew? This has been in the works for over two years,I'm surprised that anyone is still giving them business.
  - Shanea93 10y ago
    We renewed recently, through our hosting provider who have Symantec in their certificate chain.
    - criddell 10y ago
      I would contact your hosting provider. They are going to have to find a new CA themselves and when they do, I would guess they would be willing to mint you a new EV cert.
- hannob 10y ago
  I for one find it totally neat that people realize their expensive EV cert was a waste of money. Although that was true before, too. EV certs are a waste of money, the only thing they do is show a green bar. They don't improve security.

deleted 10y ago

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stevecalifornia 10y ago

TLDR: Google has lost trust in Symantec's ability to properly validate certificates they issue. Chrome has a Root Certificate Policy that expects a CA to perform in a manner commensurate with the trust being placed in them and the Google team appears to see evidence that they are not living up to the standard laid out. They propose a gradual distrust of existing certificates by reducing the 'maximum age' of the certificates with each release of Chrome. EV certificates are proposed to have their EV indicators stripped immediately until Symantec, for one year, demonstrates sustained compliance.

spelunker 10y ago
The max time also starts at 33 months w/ Chrome 59 so thankfully they're giving plenty of time to either resolve the situation or have people switch CAs.
- specialp 10y ago
  Not really. By the end of the year with their schedule Chrome 64 will be out with 9 month validity. Then who knows after that. So it is at the most 18 months.
  - spelunker 10y ago
    You're right. I didn't look into the Chrome release schedule so I just assumed they followed the max validity deprecation schedule. My mistake.
DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
They're also planning on stripping EV status from their Certs too... that's going to be fun for a lot of banks.
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  "effective immediately"

lukegb 10y ago

Google's also been looking to limit the maximum validity lifetimes in general through the CA/B Forum[1] in a ballot that ended up not passing (with hints[2] that Chrome would end up enforcing something similar itself even if it wasn't part of the Baseline Requirements). This seems to be indicative of the general indication that Chrome wants to head in anyway[3]. [1] https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2017-January/009373.html https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2017-January/009373.ht... [2] https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2017-February/009746.html https://cabforum.org/pipermail/public/2017-February/009746.h... - there was a more explicit post elsewhere but I can't find it in the archives right now [3] https://twitter.com/sleevi_/status/829804370900426752 https://twitter.com/sleevi_/status/829804370900426752

zokier 10y ago
> with hints[2] that Chrome would end up enforcing something similar itself even if it wasn't part of the Baseline Requirements Kinda undermines the idea of having a standards group if Google is going to strongarm the industry by doing their own thing anyways
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  "Baseline Requirements" sort of implies that what is specified is minimum, rather than exhaustive, rules, and that specific applications will have additional rules.
  - tialaramex 10y ago
    And they all do. Mozilla's rules are public so you can go read them, and indeed you can help write them. But most famously they required all CAs to disclose loads of stuff, and they require CAs to do lots of stuff in public where everybody can see it, not behind closed doors where we don't know what they're up to. Google's rules include lots of stuff about their Certificate Transparency idea, which has helped no end. Microsoft's rules famously include them getting a veto where they can order any CA to revoke a certificate or else leave their trust programme. They mostly use this to zap malware / phishing sites. Apple's rules forbid having lots of roots at once. Although apparently this didn't apply to Symantec, or various other people. Huh.

zie 10y ago

What is the chrome release schedule? i.e. what is the timeline for the 59 - 64 releases to happen? A quick google isn't getting me an answer(and I don't use Chrome, so don't really pay attention).

prdonahue 10y ago
What'd you search for? I typed in: chrome release schedule and this was the first link: https://www.chromium.org/developers/calendar https://www.chromium.org/developers/calendar.
- zie 10y ago
  Thanks! My date math says: Chrome 59 (Apr 13, 2017) certs invalid after 2020-01-31 Chrome 60 (May 25th, 2017) certs invalid after 2019-09-09 Chrome 61 (Jul 20th, 2017) certs invalid after 2019-05-02 Chrome 62 (Aug 31st, 2017) certs invalid after 2018-12-09 Chrome 63 (Oct 12th, 2017) certs invalid after 2018-07-18

wasntme 10y ago

Are they just hoping to drive business to their new CA: Google Trust Services?

pfg 10y ago
That's unlikely, as they currently do not offer certificates to the general public. I imagine if they do at some point, it might be as part of something like their version of Amazon's ACM for their Cloud offerings, or for custom domains on sites like Blogger. I'd expect both to be free. They're also a platinum sponsor of Let's Encrypt.
- ourcat 10y ago
  This happened recently with all my free StartSSL / Startcom certificates. I switched to LetsEncrypt. Also noticing Google and Mozilla's sponsorship.
  - gcp 10y ago
    Google and Mozilla were heavy sponsors of LetsEncrypt (in money and in Mozilla's case manpower too) because they wanted to push out HTTPS more, and mandate HTTPS for some new HTML features. That would have been problematic if certificates weren't free or convenient. In Mozilla's case, HTTPS is better for privacy. In Google's case, HTTPS makes it harder to substitude their ads.

shkkmo 10y ago

Is there a list anywhere of which EV cert providers use Symantec as a CA?

revelation 10y ago
From the Google link on Symantec root certs: http://pastebin.com/raw/nUEq5cFP http://pastebin.com/raw/nUEq5cFP Not sure if all of them issue EV.
- jwarren 10y ago
  I extracted a readable list of cert providers: Equifax VeriSign TC TrustCenter GmbH RSA Data Security Equifax Secure Symantec Corporation GeoTrust Inc. Thawte Consulting cc thawte Thawte Consulting Equifax Secure Inc. TC TrustCenter for Security in Data Networks GmbH The USERTRUST Network Thawte Source here in case I screwed up or anyone wants to verify my terrible regex: https://gist.github.com/JodiWarren/376aebbf7ce6902b06766843f4d44dc7 https://gist.github.com/JodiWarren/376aebbf7ce6902b06766843f...

sandGorgon 10y ago

>All Symantec issued certificates. GeoTrust and Thawte are CAs operated by Symantec, simply afforded different branding. >While this list may need to be updated for some recently created roots, https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/net/data/ssl/symantec/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/net/... may accurately capture the state of impact Damn. There goes my certificate (Rapidssl). Anybody know what are the remaining, trustworthy certificate issuers ? No we cannot use LetsEncrypt for convenience reasons (we bake our certificate pub key in many places)

Ajedi32 10y ago
> No we cannot use LetsEncrypt for convenience reasons (we bake our certificate pub key in many places) Why does that matter? Pretty sure you don't have to change your public key to get or renew a Let's Encrypt cert.
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  we spawn our servers and scale them up and down. We terminate ssl internally to our applications which are on Docker. Letsencrypt is painful on docker. I dont mind paying 40$ per year for a wildcard ssl certificate.
  - gcr 10y ago
    Why not keep `/etc/ssl` inside a volume mounted by each docker container and run letsencrypt outside of docker? Each docker container doesn't need its own instance of letsencrypt; it just needs access to your key.
  - fomojola 10y ago
    If you use the DNS auth, its actually not bad: you can securely issue the certs on a different machine and just copy the PEM files to the right place. I used this with Route 53's API and it works quite well and is (in my opinion) superior to having to place files.
  - user5994461 10y ago

zie 10y ago

I was curious if this would affect my Symantec issued certs... according to my date math: Chrome 59 (Apr 13, 2017) +1023 days: 2020-01-31 Chrome 60 (May 25th, 2017) +837 days: 2019-09-09 Chrome 61 (Jul 20th, 2017) +651 days: 2019-05-02 Chrome 62 (Aug 31st, 2017) +465 days: 2018-12-09 Chrome 63 (Oct 12th, 2017) +279 days: 2018-07-18

jstrom 10y ago
If I'm reading the post right, it's stricter than that: > ...distrusting certificates whose validity period (the difference of notBefore to notAfter) exceeds the specified maximum. I.e., a certificate valid from 1/2015..1/2019 is distrusted as of Chrome 59. And the more lax restrictions only apply to certificates that have already been issued. Any one issued after Chrome 61 are held to the highest (9 mo) limit. > In addition, we propose to require that all newly-issued certificates must have validity periods of no greater than 9 months (279 days) in order to be trusted in Google Chrome, effective Chrome 61.
- zie 10y ago
  I agree with the newly issued certs. The other, that's going to be painful, and a mess to figure out, if you are right.. and that's quite possible that you are. UGH. EDIT: Update, I'm not sure you are correct, I just downloaded the latest dev release (Version 59.0.3047.0 (Official Build) dev (64-bit)) and it accepts a rapidssl issued(symantec owned) cert valid for 1187 days, which would exceed the 1023 days. It's also possible it just hasn't made it into the release yet, I'll have to keep like a daily eye on this, and plan to replace much much sooner just in case.
  - hsivonen 10y ago
    > It's also possible it just hasn't made it into the release yet, The proposal was just made, so you shouldn't expect it to be reflected in code just yet.
deleted 10y ago
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nikanj 10y ago

TLDR: for the next few months, expect to tell your relatives "just click yes on the big red warning dialog". Not sure if this is good conditioning.

pfg 10y ago
The schedule they're proposing tries to specifically avoid as much of this as possible. This is probably as close to "no impact for average users" as you can get if you don't want to accept that too-big-to-fail is a thing in the Web PKI.

praptak 10y ago

It's a bit scary how much power do browser creators wield. Even if it's being used for good.

galdosdi 10y ago
It's better than it used to be. We have 4 major browser vendors now, Apple (Safari and iOS), Microsoft, Google (Chrome and Android), and Mozilla, all of which have plenty of market share and none of which have most of it. There was a long period of many years when IE was king and anything else was irrelevant. There was also, even earlier than that, a period where Mosaic/Netscape/Mozilla and its kin were dominant. This is the best it's been in a long time in terms of no single browser maker controlling the market.
- yuhong 10y ago
  Indeed, there was a set of roots IE 5.01/NT4 SP6/Win2000 and later trusted, and at that time only XP did automatic root cert update making them very valuable. Just before then, I think IE/SChannel only trusted VeriSign/Thawte/CyberTrust, and VeriSign bought Thawte just after IE 5.01 and NT4 SP6 was released.
mayoff 10y ago
It will be interesting to see what happens when a Chrome user can't access his bank web site because of this, and the bank tells her to switch to Firefox/IE/Safari.

Animats 10y ago

What's Mozilla doing?

zie 10y ago
like the post linked says, Mozilla(and the other browsers) have yet to announce/decide anything.
gcp 10y ago
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/kxs3kyqRqYU https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security... As far as I can tell, discussion about what to do with Symantec was ongoing, Google didn't think the outcome was going to be what they wanted, and then enacted a different policy on their own.
dochtman 10y ago
I was wondering the same thing. In previous cases, it seemed that Mozilla and Google acted as one, by working off the same NSS trust database. Has something about that changed? Apparently Google thinks Mozilla is moving to slow on this one?

tlrobinson 10y ago

I've often wondered: why is trust in CAs an all-or-nothing proposition (aside from EV certs), and why should my particular browser vendor have all the authority over who I should trust? For the vast majority of users that's probably just fine, but I would have thought that there'd be a browser or extension or something that allows security-conscious power users more fine-grained control over this by now. For example, I could subscribe to changes in CA trust levels from every major browser vendor, and if they don't agree my browser could show me a warning with an explanation. Or I could subscribe to feeds from other entities I trust, like the EFF. Or my security-conscious friends. Or if I decide I have lower trust in certificates issued by governmental CAs, or CAs in certain regions, I could mark them as lower trust. Basically a web of trust for CAs.

andrewfong 10y ago
> Or I could subscribe to feeds from other entities I trust, like the EFF. How would you validate that the EFF's feed is actually from the EFF? Assuming we're using existing SSL infrastructure, the browser would first need to trust the CA used by the EFF, which means we need an initial set of trusted CAs.
- jf 10y ago
  > which means we need an initial set of trusted CAs. How would you validate that the initial set of trusted CA roots is actually from those CAs?
  - inglor 10y ago
    It ships with your operating system, which you physically obtain from another computer (with hardware like a USB drive or via internal network).
    - tscs37 10y ago
      But how to trust that this other computer has a good set of CAs?

marina8888 10y ago

Related: not valid certs should show a red warning after accepting them: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1349897 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1349897 is this for all the certs or just symantec certs?

Ajedi32 10y ago

Anyone have any more information on the incidents that triggered this response? I was able to find this article on Google's Security Blog: https://security.googleblog.com/2015/10/sustaining-digital-certificate-security.html https://security.googleblog.com/2015/10/sustaining-digital-c... But that's almost 2 years old. Have there been any more recent incidents that I'm unaware of?

gcp 10y ago
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.security.policy https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.security...
agwa 10y ago
https://www.mail-archive.com/dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org/msg05455.html https://www.mail-archive.com/dev-security-policy@lists.mozil...
- pilom 10y ago
  TL;DR: in 2016 Symantec issued unauthorized certs for example.com (owned by ICANN) and a multi-domain cert with SANs for test1.com, test2.com, test3.com... even though those domains are each owned by very different organizations and did not all agree to have a common cert.
  - agwa 10y ago
    It's more than that. The ensuing thread uncovered that Symantec had exercised very lacking oversight over their partners (called Registration Authorities, or RAs) who were allowed to perform certificate validation on Symantec's behalf.
    - caf 10y ago
      ...and at least one of those RAs didn't seem to be doing any validation at all!

marina8888 10y ago

But why is https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certificate https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/ssl_certif... saying Let’s Encrypt has 0.1% when https://letsencrypt.org/stats/ https://letsencrypt.org/stats/ says 32 million Fully-Qualified Domains Active? 32 million = 0.1% 32 000 million SSL certs? = 100% ? what?

M2Ys4U 10y ago
The Let's Encrypt roots were cross-signed by IdenTrust, who are number 2 in that table.
magila 10y ago
Judging by the explosive growth of IdenTrust, which cross-signs Let's Encrypt's certs, I'd guess that Let's Encrypt certs are being counted under IdenTrust.
jaas 10y ago
TLDR: Look at the IdenTrust numbers if you want to know the real Let's Encrypt numbers. Not many people use Let's Encrypt's own root for their validation chain when they use Let's Encrypt certificates. The Let's Encrypt root is not propagated widely enough across clients. We (Let's Encrypt) have a cross-signature from IdenTrust, that's what most people use because it's widely trusted. IdenTrust issuance is otherwise very small, so you can effectively consider the IdenTrust numbers in charts like this to be a proxy for Let's Encrypt. -Josh from Let's Encrypt
- schoen 10y ago
  W³Techs also understates the fraction of "web sites" that use LE certs because it counts only the 10,000,000 top sites. But LE alone has current valid issuance covering over 30,000,000 subject names, most of which are small sites not in the top 10,000,000 sites by traffic volume or search engine ranking. https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/technologies https://letsencrypt.org/stats/ https://letsencrypt.org/stats/

justinclift 10y ago

Symantec being well... Symantec, I'd expecting them to lawyer up in order to delay, or outright block this. They're big enough to afford the higher end law firms likely needed too. :(

daenney 10y ago
They're not bigger than Google. And it's Google's browser and the open source Chromium project, so I'm having a hard time seeing how Symantec is going to get a judge to say anything along the lines of "I forbid any and all members of the Chromium project to commit anything to the codebase that would no longer treat Symantec issued certificates as before". Especially considering since plenty aren't under US jurisdiction nor necessarily employed by Google. Then they'd also have to strong arm Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft since they're rather likely to act too and at least the latter two don't disclose such changes until they've made them.
- justinclift 10y ago
  Sure, it'd probably be an uphill battle. But, Symantec has generally shown little/no morals in past times when it comes to attempting to protect their business interests. Not really seeing why this would be different. :/

jwildeboer 10y ago

TL;DR Google prefers to override what the standards say about validity of certicates instead of what would be the logical thing: stop trusting Symantec root Certs. A dangerous precedent.

ballenf 10y ago
Can you elaborate? Having trouble parsing whether you think Google is over- or under-reacting.
daenney 10y ago
Google is divesting trust from Symantec but is doing it in a way that avoids hurting end-users and badly breaking the internet. They explicitly state why they don't just want to revoke it in one go and they have really decent arguments. What are yours? Aside from that, to the best of my knowledge the CA/B forum doesn't set forth any rules that require the immediate and complete removal of trust of a CA that is found to be in violation of the guidelines. I also don't see how they could, the best they could do is put out some form of recommendation but it's up to the parties that actually include the CAs to decide how they get removed, which is normally stipulated in the rules for inclusion in a Root Certificate bundle.

unabridged 10y ago

SYMC is at an all time high, and every one of their EV certificate customers is about to start talking to different security vendors. The Jan18, Jan19 near ATM puts are quite reasonably priced.

phonon 10y ago
Crazy! A third of SYMC's revenue might be going POOF! and the market is just shrugging?
- beedogs 10y ago
  They'll all be caught by surprise and lose their shirts when Symantec releases their financials next quarter and the stock tanks. The market is full of ignorant people.
  - NickNameNick 10y ago
    Just remember that the market can afford to be wrong longer than you can afford to bet against it.
    - unabridged 10y ago
      Usually I agree, but SYMC is at an all time high and trading at 40x price per earnings. The price already implies a massive bet on increased profits, but there is no way that is going to happen.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jwarren 10y ago

If anyone here hasn't realised, Symantec bought Verisign back in 2010 - who own many brand names, like GeoTrust, Equifax, Thawte etc. You can see a list of their roots certs here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/net/data/ssl/symantec https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/net/... In case you missed it at the bottom: > From Mozilla Firefox’s Telemetry, we know that Symantec issued certificates are responsible for 42% of certificate validations

Minikloon 10y ago
Symantec bought Verisign's authentication business, still two different companies. GeoTrust was started from buying Equifax's security business. Symantec bought GeoTrust. Symantec doesn't own the Equifax brand or company.
ajasmin 10y ago
Wasn't Verisign the very first CA business? How the mighty have fallen!

WestCoastJustin 10y ago

We need a service to check if your certs could be flagged as bad. Especially since this spans so many brands (Symantec, Equifax, VeriSign, GeoTrust, Thawte, etc). Something like, plug in the domain name, and it'll tell you if you need to update the cert.

thenickdude 10y ago
Since Google typically enacts the restricts through major Chrome updates, running the Beta version of Chrome can give you some early warning at least.

dantiberian 10y ago

Not much focus in the comments has been put on the 9-month certificate validity, but it seems like that is going to be almost as big a punishment for Symantec as the deprecation. Because dealing with SSL is so painful for some large corporates, being told that you have to go from a 3 year renewal schedule to a 9 month one would be enough to cause many to go looking elsewhere.

thenickdude 10y ago
Since certificate revocation is pretty much unworkable, reducing the maximum lifetime of certificates is probably a good thing for security in general.

TenOhms 10y ago

It amazes me how often Symantec is in the news about the same subject, yet they seem to be incapable of learning a lesson from it.

abraae 10y ago
As they say "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  I don't think that's the case here, I think Symantec understood perfectly but thought they were too big to get anything more than a slap on the wrist from Chrome. Chrome's previous sanctions on Symantec, though very helpful for those trying to evaluate Symantec and inconvenient to implement on Symantec's side, were not much of a threat to their business.
dragonwriter 10y ago
If they were learning lessons from it, they wouldn't be in the news so much for it.

benchaney 10y ago

Good. The security of certificate system is dependent on an incentive model where misbehavior is punished with revocation. It is important not just because we shouldn't give individual authorities trust after they have demonstrated themselves untrustworthy (although that is an important factor), but also as a punitive measure to disincentive misbehavior.

voidlogic 10y ago

Unless Mozilla and IE goe along with this, effected orgs could just inform users that Chrome is not a supported browser? Have we heard from the other browser vendors?

Piskvorrr 10y ago
"We now do not support the one browser that has over 50% of usershare." To me, that seems to be the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot...using the Tsar Bomba.
tgsovlerkhgsel 10y ago
If this also applies to Chrome on mobile, good luck telling almost all Android users to switch browsers.
TOMDM 10y ago
Let's be honest, switching your cert is a far cheaper option than the lost business of telling 50% of your users that they need to switch browsers. Whith ecommerce sites being so hyper focused on abandoned cart stats, this is the easiest change they'll make all year.
- voidlogic 10y ago
  For ecommerce yes, but the people most impact here are prob. banks... and if somones back tells them they have to install and use FF or use Edge over Chrome, they will probably do it.

hughw 10y ago

"...pour encourager les autres"

lucb1e 10y ago
In English please?
- fh973 10y ago
  Take a second look. It's just another dialect of Latin.
- hughw 10y ago
  Byng's execution is referred to in Voltaire's novel Candide with the line "Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres" – "In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Minorca_(1756) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Minorca_(1756)

thenickdude 10y ago

It looks like the questions that Google/Mozilla asked Symantec and didn't like the answers to are posted here: https://knowledge.symantec.com/support/ssl-certificates-support/index?page=content&id=INFO4154 https://knowledge.symantec.com/support/ssl-certificates-supp... (Archive link: http://archive.is/Cq9VO http://archive.is/Cq9VO ) Really interesting reading!

tialaramex 10y ago
Because the process happens in the public newsgroup mozilla.dev.security.policy anyone with a legitimate interest in the Web PKI can ask questions during incidents like this or indeed during Mozilla's new CA application process. Some of the questions on that list are mine. I don't remember if representatives from Google or Mozilla explicitly told Symantec they needed to answer my questions, beyond a certain point it's implied that smart questions (and I hope mine are smart) should be answered regardless of who asks them. Other than Google and Mozilla, major trust stores mostly prefer to conduct their activities in private, so we don't know what (if anything) Symantec were asked by Microsoft, Apple, etc.

bandrami 10y ago

PKI is broken. The problem isn't the crypto, it's the wardens.

smartbit 10y ago

in chris palmer mar 23, 19:33 (9th answer) > Combined with the gradual move to certificates with shorter lifespans anyway (as a way of coping with problems like this, and with the difficulty of certificate revocation generally), automation is a necessity going forward. Interesting. What are the effects of automation? E.g. is it possible to automate the update of EV certs? Is this opinion fueled by the idea that websites should be hosted in the public cloud? What is OWASP's stance? Where can I find more on pro & con automated cert renewal? Around the time when Letsencrypt was introduced, there must have been someone who wrote an informed article/blog on automated cert renewal.

deleted 10y ago

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deleted 10y ago

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kartickv 10y ago

Why not immediately begin treating these connections as plain HTTP? Don't show the padlock or "Secure". Don't fail the connection, so people will still be able to use the site, but don't present it as secure. This would be a stronger action than treating EV certs as non-EV, which only a few geeks will notice. Or reducing the maximum age of certificates.

snowwrestler 10y ago
As someone who just renewed a Symantec EV cert (for a pretty penny), this would super piss me off. The steps Google has laid out seem proportionate to me. It clearly gets the message across without unduly burdening 3rd parties like me. And it has nudged me to look at other CAs. Unfortunately the first good option I've looked at--Digicert--has also been publicly rapped on the knuckles by Ryan Sleevi this month.
- kartickv 10y ago
  Pissing off Symantec customers is a necessary evil in this case. It's a sign that the strategy is working.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    Some Symantec customers are in a position to file a complaint with Google well over the heads of the Chrome cert team. Some have many $millions of transactions dependent on Symantec certs, and aggressive legal staff. Imagine if Chrome started reporting all Apple and Microsoft domains as insecure, with no warning. That's straying into very deep waters. To be clear: I support Google's action against Symantec, and it is causing me to look at other CAs. But I need time to make an orderly change.
    - kartickv 10y ago
      You can't compare Symantec with Apple and MS, since Apple and MS are competent. If you think someone might sue Google, on what basis? And Google is more than capable of defending itself. I agree about the time needed to make an orderly change, which is why I didn't propose that connections fail yet, only that they not be presented as secure in the UI.

fosco 10y ago

I do not know how to observe if this has been accepted, does it not require 3 others to approve and say 'looks good to me' to continue with this proposal? sorry if I missed this...

gigatexal 10y ago

I'd rather trust Google to be a/the defacto CA than some has been AV company.

acd 10y ago

Why trust central CA who say security charge for it but do not implement it? Why not instead use a distributed security model such as LetsEncrypt and Blockchain? The whole security model of the web is quite centralized maybe we need something more distributed? What if you had strong hashing on content, distributed webservers and distributed content?

WillyOnWheels 10y ago

Symantec thinks Google is being inflammatory. Symantec fired the people who made the test cert a couple of years ago. Here's Symantec's press release: Google’s statements about our issuance practices and the scope of our past mis-issuances are exaggerated and misleading. For example, Google’s claim that we have mis-issued 30,000 SSL/TLS certificates is not true. In the event Google is referring to, 127 certificates – not 30,000 – were identified as mis-issued, and they resulted in no consumer harm. We have taken extensive remediation measures to correct this situation, immediately terminated the involved partner’s appointment as a registration authority (RA), and in a move to strengthen the trust of Symantec-issued SSL/TLS certificates, announced the discontinuation of our RA program. This control enhancement is an important move that other public certificate authorities (CAs) have not yet followed.

tialaramex 10y ago
The 30 000 certificates don't have any documentation. The BRs require that a CA keeps documentation showing how they validated the Subject, because without that any CA could issue anything and then say "Er, I forget why, but it was definitely OK" and who can prove they were wrong? CrossCert wasn't able to produce any documentation for the certificates they got Symantec to issue. Maybe their dog ate it, or they kept it in the Recycle Bin on somebody's laptop and then mistakenly hit "Empty" one day. Most likely they simply never created the documentation at all, because Symantec had never asked them to produce it, so why bother? But that means we have no reason, other than a general sense that CrossCert appear to have been incompetent rather than malevolent, to believe any of those certificates was actually validated. On that basis they're mis-issued, and so Symantec revoked them. The 127 certificates discovered by investigators are clearly bogus, some aren't even for valid domain names, but the thousands of others weren't magically fine - we have no idea, and not having any idea is itself unacceptable. It is true that Symantec shut down their entire RA partner programme (the relationship with CrossCert and half a dozen others) without explicitly being told to do that, and personally I felt that might be enough, but Google clearly don't see it the same way.