5 ms·

I'm still really bummed about StartCom's suicide/implosion. They had by far the most sane and reasonable pricing model I've ever seen, and one I really wish som

by xoa 9y ago

I'm still really bummed about StartCom's suicide/implosion. They had by far the most sane and reasonable pricing model I've ever seen, and one I really wish someone else would do. They basically only charged for non-automatic authentication, not for what you did with that authentication, and then let each level of authentication feed into higher levels. So Level 1 machine auth (similar in spirit to LE) was entirely free, you could verify an email, domain, or whatever and then produce certs for that. If you wished you could pay money (~$60 for 2 years IIRC) to have an actual human look at your documentation and give you a call, then give you a Level 2 with your legal name. You could then use that for an unlimited number of S/MIME certs for email accounts, domains, software signing and so forth. Having gotten personal verification to level 2, you could then pay to have an organization certified. Etc. Their UI wasn't the best, but it was functional and the overall system made a lot of sense. They didn't put an artificial price on some bits with a marginal cost of nada. It's a real shame all that got flushed, because that model of business filled a hole that has no general world solution right now (in principle authentication of their citizens should be a core role and offering of modern government, but I'm not holding my breath there).

yuhong 9y ago
Thinking about it, we are lucky Debian moved to Gandi instead of StartCom when they ditched the SPI CA.
- lwf 9y ago
  Gandi's been a long-time supporter of Debian[1], providing preferred pricing (their best "bulk rates") for years. I assume the CA migration was also donated. I'm personally quite glad the SPI CA is gone, and that we removed CACert[2][3]; stopped a lot of "works on my machine" confusion, and made the project more welcoming to people not already running a Debian derivative. [1]: https://www.gandi.net/supports/debian/ https://www.gandi.net/supports/debian/ [2]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=718434 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=718434 [3]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ca-certificates/+bug/1258286 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ca-certificates/+b...
blibble 9y ago
they were a pain in the ass I had paid them for more than 5 years to provide a cert for my hobbyist website, then one day on a random subdomain decided that it was an 'organisation' and started demanding more money to verify this organisation, when there was no real organisation at all
ivanr 9y ago
You're forgetting that they had a charge for revocation, which was also automated. Even after Heartbleed, they refused to revoke the potentially compromised certificates without being paid. They also advertised their certificates as 100% free, even though they clearly weren't (because of the revocation charges). The certificates were not free for commercial purposes either. IMO, just like one of those schemes where you don't pay to get in, but you have to pay to get out. It's a shame, because they could have achieved a market share similar to Let's Encrypt, if only they had played their cards slightly differently.
- xoa 9y ago
  >You're forgetting that they had a charge for revocation, which was also automated. I did not forget that, I was just talking about the authentication and certificate issuance side. But though it didn't fall under the umbrella of authentication it is something that actually cost real money at that point. You misunderstood the situation and how revocation functioned in a way that's extremely important (since it's finally getting fixed but the improvements could use more widespread deployment). The original certificate revocation mechanisms, CRL and OCSP, are and always have been completely broken in terms of fundamental scaling and failure modes. Scott Helme just did an excellent summary on the situation and upcoming developments [1] which I strongly encourage you to read, but in essence due to the way they work seriously offering CRL/OCSP (as in, in a way that won't instantly die when someone breaths on it hard) services and adding certs to them requires significant distributed infrastructure, which has not always been cheap. They were bad approaches even with that though due to other practical failure modes that were beyond a CA's control anyway. Both stink to the point that many (most? all?) operating systems/applications/browsers just soft fail by default or even ignore them entirely. "Revocation" for the wider web has largely been a mirage. StartCom did in fact have an explainer about this at one point, and their position was reasonable. Other CAs hid the cost in large part by charging a ridiculous amount for every cert issuance, despite many people never actually needing revocation services. StartCom let you have as many certs as you wanted after authentication for free, but if you lost one in such a way that you needed to make use of CRL/OCSP then you were charged. Users could pay that price, or alternatively invest in other ways to mitigate at their discretion rather then just getting charged no matter what. If StartCom had survived until now, or if someone else adopted their model, then I'd expect at this point they'd make use of modern techniques like OCSP Must-Staple/Expect-Staple, CAA, CT, etc. by default, and in turn that problem would be solved at no cost. >IMO, just like one of those schemes where you don't pay to get in, but you have to pay to get out. This is completely ridiculous. Nothing inherently made anyone lose private keys. Even Heartbleed didn't defeat someone using an HSM for example. Nor would everyone who lost a private key need try to publicly revoke (to the extent that would even work). Given the cost tradeoffs this was one particular standards design failure that has been and remains wrong to make into some general insurance vs letting individuals have the freedom to deal with it as needed and/or having the standard itself fixed. ---- 1: https://scotthelme.co.uk/revocation-is-broken/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/revocation-is-broken/

by xoa 9y ago

yuhong 9y ago

Thinking about it, we are lucky Debian moved to Gandi instead of StartCom when they ditched the SPI CA.

lwf 9y ago
Gandi's been a long-time supporter of Debian[1], providing preferred pricing (their best "bulk rates") for years. I assume the CA migration was also donated. I'm personally quite glad the SPI CA is gone, and that we removed CACert[2][3]; stopped a lot of "works on my machine" confusion, and made the project more welcoming to people not already running a Debian derivative. [1]: https://www.gandi.net/supports/debian/ https://www.gandi.net/supports/debian/ [2]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=718434 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=718434 [3]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ca-certificates/+bug/1258286 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ca-certificates/+b...

blibble 9y ago

they were a pain in the ass I had paid them for more than 5 years to provide a cert for my hobbyist website, then one day on a random subdomain decided that it was an 'organisation' and started demanding more money to verify this organisation, when there was no real organisation at all

ivanr 9y ago

You're forgetting that they had a charge for revocation, which was also automated. Even after Heartbleed, they refused to revoke the potentially compromised certificates without being paid. They also advertised their certificates as 100% free, even though they clearly weren't (because of the revocation charges). The certificates were not free for commercial purposes either. IMO, just like one of those schemes where you don't pay to get in, but you have to pay to get out. It's a shame, because they could have achieved a market share similar to Let's Encrypt, if only they had played their cards slightly differently.

xoa 9y ago
>You're forgetting that they had a charge for revocation, which was also automated. I did not forget that, I was just talking about the authentication and certificate issuance side. But though it didn't fall under the umbrella of authentication it is something that actually cost real money at that point. You misunderstood the situation and how revocation functioned in a way that's extremely important (since it's finally getting fixed but the improvements could use more widespread deployment). The original certificate revocation mechanisms, CRL and OCSP, are and always have been completely broken in terms of fundamental scaling and failure modes. Scott Helme just did an excellent summary on the situation and upcoming developments [1] which I strongly encourage you to read, but in essence due to the way they work seriously offering CRL/OCSP (as in, in a way that won't instantly die when someone breaths on it hard) services and adding certs to them requires significant distributed infrastructure, which has not always been cheap. They were bad approaches even with that though due to other practical failure modes that were beyond a CA's control anyway. Both stink to the point that many (most? all?) operating systems/applications/browsers just soft fail by default or even ignore them entirely. "Revocation" for the wider web has largely been a mirage. StartCom did in fact have an explainer about this at one point, and their position was reasonable. Other CAs hid the cost in large part by charging a ridiculous amount for every cert issuance, despite many people never actually needing revocation services. StartCom let you have as many certs as you wanted after authentication for free, but if you lost one in such a way that you needed to make use of CRL/OCSP then you were charged. Users could pay that price, or alternatively invest in other ways to mitigate at their discretion rather then just getting charged no matter what. If StartCom had survived until now, or if someone else adopted their model, then I'd expect at this point they'd make use of modern techniques like OCSP Must-Staple/Expect-Staple, CAA, CT, etc. by default, and in turn that problem would be solved at no cost. >IMO, just like one of those schemes where you don't pay to get in, but you have to pay to get out. This is completely ridiculous. Nothing inherently made anyone lose private keys. Even Heartbleed didn't defeat someone using an HSM for example. Nor would everyone who lost a private key need try to publicly revoke (to the extent that would even work). Given the cost tradeoffs this was one particular standards design failure that has been and remains wrong to make into some general insurance vs letting individuals have the freedom to deal with it as needed and/or having the standard itself fixed. ---- 1: https://scotthelme.co.uk/revocation-is-broken/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/revocation-is-broken/