10 ms·

Digicert Withdraws from the CA Security Council

166 points by dokov 8y ago

JoshTriplett 8y ago
I'd be curious the real reasons for this, because the reasons listed in this press release sound like marketing-speak.
- raslah 8y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking as I read it.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  letsencrypt destroying their business model, they are trying to find new sources of income.
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    I didn't look in the last few months, but most definitely when I did last look the reality is that Let's Encrypt and the strongly related "HTTPS Everywhere" movement actually drove growth for the _entire CA industry_ This is undoubtedly at least in part due to a halo effect. If Alice and Bob have $0 Let's Encrypt certs for their blogs about, respectively, an obscure species of tree frog and restoring muscle cars, when Carol asks them if her new business "needs" an SSL certificate they are more likely to say "Yes" rather than "Not really" or "I don't know what that is". Even if most Carols use Let's Encrypt, any who don't are new customers for a commercial CA.
    - vbezhenar 8y ago
      I think that a lot of small customers moved from commercial CAs to letsencrypt. I don't even know a single reason not to use letsencrypt now. Sure, there will be new customers, but I'm not sure about old customers and it'll be worse as existing customers slowly would learn about free letsencrypt and migrate to it.
geofft 8y ago
Note that this is not the CA/Browser Forum, the usual industry association you hear about. The CA Security Council is a group of a small number of old-guard CAs, which has been notable recently for pushing a distinction between (automatic) domain validation, organizational validation, and Extended Validation, mostly as a response to Let's Encrypt. The "London Protocol" appears to be a proposal for formalizing the distinction between DV and OV + EV: https://casecurity.org/2018/06/27/the-london-protocol/ https://casecurity.org/2018/06/27/the-london-protocol/ If you look at this previous paper they (Entrust + Comodo) published, they're proposing that OV and EV certificates get padlocks and DV ones don't: https://casecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Incidence-of-Phishing-Among-DV-OV-and-EV-Websites-9-13-2017-short-ve....pdf https://casecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Incidence-... Or, in other words, you can't get a padlock from Let's Encrypt and you'll have to pay them for a padlock. Compare with Google's plan at https://blog.chromium.org/2018/05/evolving-chromes-security-indicators.html https://blog.chromium.org/2018/05/evolving-chromes-security-... which just drops the padlock for everyone, treats plaintext HTTP as affirmatively insecure, and stops pretending that paying money to a CA means that you're a morally upright website. A CA leaving the CASC seems like a good thing for the world.
- threeseed 8y ago
  It's an interesting question: is there value to certificate identity verification ? Apple's App Store for example demands that companies wanting to publish apps have to undergo a verification process using a DUNS number. And this has been useful for example in resolving trademark and DMCA disputes. But not really sure if it's improved security in any way.
  - geofft 8y ago
    Apple's case is a little different because it lets you publish native code on the phone. (You can argue that websites effectively also publish code, but the web sandbox is probably quite a bit stronger than the iOS one.) I don't think there's much advantage in knowing that you're some registered organization. It's pretty easy to register an organization - see e.g. https://stripe.ian.sh https://stripe.ian.sh , to which the CASC responded by proposing the rule "Applicants that have been in existence for less than 18 months are not eligible for EV certificates," as well as a requirement that the CA inspect your tax returns to make sure you're a bona-fide business. This is basically a losing game (losing for the CAs, because it won't work, and losing for the world, because startups can't get EV certificates and everyone else loses their privacy), hence my comment about validating that you're a morally upright website. It's the evil bit, except as a TLS extension. One thing that does have value, though, is making sure a website is the right website. It's perfectly fine for https://stripe.ian.sh https://stripe.ian.sh to have a cert as long as they don't get my https://stripe.com https://stripe.com credentials or cookies. On the cookie side, the browsers already solve this with the same-origin policy, so the hard part is just making sure that you don't enter usable login credentials on the wrong website (i.e., preventing phishing, which is the stated goal of CASC). There are pretty good solutions for this like FIDO/FIDO2 - in the future I'd like to see places like banks either giving you U2F security keys or letting you bring your security key in when you enroll for an account and activate it on their machine, because the FIDO protocol lets the security key participate in the same-origin policy. If I've enrolled my key with bankofamerica.com, and my login requires using a security key, I can't divulge usable credentials to bankofamerica-secure-login-trust-me.com. Relatedly, the same-origin policy doesn't (and can't) distinguish between the type of HTTPS you have or whether there's a verified organization name on the cert. It treats any HTTPS for the same domain as the same origin. So the browser makers have been pushing back against meaningful distinctions between DV, OV, and EV (and also against EV even having any costmetic distinctions), which is completely at odds with the CASC's strategy. Sucks for the CASC because it means a $0 Let's Encrypt certificate is as meaningful as a $300+ EV certificate, but I think the browser makers are right, here.
michaelbuckbee 8y ago
I have mixed feelings about all of this. The big philosophical divide is really around what you think a cert/https should mean. The one side (I'm summarizing here) says that HTTPS only means that the data transferred over the wire is secure and has nothing to do with authenticating that you're actually talking to the correct website. And that's correct, there are all sorts of MITM attacks, etc. that could be done and people shouldn't automatically trust that seeing a green lock means it's safe to put their password into a website. And that's correct. The other side says: nothing is 100% secure and security is all about defense in depth and these EV certs can be really helpful. Consider the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/ There is a whole cottage industry of unscrupulous advertisers who make their living off of scraping the look and feel of websites like the WashingtonPost, setting up a URL like washingtonpostnews.com and then making up a fake story about how the Rock was arrested because he had some special muscle growing formula on him that oh look they have a link to buy for only $15/mo. It's quite unlikely that an EV cert would be issued for washingtonpostnews.com and it doesn't seem crazy to think that there is some value in having the EV cert on the proper www.washingtonpost.com website. They'll also point out that even DV cert issuance pre LetsEncrypt was a mixed bag of good and bad. Some CA's wouldn't issue you a cert if it had certain habitually abused trademark names, etc. in it. You'd have to do more than just have an email address or a DNS entry for it. This is for terms like BMW, Tesla, Facebook, etc. and this practice legitimately tripped up (but likely didn't stop) a metric ton of phishing sites. I think LetsEncrypt is awesome and makes a ton of sense and probably has made the internet safer in general. But the general response to things like LetsEncrypt issuing upwards of 15,000 different certs for domains containing "paypal" [1] is that you should rely upon sending your browsing information to Google, Microsoft, etc. so that they can tell you "Warning this is a possible Phishing Site" [2] which worryingly seems like we've then replaced multiple CAs (which we thought were too centralized) with an even fewer number of browser vendors (which are even more centralized). 1 - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/14-766-lets-encrypt-ssl-certificates-issued-to-paypal-phishing-sites/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/14-766-lets-e... 2 - https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/static/faq.html https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/static/faq.html
- akerl_ 8y ago
zizek23 8y ago
The certificate system is broken. Technical people should not be promoting centralization, raising barriers to publishing and empowering middle men. That is not a technical solution, but behavior that favours business and vested interests. There is now a clear pattern of attempts to raise barriers and cede more control to actors in the middle. First it was de-legitimizing http, now its standard certs, then it will be 3 years. What's stopping this degenerating into an elaborate 'approval process' from a central authority in a few years which you pay dearly for, all in the name of security? This kind of control gives some the power and fig leaf of any 'arbritary process' to delegitimize and silence others.

166 points by dokov 8y ago

JoshTriplett 8y ago

I'd be curious the real reasons for this, because the reasons listed in this press release sound like marketing-speak.

raslah 8y ago
Exactly what I was thinking as I read it.
vbezhenar 8y ago
letsencrypt destroying their business model, they are trying to find new sources of income.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  I didn't look in the last few months, but most definitely when I did last look the reality is that Let's Encrypt and the strongly related "HTTPS Everywhere" movement actually drove growth for the _entire CA industry_ This is undoubtedly at least in part due to a halo effect. If Alice and Bob have $0 Let's Encrypt certs for their blogs about, respectively, an obscure species of tree frog and restoring muscle cars, when Carol asks them if her new business "needs" an SSL certificate they are more likely to say "Yes" rather than "Not really" or "I don't know what that is". Even if most Carols use Let's Encrypt, any who don't are new customers for a commercial CA.
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    I think that a lot of small customers moved from commercial CAs to letsencrypt. I don't even know a single reason not to use letsencrypt now. Sure, there will be new customers, but I'm not sure about old customers and it'll be worse as existing customers slowly would learn about free letsencrypt and migrate to it.

geofft 8y ago

Note that this is not the CA/Browser Forum, the usual industry association you hear about. The CA Security Council is a group of a small number of old-guard CAs, which has been notable recently for pushing a distinction between (automatic) domain validation, organizational validation, and Extended Validation, mostly as a response to Let's Encrypt. The "London Protocol" appears to be a proposal for formalizing the distinction between DV and OV + EV: https://casecurity.org/2018/06/27/the-london-protocol/ https://casecurity.org/2018/06/27/the-london-protocol/ If you look at this previous paper they (Entrust + Comodo) published, they're proposing that OV and EV certificates get padlocks and DV ones don't: https://casecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Incidence-of-Phishing-Among-DV-OV-and-EV-Websites-9-13-2017-short-ve....pdf https://casecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Incidence-... Or, in other words, you can't get a padlock from Let's Encrypt and you'll have to pay them for a padlock. Compare with Google's plan at https://blog.chromium.org/2018/05/evolving-chromes-security-indicators.html https://blog.chromium.org/2018/05/evolving-chromes-security-... which just drops the padlock for everyone, treats plaintext HTTP as affirmatively insecure, and stops pretending that paying money to a CA means that you're a morally upright website. A CA leaving the CASC seems like a good thing for the world.

threeseed 8y ago
It's an interesting question: is there value to certificate identity verification ? Apple's App Store for example demands that companies wanting to publish apps have to undergo a verification process using a DUNS number. And this has been useful for example in resolving trademark and DMCA disputes. But not really sure if it's improved security in any way.
- geofft 8y ago
  Apple's case is a little different because it lets you publish native code on the phone. (You can argue that websites effectively also publish code, but the web sandbox is probably quite a bit stronger than the iOS one.) I don't think there's much advantage in knowing that you're some registered organization. It's pretty easy to register an organization - see e.g. https://stripe.ian.sh https://stripe.ian.sh , to which the CASC responded by proposing the rule "Applicants that have been in existence for less than 18 months are not eligible for EV certificates," as well as a requirement that the CA inspect your tax returns to make sure you're a bona-fide business. This is basically a losing game (losing for the CAs, because it won't work, and losing for the world, because startups can't get EV certificates and everyone else loses their privacy), hence my comment about validating that you're a morally upright website. It's the evil bit, except as a TLS extension. One thing that does have value, though, is making sure a website is the right website. It's perfectly fine for https://stripe.ian.sh https://stripe.ian.sh to have a cert as long as they don't get my https://stripe.com https://stripe.com credentials or cookies. On the cookie side, the browsers already solve this with the same-origin policy, so the hard part is just making sure that you don't enter usable login credentials on the wrong website (i.e., preventing phishing, which is the stated goal of CASC). There are pretty good solutions for this like FIDO/FIDO2 - in the future I'd like to see places like banks either giving you U2F security keys or letting you bring your security key in when you enroll for an account and activate it on their machine, because the FIDO protocol lets the security key participate in the same-origin policy. If I've enrolled my key with bankofamerica.com, and my login requires using a security key, I can't divulge usable credentials to bankofamerica-secure-login-trust-me.com. Relatedly, the same-origin policy doesn't (and can't) distinguish between the type of HTTPS you have or whether there's a verified organization name on the cert. It treats any HTTPS for the same domain as the same origin. So the browser makers have been pushing back against meaningful distinctions between DV, OV, and EV (and also against EV even having any costmetic distinctions), which is completely at odds with the CASC's strategy. Sucks for the CASC because it means a $0 Let's Encrypt certificate is as meaningful as a $300+ EV certificate, but I think the browser makers are right, here.

michaelbuckbee 8y ago

I have mixed feelings about all of this. The big philosophical divide is really around what you think a cert/https should mean. The one side (I'm summarizing here) says that HTTPS only means that the data transferred over the wire is secure and has nothing to do with authenticating that you're actually talking to the correct website. And that's correct, there are all sorts of MITM attacks, etc. that could be done and people shouldn't automatically trust that seeing a green lock means it's safe to put their password into a website. And that's correct. The other side says: nothing is 100% secure and security is all about defense in depth and these EV certs can be really helpful. Consider the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/ There is a whole cottage industry of unscrupulous advertisers who make their living off of scraping the look and feel of websites like the WashingtonPost, setting up a URL like washingtonpostnews.com and then making up a fake story about how the Rock was arrested because he had some special muscle growing formula on him that oh look they have a link to buy for only $15/mo. It's quite unlikely that an EV cert would be issued for washingtonpostnews.com and it doesn't seem crazy to think that there is some value in having the EV cert on the proper www.washingtonpost.com website. They'll also point out that even DV cert issuance pre LetsEncrypt was a mixed bag of good and bad. Some CA's wouldn't issue you a cert if it had certain habitually abused trademark names, etc. in it. You'd have to do more than just have an email address or a DNS entry for it. This is for terms like BMW, Tesla, Facebook, etc. and this practice legitimately tripped up (but likely didn't stop) a metric ton of phishing sites. I think LetsEncrypt is awesome and makes a ton of sense and probably has made the internet safer in general. But the general response to things like LetsEncrypt issuing upwards of 15,000 different certs for domains containing "paypal" [1] is that you should rely upon sending your browsing information to Google, Microsoft, etc. so that they can tell you "Warning this is a possible Phishing Site" [2] which worryingly seems like we've then replaced multiple CAs (which we thought were too centralized) with an even fewer number of browser vendors (which are even more centralized). 1 - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/14-766-lets-encrypt-ssl-certificates-issued-to-paypal-phishing-sites/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/14-766-lets-e... 2 - https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/static/faq.html https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/static/faq.html

akerl_ 8y ago

zizek23 8y ago

The certificate system is broken. Technical people should not be promoting centralization, raising barriers to publishing and empowering middle men. That is not a technical solution, but behavior that favours business and vested interests. There is now a clear pattern of attempts to raise barriers and cede more control to actors in the middle. First it was de-legitimizing http, now its standard certs, then it will be 3 years. What's stopping this degenerating into an elaborate 'approval process' from a central authority in a few years which you pay dearly for, all in the name of security? This kind of control gives some the power and fig leaf of any 'arbritary process' to delegitimize and silence others.