8 ms·

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

by 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.
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    I hadn't actually even _heard_ of "OV" before. Googling... I still can't tell what the difference between it and EV is supposed to be, other than how much someone paid a CA.
    - karlshea 8y ago
      OV is EV where you also get the business name in the URL bar.
      - jrochkind1 8y ago
        Uh... this is crazy. Are you suggesting that they both verify the same thing (that a particular legal entity is the owner of the cert, verified by a certain CA), so convey the same security-related information to a client... but with one of them, you pay extra to a CA to get a name in the URL bar? If the browsers aren't getting a cut of this fee to have _their_ software put someone's name in the URL bar... they're really missing out! It's browser software that's providing the "value" to the person paying the fee, but the CA apparently obtaining the fee, and none of it seems of any value to the user... what am I missing? I hadn't realized the cert market had gotten _this_ screwy.
        geofft 8y ago
        Roughly, yes. I believe that the CA/Browser Forum has extensive documents on what passes for EV (and, notably, you have to be a registered business/organization for EV), and the only rule for OV is that you have to "implement a process" that makes sure you have "verified" the information but doesn't care how stringent you are, so in theory the "extended" part actually means something.
        tialaramex 8y ago
        What the Commercial public Certificate Authorities wanted, more than ten years ago, was a change to browser UI to make it easier to sell the better (more expensive) certificates to their clients ("subscribers" in technical speak). They wanted the Subject Organisation shown prominently. What the browsers wanted was for all the Public Certificate Authorities to get their shit together and do a better job. They met and discussed at length how both sides could get most of what they wanted. The immediate results were twofold: 1. New versions of popular browsers (all for desktop operating systems because this is over a decade ago) added the "green bar" showing the Subject Organisation for certificates which met some agreed criteria. 2. The Commercial CAs all agreed to obey these "EV SSL Certificate Guidelines". https://cabforum.org/extended-validation/ https://cabforum.org/extended-validation/ This is a pretty good deal for the CAs, they get a new product they can sell for a premium price, the browsers do a bunch of extra engineering work. Many feared this was creating a something like a treadmill, they predicted that soon "EV certificates" would be cheapened and a new "Even more Extended Validation" would be needed, with correspondingly higher prices just to get back to reasonable trust and the cycle would repeat forever. But there's two unexpected consequences. Humans like socialising, so the meetings continued, the CA/Browser Forum standing meeting is now important across the industry and it set not just these "EV SSL" guidelines but eventually the Baseline Requirements for all "SSL certificates". https://cabforum.org/baseline-requirements-documents/ https://cabforum.org/baseline-requirements-documents/ Also, desktop browsers ceased to be as important because everybody now owns a mobile phone, and the quite different UI in a phone browser lets them reconsider what is important. An Android phone doesn't show Organisation info prominently, just the domain name. So in the end mostly the browsers got what they wanted more than the commercial CAs. The CAB BRs have allowed them to gradually tighten things up, the treadmill runs in reverse - so that today your $0 Let's Encrypt cert is produced under more stringent conditions than were needed for the $$$ Extended Validation certificates from 2007, and the EV UI is less important though it still exists in popular desktop browsers. Fixing the problem is arguably better for at least two of the big browser vendors than just getting a cut of the money, that is Mozilla and Google. Both need a trustworthy web, Mozilla as part of their charitable purpose, and Google as a direct need of their business, so for them improving DV over ten years was much better than making a few grand off the higher priced certificates AND it avoided the inevitable conflict of interests taint.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  It's an interesting question: is there value to certificate identity verification ? This is interesting to me, in part because I've argued again and again against the idea that HTTPS must involve verification of the legal identity of the operator of a website, and for many years I always had people push back and insist that the encryption part was only a tiny, almost worthless portion of HTTPS -- identity verification was the real benefit. I even had people claim that encryption without identity verification was actually worse than no encryption at all! It was as if they lived in a completely different world than I did, where eavesdropping/recording of unencrypted transmissions was incredibly rare and not worth worrying about, but ten trillion googolplexes of HTTPS spoofers were lurking around every corner. Now, of course, people have done a complete 180 and realized that the encryption is the important part, and the identity verification is at best a distant secondary or even tertiary concern. Identity verification doesn't significantly add anything to end-user security; the avenues for phishing and other malicious uses of the web rely on a general public so technologically illiterate that prominently-displayed identity verification is probably several hundred steps down the list of the top thousand things you can do to protect average users, if it even cracks the list at all. Which is probably why all the prominent identity display stuff seems to be phasing out in browsers; the vendors have recognized that it doesn't contribute useful additional security (and some notable cases have shown that it's easy enough, if you want, to spoof even "verified" identities).
  - thristian 8y ago
    It's true that unauthenticated, encrypted communication is an improvement over unencrypted communication, because it rules out pure eavesdropping attacks. The question is, what's the risk of eavesdropping compared to MITM? Once upon a time, "using the Internet" meant shared-medium Ethernet, and the only choke-points were things like routers (too stupid to be nefarious) and ISPs (who were too busy). These days, nearly everything is star-topography, and one of the biggest potential bad actors (the NSA) gets Internet backbone ISPs to silently do their bidding. Sure, phishing is still a thing and identity verification doesn't solve that, but at least promoting it requires continual, repeated effort. You can't just add a black box to a network closet somewhere and come back a week later to pick up all the intercepted data.
  - 8y ago
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  Of course there is. If you don't care who you're talking to, it doesn't matter if your message is encrypted. The anonymous mystery person who decrypts your HTTPS connection might be the same person who would have MITM'd your HTTP connection. The entire concept of encryption presupposes that you care who you're talking to. If you don't, then why not just broadcast your message in the clear?
  - beefsack 8y ago
    It's FUD to say encryption doesn't matter without authentication - unencrypted traffic is eavesdroppable by default and exposes you much more broadly than just being exposed to one potential bad actor. Of course using authentication is vastly superior, but lacking it doesn't render encryption useless.
    - azernik 8y ago
      Without authentication, a man in the middle is indistinguishable from your intended target, so you are exposed to anyone on the network path.
      - laumars 8y ago
        Lets be clear, we're not talking about self signed certs here. An attacker would still need to prove they have ownership of the domain to get a non-EV CA-signed certificate which makes a MITM attack highly challenging to the point of being down right impractical to accomplish successfully. Its not simply not a large enough threat level* to worry about since it would require either DNS spoofing (in which case why bother with a MITM anyway since you now have ownership of the traffic you can just steal people's cookies and get log in directly), or access to the domain owners email (in which case gaining access to their infrastructure becomes significantly easier depending on where it is hosted) or attacking the clients PC to install your own CA certificate (in which case yiu might as well just install a RAT or keylogger and capture inputs for all websites and thus save yourself the trouble of MITMing only one specific single domain). * I mean if your business is online banking then it's a little different. But for 99.9% websites out there having EV isnt necessary.
- markonen 8y ago
  My company pays for an EV certificate, and we pin our clients to expect EV certificates in the corresponding domain names. This gets us most of the benefits of standard certificate pinning without coupling us to any specific private key or certificate vendor. The theory is that it’s hard(er) to fraudulently get an EV certificate issued, although—having gone through the process—it does not strike me as super secure against a determined adversary.
  - moju 8y ago
    https://stripe.ian.sh/ https://stripe.ian.sh/
    - markonen 8y ago
      I should clarify that we are not pinning the organization information in the certificate or relying on it; just the fact that it’s an EV certificate.
- nailer 8y ago
  Nearly every platform has something like EV - anyone can make a username or domain names that sounds official, some mechanism is needed to tie it to a real world identity. Email/GPG has services like keybase, Instagram has verified accounts, WhatsApp does too. Even bloggers who dislike checking organisations for certs (EV) do so from verified accounts - though Twitter mistakenly tried to tie it to both noteworthiness and ethics, which they're now trying to fix.
geofft 8y ago
Also - CASC member Entrust Datacard told Troy Hunt (the Have I Been Pwned guy) that the London Protocol meant that they were going to "phase out insecure DV certificates": https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1012190910254235649 https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1012190910254235649 CASC member GoDaddy cold-called a random musician with an HTTP site and told her the only way to avoid an SSL warning from Google would be to pay them $200+: https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.ann.925/posts/1740244236062908 https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.ann.925/posts/1740244236062... I can see why Digicert would want to run from the CASC and keep their reputation safe. (from Ryan Sleevi of Chrome's crypto team https://twitter.com/sleevi_/status/1012338888088719360 https://twitter.com/sleevi_/status/1012338888088719360 - searching for his other interactions with the CA Security Council is pretty enlightening too)
- hoppa_liza 8y ago
  Was it confirmed to be GoDaddy? That is dishonest marketing to say the least.
  - gpm 8y ago
    I assume it was edited in. But to be clear to future readers, the bracketed link in grandparent links to a tweet proving they did. A more direct link to where they admit it (and publicly try to fix the mistake) is this: https://twitter.com/perezbox/status/1011708133960536064 https://twitter.com/perezbox/status/1011708133960536064 They don't admit to a general pattern of mistakes like this there, they do say they will use this "as a learning opportunity for all our agents. Whether that is because this was genuinely a one off or because this is the only publicized example is unclear.
nailer 8y ago
> stops pretending that paying money to a CA means that you're a morally upright website. The rest of this is correct, but nobody is asserting EV means you're good, just that it means you are whoever you're verified to be. I.e. your cert has an Organisation field of 'Verified Org Inc' rather than a blank item like a DV cert has. DigiCert still very much supports EV, they just don't like how CASC is planning to do silly things like require you to be in business 3 years before getting verified.
thefounder 8y ago
How can they decide what certificate gets the padlock? It's really a browser decision, isn't it?
- tialaramex 8y ago
  Yes, three of the browsers are commercial products (albeit at zero dollar price), Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, Microsoft's IE/ Edge, so it's ultimately a commercial decision for those companies. The Mozilla Foundation on the other hand takes these decisions in public, m.d.s.policy is the newsgroup for security policy decisions, which ultimately mostly means stuff about SSL/TLS and these certificates.

by geofft 8y ago

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.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  I hadn't actually even _heard_ of "OV" before. Googling... I still can't tell what the difference between it and EV is supposed to be, other than how much someone paid a CA.
  - karlshea 8y ago
    OV is EV where you also get the business name in the URL bar.
    - jrochkind1 8y ago
      Uh... this is crazy. Are you suggesting that they both verify the same thing (that a particular legal entity is the owner of the cert, verified by a certain CA), so convey the same security-related information to a client... but with one of them, you pay extra to a CA to get a name in the URL bar? If the browsers aren't getting a cut of this fee to have _their_ software put someone's name in the URL bar... they're really missing out! It's browser software that's providing the "value" to the person paying the fee, but the CA apparently obtaining the fee, and none of it seems of any value to the user... what am I missing? I hadn't realized the cert market had gotten _this_ screwy.
      - geofft 8y ago
        Roughly, yes. I believe that the CA/Browser Forum has extensive documents on what passes for EV (and, notably, you have to be a registered business/organization for EV), and the only rule for OV is that you have to "implement a process" that makes sure you have "verified" the information but doesn't care how stringent you are, so in theory the "extended" part actually means something.
      - tialaramex 8y ago
        What the Commercial public Certificate Authorities wanted, more than ten years ago, was a change to browser UI to make it easier to sell the better (more expensive) certificates to their clients ("subscribers" in technical speak). They wanted the Subject Organisation shown prominently. What the browsers wanted was for all the Public Certificate Authorities to get their shit together and do a better job. They met and discussed at length how both sides could get most of what they wanted. The immediate results were twofold: 1. New versions of popular browsers (all for desktop operating systems because this is over a decade ago) added the "green bar" showing the Subject Organisation for certificates which met some agreed criteria. 2. The Commercial CAs all agreed to obey these "EV SSL Certificate Guidelines". https://cabforum.org/extended-validation/ https://cabforum.org/extended-validation/ This is a pretty good deal for the CAs, they get a new product they can sell for a premium price, the browsers do a bunch of extra engineering work. Many feared this was creating a something like a treadmill, they predicted that soon "EV certificates" would be cheapened and a new "Even more Extended Validation" would be needed, with correspondingly higher prices just to get back to reasonable trust and the cycle would repeat forever. But there's two unexpected consequences. Humans like socialising, so the meetings continued, the CA/Browser Forum standing meeting is now important across the industry and it set not just these "EV SSL" guidelines but eventually the Baseline Requirements for all "SSL certificates". https://cabforum.org/baseline-requirements-documents/ https://cabforum.org/baseline-requirements-documents/ Also, desktop browsers ceased to be as important because everybody now owns a mobile phone, and the quite different UI in a phone browser lets them reconsider what is important. An Android phone doesn't show Organisation info prominently, just the domain name. So in the end mostly the browsers got what they wanted more than the commercial CAs. The CAB BRs have allowed them to gradually tighten things up, the treadmill runs in reverse - so that today your $0 Let's Encrypt cert is produced under more stringent conditions than were needed for the $$$ Extended Validation certificates from 2007, and the EV UI is less important though it still exists in popular desktop browsers. Fixing the problem is arguably better for at least two of the big browser vendors than just getting a cut of the money, that is Mozilla and Google. Both need a trustworthy web, Mozilla as part of their charitable purpose, and Google as a direct need of their business, so for them improving DV over ten years was much better than making a few grand off the higher priced certificates AND it avoided the inevitable conflict of interests taint.
ubernostrum 8y ago
It's an interesting question: is there value to certificate identity verification ? This is interesting to me, in part because I've argued again and again against the idea that HTTPS must involve verification of the legal identity of the operator of a website, and for many years I always had people push back and insist that the encryption part was only a tiny, almost worthless portion of HTTPS -- identity verification was the real benefit. I even had people claim that encryption without identity verification was actually worse than no encryption at all! It was as if they lived in a completely different world than I did, where eavesdropping/recording of unencrypted transmissions was incredibly rare and not worth worrying about, but ten trillion googolplexes of HTTPS spoofers were lurking around every corner. Now, of course, people have done a complete 180 and realized that the encryption is the important part, and the identity verification is at best a distant secondary or even tertiary concern. Identity verification doesn't significantly add anything to end-user security; the avenues for phishing and other malicious uses of the web rely on a general public so technologically illiterate that prominently-displayed identity verification is probably several hundred steps down the list of the top thousand things you can do to protect average users, if it even cracks the list at all. Which is probably why all the prominent identity display stuff seems to be phasing out in browsers; the vendors have recognized that it doesn't contribute useful additional security (and some notable cases have shown that it's easy enough, if you want, to spoof even "verified" identities).
- thristian 8y ago
  It's true that unauthenticated, encrypted communication is an improvement over unencrypted communication, because it rules out pure eavesdropping attacks. The question is, what's the risk of eavesdropping compared to MITM? Once upon a time, "using the Internet" meant shared-medium Ethernet, and the only choke-points were things like routers (too stupid to be nefarious) and ISPs (who were too busy). These days, nearly everything is star-topography, and one of the biggest potential bad actors (the NSA) gets Internet backbone ISPs to silently do their bidding. Sure, phishing is still a thing and identity verification doesn't solve that, but at least promoting it requires continual, repeated effort. You can't just add a black box to a network closet somewhere and come back a week later to pick up all the intercepted data.
- 8y ago
snowwrestler 8y ago
Of course there is. If you don't care who you're talking to, it doesn't matter if your message is encrypted. The anonymous mystery person who decrypts your HTTPS connection might be the same person who would have MITM'd your HTTP connection. The entire concept of encryption presupposes that you care who you're talking to. If you don't, then why not just broadcast your message in the clear?
- beefsack 8y ago
  It's FUD to say encryption doesn't matter without authentication - unencrypted traffic is eavesdroppable by default and exposes you much more broadly than just being exposed to one potential bad actor. Of course using authentication is vastly superior, but lacking it doesn't render encryption useless.
  - azernik 8y ago
    Without authentication, a man in the middle is indistinguishable from your intended target, so you are exposed to anyone on the network path.
    - laumars 8y ago
      Lets be clear, we're not talking about self signed certs here. An attacker would still need to prove they have ownership of the domain to get a non-EV CA-signed certificate which makes a MITM attack highly challenging to the point of being down right impractical to accomplish successfully. Its not simply not a large enough threat level* to worry about since it would require either DNS spoofing (in which case why bother with a MITM anyway since you now have ownership of the traffic you can just steal people's cookies and get log in directly), or access to the domain owners email (in which case gaining access to their infrastructure becomes significantly easier depending on where it is hosted) or attacking the clients PC to install your own CA certificate (in which case yiu might as well just install a RAT or keylogger and capture inputs for all websites and thus save yourself the trouble of MITMing only one specific single domain). * I mean if your business is online banking then it's a little different. But for 99.9% websites out there having EV isnt necessary.
markonen 8y ago
My company pays for an EV certificate, and we pin our clients to expect EV certificates in the corresponding domain names. This gets us most of the benefits of standard certificate pinning without coupling us to any specific private key or certificate vendor. The theory is that it’s hard(er) to fraudulently get an EV certificate issued, although—having gone through the process—it does not strike me as super secure against a determined adversary.
- moju 8y ago
  https://stripe.ian.sh/ https://stripe.ian.sh/
  - markonen 8y ago
    I should clarify that we are not pinning the organization information in the certificate or relying on it; just the fact that it’s an EV certificate.
nailer 8y ago
Nearly every platform has something like EV - anyone can make a username or domain names that sounds official, some mechanism is needed to tie it to a real world identity. Email/GPG has services like keybase, Instagram has verified accounts, WhatsApp does too. Even bloggers who dislike checking organisations for certs (EV) do so from verified accounts - though Twitter mistakenly tried to tie it to both noteworthiness and ethics, which they're now trying to fix.

geofft 8y ago

Also - CASC member Entrust Datacard told Troy Hunt (the Have I Been Pwned guy) that the London Protocol meant that they were going to "phase out insecure DV certificates": https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1012190910254235649 https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1012190910254235649 CASC member GoDaddy cold-called a random musician with an HTTP site and told her the only way to avoid an SSL warning from Google would be to pay them $200+: https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.ann.925/posts/1740244236062908 https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.ann.925/posts/1740244236062... I can see why Digicert would want to run from the CASC and keep their reputation safe. (from Ryan Sleevi of Chrome's crypto team https://twitter.com/sleevi_/status/1012338888088719360 https://twitter.com/sleevi_/status/1012338888088719360 - searching for his other interactions with the CA Security Council is pretty enlightening too)

hoppa_liza 8y ago
Was it confirmed to be GoDaddy? That is dishonest marketing to say the least.
- gpm 8y ago
  I assume it was edited in. But to be clear to future readers, the bracketed link in grandparent links to a tweet proving they did. A more direct link to where they admit it (and publicly try to fix the mistake) is this: https://twitter.com/perezbox/status/1011708133960536064 https://twitter.com/perezbox/status/1011708133960536064 They don't admit to a general pattern of mistakes like this there, they do say they will use this "as a learning opportunity for all our agents. Whether that is because this was genuinely a one off or because this is the only publicized example is unclear.

nailer 8y ago

> stops pretending that paying money to a CA means that you're a morally upright website. The rest of this is correct, but nobody is asserting EV means you're good, just that it means you are whoever you're verified to be. I.e. your cert has an Organisation field of 'Verified Org Inc' rather than a blank item like a DV cert has. DigiCert still very much supports EV, they just don't like how CASC is planning to do silly things like require you to be in business 3 years before getting verified.

thefounder 8y ago

How can they decide what certificate gets the padlock? It's really a browser decision, isn't it?

tialaramex 8y ago
Yes, three of the browsers are commercial products (albeit at zero dollar price), Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, Microsoft's IE/ Edge, so it's ultimately a commercial decision for those companies. The Mozilla Foundation on the other hand takes these decisions in public, m.d.s.policy is the newsgroup for security policy decisions, which ultimately mostly means stuff about SSL/TLS and these certificates.