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> It's quite unlikely that an EV cert would be issued for washingtonpostnews.com I think the https://stripe.ian.sh https://stripe.ian.sh story argues otherwise

by geofft 8y ago

> It's quite unlikely that an EV cert would be issued for washingtonpostnews.com I think the https://stripe.ian.sh https://stripe.ian.sh story argues otherwise - it would be pretty easy to start an LLC named "Washington Post News" in some other state and have the government agencies be fine with that. (In fact, for the specific case of Washington Posts, half of all US states have a city/town named "Washington.") Also the more practical problem with the Washington Post is the existence of the Washington Times, established in 1982 by Sun Myung Moon well before the web or SSL.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
This is one example, sure, but EV does, in general, work. And the reason why is not because it's an ironclad indefeatable process for proving you are legitimately a major trustworthy party: It's a frustrating pile of hoops to jump through. The arcane and archaic nature of getting an EV gates out malicious actors pretty effectively. If you go through all of the process to get an EV (often involving scanned/faxed documents and phone calls), and then do something malicious with it, you're going to end up burning it (getting it revoked, generally, though, obviously the nightmare of revocation being still effectively broken comes into play) or even just the domain blocked by web filters and marked unsafe in the Safe Browsing list, setting you back to square one. All an EV vendor has to do for this to work is remember not to issue an EV again to anyone who uses the same credentials or proofs, whether or not they verified them with other authorities. Whereas a domain-validated cert can, of course, be automated (as can domain purchasing), meaning DV certs can scale. As with spam, malware, etc., you just publish it in volume, keep changing addresses, content, etc. to evade automated filtering, and press on. Meanwhile, if someone gets a Washington Post News EV, and starts impersonating WaPo, they only have one target to shut down a malicious actor. I could give non-CA-related examples, but I've come to the belief recently that security and trust is often a matter of creating solutions which don't scale.
- geofft 8y ago
  https://stripe.ian.sh https://stripe.ian.sh addresses this objection: > First, from incorporation to issuance of the EV certificate, I spent less than an hour of my time and about $177. $100 of this was to incorporate the company, and $77 was for the certificate. It took about 48 hours from incorporation to the issuance of the certificate. > The primary point raised by advocates of extended validation is that obtaining EV certificates would leave behind a signifigant paper trail of the bad actor's identity. However, there is minimal individual identity verification in the process. Dun & Bradstreet1 is the only entity who attempted to verify my identity, and did so with a few trivial identity verification questions. Purchasing identities with answers to common verification questions is neither hard nor expensive. > Otherwise, there was no attempt at identity verification from the state of Kentucky or the registered agent I used in the process. This is typical of company formation in the United States. Given the use of a registered agent, and given that registered agents are a pretty common thing, I don't think that anything is actually being burned here, unless you want to say that any registered agent who incorporates a phishing company gets all their other companies banned. Which, like the CASC's "You can't have EV if you haven't existed for 18 months" suggestion, will technically work at the cost of making EV useless. Also, a lot of attacks don't care that they're burning credentials anyway. You don't need to spoof MyEtherWallet more than once to walk off with hundreds of thousands in Ethereum. You don't need to spoof the Washington Post more than once to spread fake news 48 hours before a presidential election.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Your first quote proves my point: $177 times... how many malicious attempts? That isn't a cost that scales, because in the case of a multitude of malicious activities online, the number of attempts, at $177 a try, would not be worth it. You are using an example of singular high profile attempts, such as "I incorporated a company for this demo" or "I am a state actor trying to derail a Presidential election". While you fail to recognize that EV would likely protect users from 99% of attacks caused by malicious actors spoofing domains, which could trivially be domain validated otherwise. I find this a particular trend amongst security discussion, particularly here on HN: Focus on the most possibly sophisticated and capable attack, while ignoring that tens of millions of users are afflicted by pretty rudimentary attacks that are more or less automated on a daily basis. If EV were to solely succeed in ensuring an actual human had to go through the registration process, it would almost certainly be worth it. Additionally, as a point of note, EV certificates could be made vastly more effective by easily addressing your concerns: Raise the price of EV certs significantly, which CAs would be more than happy to do, and ensure you needed to go to one of the upper levels of the CA system (say, having to go to Comodo for them, rather than your Trustico nonsense) to reduce the number of parties which could issue them as much as possible, and raise the mutual requirements between them to issue them.
    - geofft 8y ago
      Our scales of economics must be totally off. I'd argue that an attack that costs $177 a try is entirely scalable - presumably you should gain more than $177 in value from a single spoofed domain, right? I do agree that if $177 is too high a cost, then the problem is solvable by just setting a price floor on certificates (modulo CA/Browser Forum antitrust concerns). I do not think that solution is likely to work, except at a price point at which EV becomes unusably expensive for legitimate users. EV only works if we are reasonably confident that users will refuse to enter credentials into a site without EV. As EV stands today - with EV costing less than $177 for a legitimate user (because they've already incorporated) - that isn't happening. Making EV harder to acquire doesn't actually solve phishing. That's my objection. Sure, you can make it harder to get an EV cert for a phishing site, but, so what? (A better solution that actually works against rudimentary attacks is to just give everyone a U2F security key.)
nailer 8y ago
That's a flaw (specific to the US, where the same name can be registered in different states) but DigiCert (the subject of the article) is proposing remedies to fix it.

by geofft 8y ago

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

This is one example, sure, but EV does, in general, work. And the reason why is not because it's an ironclad indefeatable process for proving you are legitimately a major trustworthy party: It's a frustrating pile of hoops to jump through. The arcane and archaic nature of getting an EV gates out malicious actors pretty effectively. If you go through all of the process to get an EV (often involving scanned/faxed documents and phone calls), and then do something malicious with it, you're going to end up burning it (getting it revoked, generally, though, obviously the nightmare of revocation being still effectively broken comes into play) or even just the domain blocked by web filters and marked unsafe in the Safe Browsing list, setting you back to square one. All an EV vendor has to do for this to work is remember not to issue an EV again to anyone who uses the same credentials or proofs, whether or not they verified them with other authorities. Whereas a domain-validated cert can, of course, be automated (as can domain purchasing), meaning DV certs can scale. As with spam, malware, etc., you just publish it in volume, keep changing addresses, content, etc. to evade automated filtering, and press on. Meanwhile, if someone gets a Washington Post News EV, and starts impersonating WaPo, they only have one target to shut down a malicious actor. I could give non-CA-related examples, but I've come to the belief recently that security and trust is often a matter of creating solutions which don't scale.

geofft 8y ago
https://stripe.ian.sh https://stripe.ian.sh addresses this objection: > First, from incorporation to issuance of the EV certificate, I spent less than an hour of my time and about $177. $100 of this was to incorporate the company, and $77 was for the certificate. It took about 48 hours from incorporation to the issuance of the certificate. > The primary point raised by advocates of extended validation is that obtaining EV certificates would leave behind a signifigant paper trail of the bad actor's identity. However, there is minimal individual identity verification in the process. Dun & Bradstreet1 is the only entity who attempted to verify my identity, and did so with a few trivial identity verification questions. Purchasing identities with answers to common verification questions is neither hard nor expensive. > Otherwise, there was no attempt at identity verification from the state of Kentucky or the registered agent I used in the process. This is typical of company formation in the United States. Given the use of a registered agent, and given that registered agents are a pretty common thing, I don't think that anything is actually being burned here, unless you want to say that any registered agent who incorporates a phishing company gets all their other companies banned. Which, like the CASC's "You can't have EV if you haven't existed for 18 months" suggestion, will technically work at the cost of making EV useless. Also, a lot of attacks don't care that they're burning credentials anyway. You don't need to spoof MyEtherWallet more than once to walk off with hundreds of thousands in Ethereum. You don't need to spoof the Washington Post more than once to spread fake news 48 hours before a presidential election.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Your first quote proves my point: $177 times... how many malicious attempts? That isn't a cost that scales, because in the case of a multitude of malicious activities online, the number of attempts, at $177 a try, would not be worth it. You are using an example of singular high profile attempts, such as "I incorporated a company for this demo" or "I am a state actor trying to derail a Presidential election". While you fail to recognize that EV would likely protect users from 99% of attacks caused by malicious actors spoofing domains, which could trivially be domain validated otherwise. I find this a particular trend amongst security discussion, particularly here on HN: Focus on the most possibly sophisticated and capable attack, while ignoring that tens of millions of users are afflicted by pretty rudimentary attacks that are more or less automated on a daily basis. If EV were to solely succeed in ensuring an actual human had to go through the registration process, it would almost certainly be worth it. Additionally, as a point of note, EV certificates could be made vastly more effective by easily addressing your concerns: Raise the price of EV certs significantly, which CAs would be more than happy to do, and ensure you needed to go to one of the upper levels of the CA system (say, having to go to Comodo for them, rather than your Trustico nonsense) to reduce the number of parties which could issue them as much as possible, and raise the mutual requirements between them to issue them.
  - geofft 8y ago
    Our scales of economics must be totally off. I'd argue that an attack that costs $177 a try is entirely scalable - presumably you should gain more than $177 in value from a single spoofed domain, right? I do agree that if $177 is too high a cost, then the problem is solvable by just setting a price floor on certificates (modulo CA/Browser Forum antitrust concerns). I do not think that solution is likely to work, except at a price point at which EV becomes unusably expensive for legitimate users. EV only works if we are reasonably confident that users will refuse to enter credentials into a site without EV. As EV stands today - with EV costing less than $177 for a legitimate user (because they've already incorporated) - that isn't happening. Making EV harder to acquire doesn't actually solve phishing. That's my objection. Sure, you can make it harder to get an EV cert for a phishing site, but, so what? (A better solution that actually works against rudimentary attacks is to just give everyone a U2F security key.)

nailer 8y ago

That's a flaw (specific to the US, where the same name can be registered in different states) but DigiCert (the subject of the article) is proposing remedies to fix it.