14 ms·

Distrust of Symantec TLS Certificates

307 points by asymmetric 8y ago

AndrewDucker 8y ago
Chrome doing likewise: https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec-pki-immediate.html https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec...
- kzrdude 8y ago
  Chrome did this first, so any wide effect (in yall's organsiations) should already have been noticed by now, due to this.
  - oasisbob 8y ago
    As I understand it, Chrome and Firefox are both operating under the same policies with about the same timetables. Full distrust doesn't come until Firefox 63 / Chrome 70 - neither of which are stable releases yet. The limited distrust (for older certs issued prior to June 2016) was activated in Firefox 60 and Chrome 66 much earlier this year.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      That's factually incorrect. Google blacklisted ALL Symantec certificates since Chrome 66, in April. The roadmap announced the change for October but they did it 6 months earlier, ignoring their own roadmap. As the OP says, organizations using Symantec have already been hit very hard, by surprise.
      - oasisbob 8y ago
        Do you have a source for that? Google's KB articles still reference Chrome 70 [1], and I can't find another reference to this anywhere else. Paypal.com is still operating with a Symantec signed cert - issued by "Symantec Class 3 EV SSL CA - G3". Works fine in Chrome 68. (and not in Firefox with the security.pki.distrust_ca_policy override set) [1] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7662561?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7662561?hl=en
        user5994461 8y ago
        I worked at a large company whose sole supplier was Symantec. Everything has been blacklisted since April.
        brazzledazzle 8y ago
        Similar environment except for the blacklisting didn’t happen to us. Any chance some wires were crossed and someone pushed out a policy explicitly distrusting the CA?
        SpikeDad 8y ago
        I think a source implies an authoritative source and not an anecdotal source.
        zachberger 8y ago
        Yeah. Not true. I visit many sites with Symantec certs in Chrome 69 that don't work in Chrome 70
      - Enverex 8y ago
        This isn't true. Chrome itself proves this when loading a site affected by wave 2 of the distrust: "The SSL certificate used to load resources from https://(domain) https://(domain) will be distrusted in M70. Once distrusted, users will be prevented from loading these resources. See https://g.co/chrome/symantecpkicerts https://g.co/chrome/symantecpkicerts for more information." Everything was being done in 2 waves. First wave was Chrome 66, second wave is Chrome 70. See Google's link above for the specifics. Source: Chrome's own warnings and that I work for a business that deals heavily in SSL sales.
- Jaepa 8y ago
  Apple¹ and Mircosoft² are doing the same. Additionally anything that uses Chromium's trustlists (Vivaldi, Electron, etc) will also distrust old Symantec & co's certs. 1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208860 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208860 2: https://knowledge.digicert.com/alerts/ALERT2562.html https://knowledge.digicert.com/alerts/ALERT2562.html EDIT: Its also worth mentioning that this isn't just limited Symantec certs but also will include GeoTrust, thawte, & VeriSign certs. Symantec's cert business has now been taken over by DigiCert so there is a means for valid reassurance. EDIT2: Also it will effect RapidSSL. Totally forgot about them.
natch 8y ago
When such an error (see article) is presented, it’s a teachable moment not only for the user surfing the site, but also for the owner of the site who is going to field questions about the error message from users. It would be great if Mozilla would include some wording that instills alarm in site owners about how the site’s information, not just the user’s, is at risk. For example, most non-malicious site owners probably would not want maliciously altered content served from or made to appear as though it came from their site. Yet most of them are, I suspect, unaware that this is a danger when their site does not use TLS. It would be great to see Mozilla take this chance to highlight this danger so that the people most in a position to make changes would become aware of this additional good reason to do so.
- sebazzz 8y ago
  > It would be great if Mozilla would include some wording that instills alarm in site owners about how the site’s information, not just the user’s, is at risk. I'd expect the reseller to inform the buyer about the distrust of these certificates. The SSL reseller we use informed us before April this year.
  - natch 8y ago
    I’m not talking about the distrust though. I’m talking about how to convince sites why they should give a care about the distrust. Many of them have no cares to give because they are missing this part of the picture.
ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
It's just insane that they haven't been able fix this issue and get back into good standing with 6 months warning.
- mtgx 8y ago
  They've already sold the division. They don't care and probably never did.
- spydum 8y ago
  Sold and DigiCert has been reissuing new certs. Unfortunately they can’t change them for you. Poor operators won’t know until the rug is finally pulled from under them. DigiCert and browser vendors have done a decent job of telegraphing the changes..
- klodolph 8y ago
  > Root cause: Symantec was willfully disregarding industry regulations by issuing trusted certificates without proper authorization. Source: https://sslmate.com/certspotter/failures https://sslmate.com/certspotter/failures “Willfully” is the key word here. The business side of running a CA is fundamentally at odds with the security side. A few short-sighted decisions by business-minded managers with their eyes set on profits can completely eviscerate the security side of a company, and it’s possible that nobody remains at Symantec who has the combination of security knowledge + internal political power + will. There’s also the Trustico fiasco. Trustico revoked 50,000 Symantec-issued certificates in a shockingly bad way. Because policies allowed for certificates with compromised public keys to be revoked, Trustico intentionally compromised the private keys in order to achieve the desired revocation. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/wxX4Yv0E3Mk https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security... > As one of Symantec's former largest partners - my personal opinion and personal experience is that Symantec is a company that thrives on recklessness and one that I wouldn't trust nor deal with. You can see more bad behavior here—Symantec is seen as a reckless company, and Trustico (recklessly) cuts ties with Symantec for its business needs. Both actors are bad enough that their relationship reflects poorly on both of them. I’m sure there are some people who could fix this problem in six months, but I bet they don’t work for Symantec or don’t have the power to do it.
fosco 8y ago
anyone know if Microsoft is following suit? I searched briefly and could not find any comments...
- gsnedders 8y ago
  Microsoft rarely comment publicly prior to making changes to trust levels, but I've heard from several people that they will similarly distrust them. Apple are yet to state when they will perform the final, total distrust, but it is planned: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208860 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208860
lbriner 8y ago
Wow, I didn't realise how many non-conformances there were with Symantec. It certainly looks like they had enough chances to get their houses in order and didn't! I wonder what the root problem was? They didn't care, they didn't think anyone would do anything or they are just a large sloppy corporate who can't run a group properly?
- jjeaff 8y ago
  I've wondered the same. Certificate trust was absolutely crucial to their business. The only thing I can think is that the leadership was oblivious to this. Maybe they didn't understand how certificates work.
  - klodolph 8y ago
    Sell more certificates, make more money. Anything which gets in the way of making more money (like security) should be reduced or eliminated, with the right touch you can get bonuses / promotions for meeting fiscal goals and leave your successor to deal with the aftermath. They might understand how certificates work but that doesn’t mean they know how to set up an organization with the right incentives to do it correctly.
    - jjeaff 8y ago
      Interestingly, I looked up the symantec CEO. He was previously the ceo of Blue Coat. Blue Coat is a maker of man in the middle proxy appliances for businesses to spy on their employees. They controversially got root certificate authority. Which could of course be used to mitm SSL sites (which they promised and crossed their heart they would never do). https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/27/blue_coat_ca_certs/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/27/blue_coat_ca_certs/
      - dan0- 8y ago
        Didn't someone at the Tor Project analyse these Blue Coat MiTM boxes and find a cross-signed intermediate signing certificate preloaded, with the option to load your own signing cert so one could MiTM with ease? This was more than a few years back...
frandroid 8y ago
Wow, talk about an obscure warning that tells nothing to the domain owner.
- olliej 8y ago
  Symantec should have contacted everyone they issued a certificate to.
  - pacaro 8y ago
    It appears that there are a lot of things that Symantec should have done, yet here we are.
    - olliej 8y ago
      Haha it’s so weird, it’s almost like they aren’t very good at being a CA :D
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  While that is true, all service providers, VPS providers, cert resellers, hosting companies have known about this for over a year and should have replaced all of these certs by now as well as contacting cert holders.
  - pvg 8y ago
    They're still exceptionally user-hostile warnings. You can get this running a pre-release browser (and I doubt that they'll be changed for the stable releases of either FF or Chrome) trying to visit Paypal. It's utterly bananas to present this to an end-user doing a very common, security-dependent interaction.
- jleedev 8y ago
  Nobody who runs a website can pretend to be ignorant of this fiasco.
  - 8y ago
retlehs 8y ago
PayPal's site is affected by this
- twblalock 8y ago
  That's surprising, because Chrome has distrusted Symantec certs for a few months and it's odd that Paypal would not have fixed it by now.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    Chrome and Firefox have only distrusted Symantec certs in their pre-release versions. The Chrome 70 and Firefox 63 releases in mid-October are when the hammer will fall. https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec-pki-immediate.html https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - user5994461 8y ago
      The hammer fell in April already. Google published a roadmap, the link you gave, but didn't respect it.
      - plttn 8y ago
        Your anecdotal evidence doesn't prove they didn't respect it. I was just able to load PayPal with a Symantec cert on Chrome 69 on Android, which I realize is dueling anecdotes, but I'm just reinforcing the status quo, you're the one making a bold claim.
  - awakeasleep 8y ago
    The head of Symantec's board is the CEO of PayPal. PayPal is a diehard Symantec company and will not abandon anything Symantec related until it is absolutely forced to.
- 8y ago
mjlee 8y ago
You can enable this now in Firefox 62 (latest stable) > In advance of removing all trust for Symantec-issued certificates in Firefox 63, a preference was added that allows users to distrust certificates issued by Symantec. To use this preference, go to about:config in the address bar and set the preference "security.pki.distrust_ca_policy" to 2.
oasisbob 8y ago
It would be nice to have the date reflected in the title of this post (March 2018). It's relevant and a nice reminder because the full-distrust is coming soon, but there isn't anything new here AFAICT.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Right, nothing new here. I was confused when I read the title, thinking "it was already distrusted, is there some further amount of distrust possible or is it groundhog day?"
cpeterso 8y ago
Firefox bug 1484006 has a list of some sites that are still using distrusted Symantec certs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484006 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484006
josho 8y ago
This is huge as it affects GeoTrust, RapidSSL, Thawte, and VeriSign. I was aware of the Symantec issue and checked my own certs and didn't see their name, but skimming the article I noticed RapidSSL and thought I'd double check and sure enough my certs are about to become bogus.
user5994461 8y ago
FYI: Your site has been unreachable since April if you use Symantec certificates. Chrome announced the depreciation for October but they didn't stick to their own roadmap and blacklisted Symantec since April instead (Chrome 66 release). https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec-pki-immediate.html https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec...
- phobosdeimos 8y ago
  Yeah I have seen ecommerce sites that were using Symantec. Nobody cares about Firefox I guess but once Chrome starts enforcement shit will hit the fan.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    Point being. Chrome already started enforcement in April.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  Not sure why this is downvoted. It is correct.
  - Ajedi32 8y ago
    Because it's wrong. The very post GP linked explicitly says that Symantec certs issued before June 1, 2016 would stop functioning in Chrome 66.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      Chrome also blacklisted certs issued after June 1, 2016.
      - oasisbob 8y ago
        I understand if you don't want to reveal your organization affiliations, but if this was widespread, it should have been discussed somewhere with more specifics. Can you link to a discussion anywhere with more specific examples? We had a bunch of RapidSSL certs in-use internally, and were rather pokey in replacing them since they were less-critical internal certs. Everything with the deprecation warnings were exactly as expected and announced. I follow Mozilla's dev Security list and the CAB Forum mailing lists fairly regularly, can't find any discussions about Google deviating from their announced plan.
korethr 8y ago
There's been downvoted comments below that, to me, seem to complain of Mozilla unfairly blindsiding domain owners. I disagree, based on my own personal experience. This has been coming for a while, with plenty of forewarning. My employer uses certificates from one of Symantec's brands. Last year, we began to get notices that Chrome et. al. would be distrusting the certificates issued from the old Symantec root this year, and that we would need to claim our free replacements issued from the new trust root that is replacing Symantec's. And it's not been just one notice, we've been getting them regularly. And in addition to the automatic form emails, the sales rep assigned our account personally reached out to us to make sure we were getting this taken care of. We are not a large company, either; we have less than 100 employees. DigiCert is taking this transition seriously. So IMO, if someone gets blindsided by their website breaking because of the Symantec root distrust, then they have only laziness and/or incompetence to blame, whether it's their own, or that of their website operator. Those who's job it is to make sure that doesn't happen have been warning about it for nearly a year now.
- josho 8y ago
  I've received those emails as well. The emails came from our domain registrar. We don't buy certificates from our domain registrar. Adding to the confusion the email refers to Symantec certificates of which we don't have any, I even double checked the certificate chain and Symantec wasn't involved. So, for the longest time I assumed the emails were a phishing scam and disregarded them. Only today when I tried testing with Firefox did I realize that several certificate brands were handled by Symantec and that YES I was affected. So, yes there has been plenty of forewarning, but yet was surprised today.
  - korethr 8y ago
    I'm curious if you received the same emails I did. We got ours from our cert vendor, so I suppose that's as about as direct as it can get. If your domain registar was crafting their own, then I could see how you might have gotten blindsided. There's always a risk of information loss when the game of telephone comes into play. When I first started looking at this myself, I was surprised at just how many TLS cert brands Symantec held: damn near half of them.
SpikeDad 8y ago
Apple is also distrusting Symantec CAs which started in Aug 2018 - fully by Fall 2018 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208860 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208860
sam0x17 8y ago
It's been obvious to me for quite a while that EV etc only really tells you "this person paid $$$ to get a cert" rather than anything about the site being trustworthy or being who it says it is. I wouldn't bat an eye if 10 years from now major browsers distrusted everything but letsencrypt. Once the letsencrypt project comes out with a comparable solution for code signing, there is really no more reason for paid cert companies to exist. They don't check shit and it's super easy to get fraudulent certs so the value of what they provide is $0.
- majewsky 8y ago
  I would bat an eye because it's never good to rely on a single point of failure. Imagine, for instance, that at some point, LE is the only trusted CA for code-signing. If its root key gets compromised for some reason, how are we supposed to move to a new CA if the auto-updaters cannot trust the old CA anymore?
  - sam0x17 8y ago
    True. They should maybe consider breaking up their operation into 20 or so root certs.
    - sterlind 8y ago
      As much as I'm tempted to agree, decentralization perhaps risks even more. Opsec compromise is only one SPOF for a signing service; the state might coerce the CA into handing over the keys or issuing an intermediate for MitM. Do you shard across 20 nations? If so, you have to contend with 20 intelligence agencies. It might make more sense to keep all the eggs in one basket, and have new baskets ready to go if a canary triggers.
- lifthrasiir 8y ago
  I strongly agree to the conclusion but not the logic. It is an entirely possible situation that while EV indeed is a CV's scheme to earn more $$$ users do care and as a result the user security does improve (most possibly, only a bit though). My own conclusion results from the observation that, well, users don't; see an account [1] from Troy Hunt (of the HaveIBeenPwned fame) for example. [1] https://www.troyhunt.com/on-the-perceived-value-ev-certs-cas-phishing-lets-encrypt/ https://www.troyhunt.com/on-the-perceived-value-ev-certs-cas...
xmichael999 8y ago
All I can say is Firefox and Mozilla need to go away.
- judofyr 8y ago
  Google, Apple and Microsoft are doing the exactly same thing in this matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920093
acd 8y ago
The CA trust model is totally broken! We pay certificate of authority CA companies a lot of money for certificates that are not fully confirmed to be authentic. Here is a better model. You normally register your company with the local government corporate registration authority. The local government knows who this company is, who the corporate registrars are. One should use a digital ID card to apply to register a company. The founders sign the registration of the company with their personal digital ID. The company is then registered. To apply for a domain name for a company should be digitally signed. The registration government authority should handle certificate of authentic not foreign CA registrars. All corporations should use Government CAs all other types of certificates can then be issued by Lets Encrypt having proper DNS validation in place should help there too. All else is broken security by design.
- clon 8y ago
  > One should use a digital ID card to apply to register a company. The founders sign the registration of the company with their personal digital ID. The company is then registered. To apply for a domain name for a company should be digitally signed. The registration government authority should handle certificate of authentic not foreign CA registrars. You must be from Estonia. Or on crack. I'm guessing Estonia. A lifetime of experience has convinced me that we will have hoverboards, hell, self-flying hoverboards, before such a scheme becomes the universal norm.
yuhong 8y ago
My favorite story is when Mark Shuttleworth sold Thawte to VeriSign and used the money to start Canonical. This shows one of the problems of the current debt-based economy.
- sobani 8y ago
  > Mark Shuttleworth > Canonical > debt-based economy What do any of those things have anything to do with Symantec certificates being distrusted?
  - yuhong 8y ago
    Nothing, just mentioning the history. It is worth mentioning since VeriSign was one of the first CAs.
peterwwillis 8y ago
There's two problems this exposes. One, it takes a very long time to dis-trust a root cert. This means some people's connections could be exposed for a very long time. Two, the method for update shown here is to upgrade your browser. Not everyone can upgrade their browser. Corporations often lock down browser updates, and take a very long time to upgrade. Sure, it's fine for you to say "that's the corporation's fault, too bad for them!" but the users of those companies still have to suffer in the meanwhile - to say nothing of vendored smartphone OSes with slow updates... The other problem with upgrading is legacy computers run very old browsers. I don't know if you've tried to browse the web on an old computer with a new browser, but here's a secret: it doesn't work. New browsers have so many "advancements" that they bloat and crawl on older machines. So effectively, the means of being able to use the internet requires you to buy a new machine. If operating systems immediately shipped patched CA lists, and browsers immediately used them, that would patch the legacy browsers. But it would not prevent sites from immediately breaking. So no matter what, either we wait forever to dis-trust certs, or we break sites. Clearly we need an option C that will allow site owners to upgrade their keys immediately and without issue, and users to update their CA lists immediately and without issue. ACME is a good start, but it too has issues that need to be solved. In addition, the whole idea of trusting hundreds of root certs to sign for every domain is just crazy. We need a method to sign certs only by the organization who actually has responsibility for ensuring the ownership of the domain: the registrar. CAs are a great "hack" because they allow browsers to verify certs of sites without ever putting any onus on the registrar, but they also have a wacky "trust" model. Any of hundreds of organizations can verify who controls the IP space of a domain, one time, and issue a magical assurance of this, which is trusted until the assurance expires in several years. This can be overridden at any time, and it has nothing to do with who actually controls the domain, which is the registrar and the user who registered it. All the current system really verifies is who controlled the DNS at one time, which is merely pointed to by the registrar, and can be hacked independently of the registrar, meaning there are extra attack vectors. Yes, lots of little extra "hacks" have been added as stop-gaps, like CAA, and Certificate Transparency, the now-defunct HPKP, and the future implementation of cert issuers verifying the DNS and host integrity from multiple ASNs. But these are just to keep the status quo limping on, and ignore the unnecessary risks the current design imposes. We need innovation and better design, not hacks.
King-Aaron 8y ago
I've got a question about this, as I've been hurled into the admin of our certs, and honestly I probably shouldn't be the one to do it, lol. But, we run root certs from DigiCert with the rest of the chain provided by RapidSSL. However, I have not received any depreciation warnings via email or any notification in the console output on these sites. Is there a utility available to "check" our sites, in the same way vendors provide utilities to verify your cert installations? Or should I assume that our stack is going to get caught up in this, and move to find alternative certs now?
- discreditable 8y ago
  Chrome's dev console shows a warning for affected certs.
ibotty 8y ago
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.paypal.com&latest https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.paypal.co... I was getting frustrated because I could not visit Paypal (and Ebay) with Firefox nightly, because thy still use the old Symantec TLS certificates. I wonder whether there is _any_ major party that should be more concerned with their certificates than Paypal.

307 points by asymmetric 8y ago

Chrome doing likewise: https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec-pki-immediate.html https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec...

kzrdude 8y ago
Chrome did this first, so any wide effect (in yall's organsiations) should already have been noticed by now, due to this.
- oasisbob 8y ago
  As I understand it, Chrome and Firefox are both operating under the same policies with about the same timetables. Full distrust doesn't come until Firefox 63 / Chrome 70 - neither of which are stable releases yet. The limited distrust (for older certs issued prior to June 2016) was activated in Firefox 60 and Chrome 66 much earlier this year.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    That's factually incorrect. Google blacklisted ALL Symantec certificates since Chrome 66, in April. The roadmap announced the change for October but they did it 6 months earlier, ignoring their own roadmap. As the OP says, organizations using Symantec have already been hit very hard, by surprise.
    - oasisbob 8y ago
      Do you have a source for that? Google's KB articles still reference Chrome 70 [1], and I can't find another reference to this anywhere else. Paypal.com is still operating with a Symantec signed cert - issued by "Symantec Class 3 EV SSL CA - G3". Works fine in Chrome 68. (and not in Firefox with the security.pki.distrust_ca_policy override set) [1] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7662561?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7662561?hl=en
      - user5994461 8y ago
        I worked at a large company whose sole supplier was Symantec. Everything has been blacklisted since April.
        brazzledazzle 8y ago
        Similar environment except for the blacklisting didn’t happen to us. Any chance some wires were crossed and someone pushed out a policy explicitly distrusting the CA?
        SpikeDad 8y ago
        I think a source implies an authoritative source and not an anecdotal source.
        zachberger 8y ago
        Yeah. Not true. I visit many sites with Symantec certs in Chrome 69 that don't work in Chrome 70
    - Enverex 8y ago
      This isn't true. Chrome itself proves this when loading a site affected by wave 2 of the distrust: "The SSL certificate used to load resources from https://(domain) https://(domain) will be distrusted in M70. Once distrusted, users will be prevented from loading these resources. See https://g.co/chrome/symantecpkicerts https://g.co/chrome/symantecpkicerts for more information." Everything was being done in 2 waves. First wave was Chrome 66, second wave is Chrome 70. See Google's link above for the specifics. Source: Chrome's own warnings and that I work for a business that deals heavily in SSL sales.
Jaepa 8y ago
Apple¹ and Mircosoft² are doing the same. Additionally anything that uses Chromium's trustlists (Vivaldi, Electron, etc) will also distrust old Symantec & co's certs. 1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208860 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208860 2: https://knowledge.digicert.com/alerts/ALERT2562.html https://knowledge.digicert.com/alerts/ALERT2562.html EDIT: Its also worth mentioning that this isn't just limited Symantec certs but also will include GeoTrust, thawte, & VeriSign certs. Symantec's cert business has now been taken over by DigiCert so there is a means for valid reassurance. EDIT2: Also it will effect RapidSSL. Totally forgot about them.

natch 8y ago

When such an error (see article) is presented, it’s a teachable moment not only for the user surfing the site, but also for the owner of the site who is going to field questions about the error message from users. It would be great if Mozilla would include some wording that instills alarm in site owners about how the site’s information, not just the user’s, is at risk. For example, most non-malicious site owners probably would not want maliciously altered content served from or made to appear as though it came from their site. Yet most of them are, I suspect, unaware that this is a danger when their site does not use TLS. It would be great to see Mozilla take this chance to highlight this danger so that the people most in a position to make changes would become aware of this additional good reason to do so.

sebazzz 8y ago
> It would be great if Mozilla would include some wording that instills alarm in site owners about how the site’s information, not just the user’s, is at risk. I'd expect the reseller to inform the buyer about the distrust of these certificates. The SSL reseller we use informed us before April this year.
- natch 8y ago
  I’m not talking about the distrust though. I’m talking about how to convince sites why they should give a care about the distrust. Many of them have no cares to give because they are missing this part of the picture.

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago

It's just insane that they haven't been able fix this issue and get back into good standing with 6 months warning.

mtgx 8y ago
They've already sold the division. They don't care and probably never did.
spydum 8y ago
Sold and DigiCert has been reissuing new certs. Unfortunately they can’t change them for you. Poor operators won’t know until the rug is finally pulled from under them. DigiCert and browser vendors have done a decent job of telegraphing the changes..
klodolph 8y ago
> Root cause: Symantec was willfully disregarding industry regulations by issuing trusted certificates without proper authorization. Source: https://sslmate.com/certspotter/failures https://sslmate.com/certspotter/failures “Willfully” is the key word here. The business side of running a CA is fundamentally at odds with the security side. A few short-sighted decisions by business-minded managers with their eyes set on profits can completely eviscerate the security side of a company, and it’s possible that nobody remains at Symantec who has the combination of security knowledge + internal political power + will. There’s also the Trustico fiasco. Trustico revoked 50,000 Symantec-issued certificates in a shockingly bad way. Because policies allowed for certificates with compromised public keys to be revoked, Trustico intentionally compromised the private keys in order to achieve the desired revocation. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/wxX4Yv0E3Mk https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security... > As one of Symantec's former largest partners - my personal opinion and personal experience is that Symantec is a company that thrives on recklessness and one that I wouldn't trust nor deal with. You can see more bad behavior here—Symantec is seen as a reckless company, and Trustico (recklessly) cuts ties with Symantec for its business needs. Both actors are bad enough that their relationship reflects poorly on both of them. I’m sure there are some people who could fix this problem in six months, but I bet they don’t work for Symantec or don’t have the power to do it.

fosco 8y ago

anyone know if Microsoft is following suit? I searched briefly and could not find any comments...

gsnedders 8y ago
Microsoft rarely comment publicly prior to making changes to trust levels, but I've heard from several people that they will similarly distrust them. Apple are yet to state when they will perform the final, total distrust, but it is planned: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208860 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208860

lbriner 8y ago

Wow, I didn't realise how many non-conformances there were with Symantec. It certainly looks like they had enough chances to get their houses in order and didn't! I wonder what the root problem was? They didn't care, they didn't think anyone would do anything or they are just a large sloppy corporate who can't run a group properly?

jjeaff 8y ago
I've wondered the same. Certificate trust was absolutely crucial to their business. The only thing I can think is that the leadership was oblivious to this. Maybe they didn't understand how certificates work.
- klodolph 8y ago
  Sell more certificates, make more money. Anything which gets in the way of making more money (like security) should be reduced or eliminated, with the right touch you can get bonuses / promotions for meeting fiscal goals and leave your successor to deal with the aftermath. They might understand how certificates work but that doesn’t mean they know how to set up an organization with the right incentives to do it correctly.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    Interestingly, I looked up the symantec CEO. He was previously the ceo of Blue Coat. Blue Coat is a maker of man in the middle proxy appliances for businesses to spy on their employees. They controversially got root certificate authority. Which could of course be used to mitm SSL sites (which they promised and crossed their heart they would never do). https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/27/blue_coat_ca_certs/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/27/blue_coat_ca_certs/
    - dan0- 8y ago
      Didn't someone at the Tor Project analyse these Blue Coat MiTM boxes and find a cross-signed intermediate signing certificate preloaded, with the option to load your own signing cert so one could MiTM with ease? This was more than a few years back...

frandroid 8y ago

Wow, talk about an obscure warning that tells nothing to the domain owner.

olliej 8y ago
Symantec should have contacted everyone they issued a certificate to.
- pacaro 8y ago
  It appears that there are a lot of things that Symantec should have done, yet here we are.
  - olliej 8y ago
    Haha it’s so weird, it’s almost like they aren’t very good at being a CA :D
LinuxBender 8y ago
While that is true, all service providers, VPS providers, cert resellers, hosting companies have known about this for over a year and should have replaced all of these certs by now as well as contacting cert holders.
- pvg 8y ago
  They're still exceptionally user-hostile warnings. You can get this running a pre-release browser (and I doubt that they'll be changed for the stable releases of either FF or Chrome) trying to visit Paypal. It's utterly bananas to present this to an end-user doing a very common, security-dependent interaction.
jleedev 8y ago
Nobody who runs a website can pretend to be ignorant of this fiasco.
- 8y ago

retlehs 8y ago

PayPal's site is affected by this

twblalock 8y ago
That's surprising, because Chrome has distrusted Symantec certs for a few months and it's odd that Paypal would not have fixed it by now.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  Chrome and Firefox have only distrusted Symantec certs in their pre-release versions. The Chrome 70 and Firefox 63 releases in mid-October are when the hammer will fall. https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec-pki-immediate.html https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - user5994461 8y ago
    The hammer fell in April already. Google published a roadmap, the link you gave, but didn't respect it.
    - plttn 8y ago
      Your anecdotal evidence doesn't prove they didn't respect it. I was just able to load PayPal with a Symantec cert on Chrome 69 on Android, which I realize is dueling anecdotes, but I'm just reinforcing the status quo, you're the one making a bold claim.
- awakeasleep 8y ago
  The head of Symantec's board is the CEO of PayPal. PayPal is a diehard Symantec company and will not abandon anything Symantec related until it is absolutely forced to.
8y ago

mjlee 8y ago

You can enable this now in Firefox 62 (latest stable) > In advance of removing all trust for Symantec-issued certificates in Firefox 63, a preference was added that allows users to distrust certificates issued by Symantec. To use this preference, go to about:config in the address bar and set the preference "security.pki.distrust_ca_policy" to 2.

oasisbob 8y ago

It would be nice to have the date reflected in the title of this post (March 2018). It's relevant and a nice reminder because the full-distrust is coming soon, but there isn't anything new here AFAICT.

craftyguy 8y ago
Right, nothing new here. I was confused when I read the title, thinking "it was already distrusted, is there some further amount of distrust possible or is it groundhog day?"

cpeterso 8y ago

Firefox bug 1484006 has a list of some sites that are still using distrusted Symantec certs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484006 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484006

josho 8y ago

This is huge as it affects GeoTrust, RapidSSL, Thawte, and VeriSign. I was aware of the Symantec issue and checked my own certs and didn't see their name, but skimming the article I noticed RapidSSL and thought I'd double check and sure enough my certs are about to become bogus.

user5994461 8y ago

FYI: Your site has been unreachable since April if you use Symantec certificates. Chrome announced the depreciation for October but they didn't stick to their own roadmap and blacklisted Symantec since April instead (Chrome 66 release). https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec-pki-immediate.html https://security.googleblog.com/2018/03/distrust-of-symantec...

phobosdeimos 8y ago
Yeah I have seen ecommerce sites that were using Symantec. Nobody cares about Firefox I guess but once Chrome starts enforcement shit will hit the fan.
- user5994461 8y ago
  Point being. Chrome already started enforcement in April.
paulddraper 8y ago
Not sure why this is downvoted. It is correct.
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  Because it's wrong. The very post GP linked explicitly says that Symantec certs issued before June 1, 2016 would stop functioning in Chrome 66.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    Chrome also blacklisted certs issued after June 1, 2016.
    - oasisbob 8y ago
      I understand if you don't want to reveal your organization affiliations, but if this was widespread, it should have been discussed somewhere with more specifics. Can you link to a discussion anywhere with more specific examples? We had a bunch of RapidSSL certs in-use internally, and were rather pokey in replacing them since they were less-critical internal certs. Everything with the deprecation warnings were exactly as expected and announced. I follow Mozilla's dev Security list and the CAB Forum mailing lists fairly regularly, can't find any discussions about Google deviating from their announced plan.

korethr 8y ago

There's been downvoted comments below that, to me, seem to complain of Mozilla unfairly blindsiding domain owners. I disagree, based on my own personal experience. This has been coming for a while, with plenty of forewarning. My employer uses certificates from one of Symantec's brands. Last year, we began to get notices that Chrome et. al. would be distrusting the certificates issued from the old Symantec root this year, and that we would need to claim our free replacements issued from the new trust root that is replacing Symantec's. And it's not been just one notice, we've been getting them regularly. And in addition to the automatic form emails, the sales rep assigned our account personally reached out to us to make sure we were getting this taken care of. We are not a large company, either; we have less than 100 employees. DigiCert is taking this transition seriously. So IMO, if someone gets blindsided by their website breaking because of the Symantec root distrust, then they have only laziness and/or incompetence to blame, whether it's their own, or that of their website operator. Those who's job it is to make sure that doesn't happen have been warning about it for nearly a year now.

josho 8y ago
I've received those emails as well. The emails came from our domain registrar. We don't buy certificates from our domain registrar. Adding to the confusion the email refers to Symantec certificates of which we don't have any, I even double checked the certificate chain and Symantec wasn't involved. So, for the longest time I assumed the emails were a phishing scam and disregarded them. Only today when I tried testing with Firefox did I realize that several certificate brands were handled by Symantec and that YES I was affected. So, yes there has been plenty of forewarning, but yet was surprised today.
- korethr 8y ago
  I'm curious if you received the same emails I did. We got ours from our cert vendor, so I suppose that's as about as direct as it can get. If your domain registar was crafting their own, then I could see how you might have gotten blindsided. There's always a risk of information loss when the game of telephone comes into play. When I first started looking at this myself, I was surprised at just how many TLS cert brands Symantec held: damn near half of them.

SpikeDad 8y ago

Apple is also distrusting Symantec CAs which started in Aug 2018 - fully by Fall 2018 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208860 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208860

sam0x17 8y ago

It's been obvious to me for quite a while that EV etc only really tells you "this person paid $$$ to get a cert" rather than anything about the site being trustworthy or being who it says it is. I wouldn't bat an eye if 10 years from now major browsers distrusted everything but letsencrypt. Once the letsencrypt project comes out with a comparable solution for code signing, there is really no more reason for paid cert companies to exist. They don't check shit and it's super easy to get fraudulent certs so the value of what they provide is $0.

majewsky 8y ago
I would bat an eye because it's never good to rely on a single point of failure. Imagine, for instance, that at some point, LE is the only trusted CA for code-signing. If its root key gets compromised for some reason, how are we supposed to move to a new CA if the auto-updaters cannot trust the old CA anymore?
- sam0x17 8y ago
  True. They should maybe consider breaking up their operation into 20 or so root certs.
  - sterlind 8y ago
    As much as I'm tempted to agree, decentralization perhaps risks even more. Opsec compromise is only one SPOF for a signing service; the state might coerce the CA into handing over the keys or issuing an intermediate for MitM. Do you shard across 20 nations? If so, you have to contend with 20 intelligence agencies. It might make more sense to keep all the eggs in one basket, and have new baskets ready to go if a canary triggers.
lifthrasiir 8y ago
I strongly agree to the conclusion but not the logic. It is an entirely possible situation that while EV indeed is a CV's scheme to earn more $$$ users do care and as a result the user security does improve (most possibly, only a bit though). My own conclusion results from the observation that, well, users don't; see an account [1] from Troy Hunt (of the HaveIBeenPwned fame) for example. [1] https://www.troyhunt.com/on-the-perceived-value-ev-certs-cas-phishing-lets-encrypt/ https://www.troyhunt.com/on-the-perceived-value-ev-certs-cas...

xmichael999 8y ago

All I can say is Firefox and Mozilla need to go away.

judofyr 8y ago
Google, Apple and Microsoft are doing the exactly same thing in this matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920093

acd 8y ago

The CA trust model is totally broken! We pay certificate of authority CA companies a lot of money for certificates that are not fully confirmed to be authentic. Here is a better model. You normally register your company with the local government corporate registration authority. The local government knows who this company is, who the corporate registrars are. One should use a digital ID card to apply to register a company. The founders sign the registration of the company with their personal digital ID. The company is then registered. To apply for a domain name for a company should be digitally signed. The registration government authority should handle certificate of authentic not foreign CA registrars. All corporations should use Government CAs all other types of certificates can then be issued by Lets Encrypt having proper DNS validation in place should help there too. All else is broken security by design.

clon 8y ago
> One should use a digital ID card to apply to register a company. The founders sign the registration of the company with their personal digital ID. The company is then registered. To apply for a domain name for a company should be digitally signed. The registration government authority should handle certificate of authentic not foreign CA registrars. You must be from Estonia. Or on crack. I'm guessing Estonia. A lifetime of experience has convinced me that we will have hoverboards, hell, self-flying hoverboards, before such a scheme becomes the universal norm.

yuhong 8y ago

My favorite story is when Mark Shuttleworth sold Thawte to VeriSign and used the money to start Canonical. This shows one of the problems of the current debt-based economy.

sobani 8y ago
> Mark Shuttleworth > Canonical > debt-based economy What do any of those things have anything to do with Symantec certificates being distrusted?
- yuhong 8y ago
  Nothing, just mentioning the history. It is worth mentioning since VeriSign was one of the first CAs.

peterwwillis 8y ago

There's two problems this exposes. One, it takes a very long time to dis-trust a root cert. This means some people's connections could be exposed for a very long time. Two, the method for update shown here is to upgrade your browser. Not everyone can upgrade their browser. Corporations often lock down browser updates, and take a very long time to upgrade. Sure, it's fine for you to say "that's the corporation's fault, too bad for them!" but the users of those companies still have to suffer in the meanwhile - to say nothing of vendored smartphone OSes with slow updates... The other problem with upgrading is legacy computers run very old browsers. I don't know if you've tried to browse the web on an old computer with a new browser, but here's a secret: it doesn't work. New browsers have so many "advancements" that they bloat and crawl on older machines. So effectively, the means of being able to use the internet requires you to buy a new machine. If operating systems immediately shipped patched CA lists, and browsers immediately used them, that would patch the legacy browsers. But it would not prevent sites from immediately breaking. So no matter what, either we wait forever to dis-trust certs, or we break sites. Clearly we need an option C that will allow site owners to upgrade their keys immediately and without issue, and users to update their CA lists immediately and without issue. ACME is a good start, but it too has issues that need to be solved. In addition, the whole idea of trusting hundreds of root certs to sign for every domain is just crazy. We need a method to sign certs only by the organization who actually has responsibility for ensuring the ownership of the domain: the registrar. CAs are a great "hack" because they allow browsers to verify certs of sites without ever putting any onus on the registrar, but they also have a wacky "trust" model. Any of hundreds of organizations can verify who controls the IP space of a domain, one time, and issue a magical assurance of this, which is trusted until the assurance expires in several years. This can be overridden at any time, and it has nothing to do with who actually controls the domain, which is the registrar and the user who registered it. All the current system really verifies is who controlled the DNS at one time, which is merely pointed to by the registrar, and can be hacked independently of the registrar, meaning there are extra attack vectors. Yes, lots of little extra "hacks" have been added as stop-gaps, like CAA, and Certificate Transparency, the now-defunct HPKP, and the future implementation of cert issuers verifying the DNS and host integrity from multiple ASNs. But these are just to keep the status quo limping on, and ignore the unnecessary risks the current design imposes. We need innovation and better design, not hacks.

King-Aaron 8y ago

I've got a question about this, as I've been hurled into the admin of our certs, and honestly I probably shouldn't be the one to do it, lol. But, we run root certs from DigiCert with the rest of the chain provided by RapidSSL. However, I have not received any depreciation warnings via email or any notification in the console output on these sites. Is there a utility available to "check" our sites, in the same way vendors provide utilities to verify your cert installations? Or should I assume that our stack is going to get caught up in this, and move to find alternative certs now?

discreditable 8y ago
Chrome's dev console shows a warning for affected certs.

ibotty 8y ago

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.paypal.com&latest https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.paypal.co... I was getting frustrated because I could not visit Paypal (and Ebay) with Firefox nightly, because thy still use the old Symantec TLS certificates. I wonder whether there is _any_ major party that should be more concerned with their certificates than Paypal.