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Combine this with exploits into one or more broadly trusted certificate authorities (which surely exist) and it's pretty amazing how much data China would have
by resters 8y ago
Combine this with exploits into one or more broadly trusted certificate authorities (which surely exist) and it's pretty amazing how much data China would have been able to obtain.
Every time I bring up the following point someone chimes in that it's a bad idea, but I still fail to understand why it's not easy to pick which CAs I want to trust by picking a list of entities/people I trust and then adopting their recommendations for which CAs to trust.
This would be a few clicks of UI to let me be intelligently paranoid while maintaining only a layperson's understanding of why (say) Bruce Schneier decides to trust some and not others.
- freeflight 8y agoSounds a bit like how ad-block plus handles the blocking based on lists to which you subscribe, just with certificate white/blacklists?
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y agoThat’s basically PGP.
- cwkoss 8y agoDistributed trust and vouching systems are going to be the next big thing.
- jopsen 8y agoI personally think certificate transparency and Expect-Ct headers will do far more to detect China-in-the-middle. Nothing is more embarrassing than getting caught with your fingers in the cookie jar. Besides I trust CAs will be de-listed if proven compromised.
- tinus_hn 8y agoChina would only be annoyed if you made it out to be a bad thing. Everybody knows that, like the US, they snoop up any information they can get their hands on. Which makes it even more likely they didn’t do an active attack because there’s more chance of being caught if you don’t care.
- maltalex 8y ago> Combine this with exploits into one or more broadly trusted certificate authorities (which surely exist) and it's pretty amazing how much data China would have been able to obtain. The attacker doesn't even need to compromise a CA. If someone hijacks the IP address of example.com, he could easily get a valid Let's Encrypt certificate for that domain.
- gruez 8y agothis can easily be fixed by having some sort of mandatory waiting period (eg. 7 days) after issuance before a certificate can be considered valid. ct can be used to ensure no backdating occurs
- billylindeman 8y agoor dns records validating the ca?
- resters 8y agoGreat point. Ideally it would also be possible to track which certificate was used last time and if the certificate has changed, verify somehow whether the change was intentional.
- predakanga 8y agoThis did exist in the form of HTTP Public Key Pinning (now deprecated). Unfortunately, the mechanism which replaced it (Expect-CT) can only help after the fact - someone would have to notice the extra issuance, and you would have no idea whether your traffic was affected.
- tialaramex 8y agoIf there's a CAA record for example.com that doesn't allow Let's Encrypt (CAA tag "letsencrypt.org") then this won't work. Let's Encrypt will check CAA (they will use DNSSEC if your domain has that) and verify that their tag is present before issuing if you have a CAA record. If you're a larger outfit you should pick a trustworthy CA vendor or (two independent vendors according to your risk management profile), and lock CAA to those trusted vendors. You can then agree whatever terms suit your business on top of the Ten Blessed Methods, so as to avoid bad guys stealing your names. For example Facebook has an agreement with their chosen CA that all facebook.com and fb.com issuances get signed off by Facebook's network security people. No "But I'm the head of Asian marketing! I need this immediately" bullshit, it gets a sign off from netsec or it doesn't get issued.
- gcb0 8y agobecause tomorrow your bank starts to only have a cert from some CA you didn't trust before. having to manually select/add CAs is akin to not having ssl and using pgp everywhere. and you know how well that works out even for technical folks.
- _jal 8y agoIf my bank appears to switch to a CA with a record of issuing fraudulent certificates or enabling same (cf. Comodo, Symantec), that's exactly what I want to happen! I realize the desire to control my own security is thought by browser-makers to be the death of ecommerce. I still want it.
- olliej 8y agoOk, what happens if it switches to a CA you haven’t heard of? What happens when some 20 year old gets their first computer, it doesn’t have any CAs in the trust store so how do they find the good ones? How do they know what the good ones are? You think you want it, but you don’t necessarily know which CAs are good - have you read all the audits (which you can only trust if you got over tls, which requires you trust it). What happens when you get a site saying “you need to trust ‘Google CA 1’/‘LetsEncrypt’” (or whatever their public CA is). I’m joking of course - the name is meaningless - there’s no root of trust to verify that it’s not someone making a certificate that just claims to be that CA. So you actually need to know the public key for each CA that you think is trustworthy.
- brobdingnagians 8y agoIf it was all CAs by default, but then allowed you to remove the ones you didn't trust, then that would help a lot. Then the vast majority of users will be going with the browser recommended CAs, but advanced users can customize. If there was a distribution format for experts to "vote/warn" on which CAs are trusted, then you could subscribe to their lists with a common configuration of (Trusted by All, Trusted by At Least One, Not Warned By Any, Not Warned by All). That way you could get updates automatically from your favorite experts. We often outsource things like reviewing all the advisories in this way. Now we just need someone to develop this in. Could it be done as an extension?
- tinus_hn 8y agoThe party you want to connect to chooses the CA, not you. Are you really not going to use YouTube because you don’t trust the Google CA? Anyway, redirecting and sniffing traffic is one thing, intercepting and changing encrypted traffic while being undetected is another. It’s quite a stretch really.
- nothrabannosir 8y agoThe idea being: stronger market forces leading to more competition among CAs to end up on more people’s trusted list. Combined with the option to serve multiple signatures for the same cert, this might actually just work :)
- olliej 8y agoHow does a user distinguish? For instance say you want to go to example.com, and it says “you need to trust X CA”. Ignoring that a user doesn’t know what that even means, all of history demonstrates that a user’s goal when encountering a barrier in the way of something they want is to get rid of the barrier. Arguing for user education isnt the right response because technology needs to be designed to work with humans, not the other way round. Instead we defer to groups like the various CARB orgs to ensure that the trust stores contain only robust CAs. Historically there have been few teeth as evicting CAs from the truststores is hard - look at how long the Symantec distrust is taking, and look at how many people (incl. HN commenters) have argued against it. That said the addition of things like CT logs has finally given trust stores a view into what is being issued, so can finally detect poorly run CAs at the time that screw up, rather than maybe catching them months later, if at all. That then provides the evidence needed to justify distrusting a ca or auditor. That is all a large amount of exceedingly technical work, that no regular user could hope to grasp and make a reasonable choice about. Instead the market pressure is as it should be for CAs now: ensure you are following the rules, or risk distrust. That is pretty much the most effective market pressure you can have in the CA market.
- tinus_hn 8y agoRemember that the resources, scripts and images can be loaded from hosts using different CAs. A page doesn’t even have one CA. The only thing that is even remotely feasible is blocking one or more CAs and that causes so much disruption normal people are never going to do that.
- unethical_ban 8y agoThis should absolutely be exposed in browser UIs, esp Firefox which uses its own store. Why can I not easily select/deselect all, sort by country of origin, issuer, plain text search filters, and so on? The ability to click-through, or even to simply display the "insecure" badge, would still be there. Or, as you said, being able to subscribe to other recommendations would be cool.
- resters 8y agoExactly. And if you subscribe to the recommendations of more than one expert, a useful option would be to decline to trust any CAs that are mistrusted by any of the chosen experts.
- dsl 8y agoBecause it is never the "China Government" CA that is the problem, it is a medium to large Western-based CA getting hacked. China, Iran, etc. don't want direct attribution.
- killjoywashere 8y agoAnd by "Western", keep in mind Italy and many other "2nd world" countries (to use some dated terminology).
- Lio 8y ago2nd World? Doesn't that usually refer to former members of the old Eastern Block?[1] To my knowledge, Italy has never been part of the Eastern Block. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc
- arm85 8y agoHuh, I never thought about Switzerland being a third world country.
- 8y ago
- raquo 8y agoI understand the sentiment, but somehow I feel that more people will trust Alex Jones on this than Bruce Schneier. Actual experts aren't respected by the general population enough for this to be a net positive change is my guess.