5 ms·

It would be perfect for them. Instead of having to hack, just get them to come to you under the guise of DDoS protection. "Hey, everyone's starting to encrypt

by cronix 8y ago

It would be perfect for them. Instead of having to hack, just get them to come to you under the guise of DDoS protection. "Hey, everyone's starting to encrypt and we can't get the data as easy as we used to." "Well, DDoS is a big problem out there. What if we offered a DDoS protection service because very few companies can afford the huge pipes needed to mitigate those attacks." "Perfect! We can offer it to free for most sites, and offer "free" SSL encryption that terminates on our end." "Yes! We'd gain their trust by offering such a service and they'd COME TO US begging for help." I've wondered about LetsEncrypt as well. Since they're they ones generating these "free ssl certs", don't they then have the means to the decrypt the data? Yes, I'm cynical, but I think we need to be. Same scenario as above. "Hey, we can just offer free certs and they will just give us the keys."

unilynx 8y ago
LetsEncrypt, no. they don't ask you for your private key when you get a certificate, so they can't decrypt anything.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  They couldn't decrypt, but as a CA, like any other trusted CA, they could man-in-the-middle the traffic, read it, then pass it along to your server, re-encrypted.
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    When a Chrome (and soon to be also Safari, Firefox) connects to a web server over TLS it expects to see SCTs, Signed Certificate Timestamps from some qualified logs (in Chrome's case at least one of these logs must be operated by Google and at least one must not). In most people's setups they get these baked inside their certificates, but you can do it in other ways and that'll work too. The SCTs can only be produced by these logs, and only when the log is shown the tbsCertificate data. The intent is that the log service promises to log all certificates for which it provides a timestamp. A Merkle Tree is used so that we can examine a log and obtain proof that it does indeed contain every certificate we've seen SCTs for. So, your conspiracy needs to involve the Certificate Authority (Let's Encrypt in this case), the CT logging team at Google, and at least one third party log operator. Or it would be detected when it was tried.
    - jjeaff 8y ago
      >So, your conspiracy needs to involve the Certificate Authority (Let's Encrypt in this case), the CT logging team at Google... No, as you alluded to, my conspiracy only needs that the user uses any of the many browsers besides chrome.
zeta0134 8y ago
At least in Let's Encrypt's case, I thought the free SSL cert was handled as a normal CSR request; the private key should never leave the server the certificate is issued for, assuming the client performing the CSR isn't compromised in some way. All Let's Encrypt's validator service should get is a challenge signed by the private key, not the key itself. A CA compromise is still very bad, but mostly because it allows an attacker to issue valid certificates and set themselves up as a MitM more easily. Let's Encrypt is still subject to this kind of attack, but so is every other CA; it's not a new threat. That can be reasonably worked around with certificate pinning and other techniques.

by cronix 8y ago

unilynx 8y ago

LetsEncrypt, no. they don't ask you for your private key when you get a certificate, so they can't decrypt anything.

jjeaff 8y ago
They couldn't decrypt, but as a CA, like any other trusted CA, they could man-in-the-middle the traffic, read it, then pass it along to your server, re-encrypted.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  When a Chrome (and soon to be also Safari, Firefox) connects to a web server over TLS it expects to see SCTs, Signed Certificate Timestamps from some qualified logs (in Chrome's case at least one of these logs must be operated by Google and at least one must not). In most people's setups they get these baked inside their certificates, but you can do it in other ways and that'll work too. The SCTs can only be produced by these logs, and only when the log is shown the tbsCertificate data. The intent is that the log service promises to log all certificates for which it provides a timestamp. A Merkle Tree is used so that we can examine a log and obtain proof that it does indeed contain every certificate we've seen SCTs for. So, your conspiracy needs to involve the Certificate Authority (Let's Encrypt in this case), the CT logging team at Google, and at least one third party log operator. Or it would be detected when it was tried.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    >So, your conspiracy needs to involve the Certificate Authority (Let's Encrypt in this case), the CT logging team at Google... No, as you alluded to, my conspiracy only needs that the user uses any of the many browsers besides chrome.

zeta0134 8y ago

At least in Let's Encrypt's case, I thought the free SSL cert was handled as a normal CSR request; the private key should never leave the server the certificate is issued for, assuming the client performing the CSR isn't compromised in some way. All Let's Encrypt's validator service should get is a challenge signed by the private key, not the key itself. A CA compromise is still very bad, but mostly because it allows an attacker to issue valid certificates and set themselves up as a MitM more easily. Let's Encrypt is still subject to this kind of attack, but so is every other CA; it's not a new threat. That can be reasonably worked around with certificate pinning and other techniques.