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Some are. The French and Tunisian governments have been caught emitting fake TLS certificates through their national CA in the past. There's probably many more

Some are. The French and Tunisian governments have been caught emitting fake TLS certificates through their national CA in the past. There's probably many more who don't get caught because their attacks are more targeted. The whole Public Key Infrastructure is fully insecure because of this property that any root CA can emit a internet-wide valid certificate for any domain. That's why people work on DANE for DNS and Tor onion services (among others) to reduce the attack surface to the name resolution level, which in the case of onion services equals breaking an ed25519 keypair because the onion domain name is tied to the key. We need to ditch PKI as soon as possible!

hedora 7y ago
PKI weaknesses extend far beyond state sponsored attacks. Things like Let’s Encrypt allow anyone that can intercept 100% of the traffic to your site to get a signed cert for your domain with no further validation. Unless your site is directly peered to multiple backbones, you are trusting at least one service provider not to man in the middle your traffic. Cert pinning sort of protects against this, but it is widely considered impractical. The certificate transparency efforts also sort of protect against this, though I think there are still CA’s that don’t participate. As long as browsers accept certs from those CA’s, certificate transparency doesn’t solve the problem either. (Also, what percentage of sites actually monitor to see if there are malicious certificates for their domains?)
- southerntofu 7y ago
  > Things like Let’s Encrypt Any CA will do that. Paying a hundred bucks for a certificate will has never stopped a malicious actor, therefore Let's Encrypt does not introduce any new concern. > Cert pinning sort of protects against this DANE was designed for this. Since DNS is always a SPOF on the web, registering TLS public keys in DNS reduces the attack surface (instead of introducing a new channel for transport security). > The certificate transparency efforts also sort of protect against this That's bullshit. Nothing prevents a CA to emit certificates without declaring them. We should not rely on those big corporations for our security: our interests are FAR from aligned.

hedora 7y ago

PKI weaknesses extend far beyond state sponsored attacks. Things like Let’s Encrypt allow anyone that can intercept 100% of the traffic to your site to get a signed cert for your domain with no further validation. Unless your site is directly peered to multiple backbones, you are trusting at least one service provider not to man in the middle your traffic. Cert pinning sort of protects against this, but it is widely considered impractical. The certificate transparency efforts also sort of protect against this, though I think there are still CA’s that don’t participate. As long as browsers accept certs from those CA’s, certificate transparency doesn’t solve the problem either. (Also, what percentage of sites actually monitor to see if there are malicious certificates for their domains?)

southerntofu 7y ago
> Things like Let’s Encrypt Any CA will do that. Paying a hundred bucks for a certificate will has never stopped a malicious actor, therefore Let's Encrypt does not introduce any new concern. > Cert pinning sort of protects against this DANE was designed for this. Since DNS is always a SPOF on the web, registering TLS public keys in DNS reduces the attack surface (instead of introducing a new channel for transport security). > The certificate transparency efforts also sort of protect against this That's bullshit. Nothing prevents a CA to emit certificates without declaring them. We should not rely on those big corporations for our security: our interests are FAR from aligned.