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Commercial certificates are not a scam. You're paying for a company (the CA) to certify (via the SSL cert signature) that an identity belongs to someone that ha

by iigs 18y ago

Commercial certificates are not a scam. You're paying for a company (the CA) to certify (via the SSL cert signature) that an identity belongs to someone that has provided proof that they're who they say they are. You can absolutely do what you're requesting by creating your own CA and signing certs for your sites and distributing your CA cert to your users somehow. If you can figure out how to reliably provide this service for free you could revolutionize crypto on the internet. You might start by looking at what cacert.org has done to see what problems they've hit and why it's not as easy as it seems.

tptacek 18y ago
You are absolutely paying a premium based on the market persuasion tactics Verisign and Thawte have employed against the world. It's true that there's no good reason to trust Verisign more than Mozilla, Microsoft, and OpenSSL --- if Mozilla fucks up, you're just as screwed as if Verisign does. The business model behind certificates may very well be a huge scam. Unfortunately, the technical model behind having a small number of trusted certificates shipped with your browser is not. Until that link breaks, you don't get security without paying Verisign.
- nickf 18y ago
  It's amazing how many people still think Verisign are the only CA out there. There are a lot now, and if you hunt about, you needn't pay more than $10-$20 for a cert that's trusted in most browsers (granted, they are domain-only validated, but that's a whole different issue that needs to be fixed, I won't bring it up here...) The reason you 'trust' Verisign/Thawte/Comodo/Geotrust/GoDaddy is because their roots are in the OSs & browsers. You can't get in those root stores without a hell of a lot of hoop-jumping. I know this. The money you pay for a cert does go to covering the costs of the background checks you have to pass through before you get the certificate. Trust has to start somewhere - why not with large companies who have undergone rigorous procedures that also have been vetted by the companies you're implicitly trusting by installing their software?
  - tptacek 18y ago
    If someone on this board wanted to argue that GoDaddy and GeoTrust haven't really seen "vetting" that makes or breaks their security, as a practitioner in this industry, I don't feel I could win that argument. What you and I are really saying is that a company like Thawte has staked their business on those pubkeys, so that we at least know that if they screw up, they stand a good chance of losing the company.
Dobbs 18y ago
What about a public key ssl server? Webmaster Bob wants to add his key to the server. Bob goes to the server page and hits add key button, puts in an email address for the webmaster, his public key and submits. Then the public key server sometime in the next couple hours goes outs and checks the website itself. If the two match it adds it to the database. You can have the server require a reverse DNS lookup and also have it use something along the lines of OpenDNS to help secure against fraud. Also if the server itself uses a CA cert to secure data on transit that would also help secure it. Require a revocation key to invalidate self signed keys on the database would also further security. Then user Joe can add "Self-sign Pub key extension" to Firefox to automate the checking of public keys. This allows for a relatively cheap self-signing check. Does a minimal amount of is this the real website I'm using but still not quite the level of a paid CA cert that say a bank should have. (Apologies about the ramblyness of this post)
- jabr 18y ago
  Or you can just get a free DV cert from startssl.com and not have to do anything else.

by iigs 18y ago

tptacek 18y ago

You are absolutely paying a premium based on the market persuasion tactics Verisign and Thawte have employed against the world. It's true that there's no good reason to trust Verisign more than Mozilla, Microsoft, and OpenSSL --- if Mozilla fucks up, you're just as screwed as if Verisign does. The business model behind certificates may very well be a huge scam. Unfortunately, the technical model behind having a small number of trusted certificates shipped with your browser is not. Until that link breaks, you don't get security without paying Verisign.

nickf 18y ago
It's amazing how many people still think Verisign are the only CA out there. There are a lot now, and if you hunt about, you needn't pay more than $10-$20 for a cert that's trusted in most browsers (granted, they are domain-only validated, but that's a whole different issue that needs to be fixed, I won't bring it up here...) The reason you 'trust' Verisign/Thawte/Comodo/Geotrust/GoDaddy is because their roots are in the OSs & browsers. You can't get in those root stores without a hell of a lot of hoop-jumping. I know this. The money you pay for a cert does go to covering the costs of the background checks you have to pass through before you get the certificate. Trust has to start somewhere - why not with large companies who have undergone rigorous procedures that also have been vetted by the companies you're implicitly trusting by installing their software?
- tptacek 18y ago
  If someone on this board wanted to argue that GoDaddy and GeoTrust haven't really seen "vetting" that makes or breaks their security, as a practitioner in this industry, I don't feel I could win that argument. What you and I are really saying is that a company like Thawte has staked their business on those pubkeys, so that we at least know that if they screw up, they stand a good chance of losing the company.

Dobbs 18y ago

What about a public key ssl server? Webmaster Bob wants to add his key to the server. Bob goes to the server page and hits add key button, puts in an email address for the webmaster, his public key and submits. Then the public key server sometime in the next couple hours goes outs and checks the website itself. If the two match it adds it to the database. You can have the server require a reverse DNS lookup and also have it use something along the lines of OpenDNS to help secure against fraud. Also if the server itself uses a CA cert to secure data on transit that would also help secure it. Require a revocation key to invalidate self signed keys on the database would also further security. Then user Joe can add "Self-sign Pub key extension" to Firefox to automate the checking of public keys. This allows for a relatively cheap self-signing check. Does a minimal amount of is this the real website I'm using but still not quite the level of a paid CA cert that say a bank should have. (Apologies about the ramblyness of this post)

jabr 18y ago
Or you can just get a free DV cert from startssl.com and not have to do anything else.