8 ms·

Mozilla moves to distrust the TrustCor CA

198 points by jamespwilliams 4y ago

jwilk 4y ago
Earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33810755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33810755 (40 comments at the moment)
- tialaramex 4y ago
  Right, in some sense m.d.s.policy is the more authoritative source, but unless the discussion ends up being distorted because of reporting elsewhere that's inaccurate the existing thread ought to "win". Doubtless HN has policy about this that I have not read.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
The thread is hilarious. The accused being passive agressive to essentially the judges is mind boggling. I also like how the TrustCor person in the discussion claims the spyware was by a rogue developer and they can't do anything about that and gets the reply from the initial poster: "This same rogue developer set up a proxy to receive data sent by the SDK and then forward it on somewhere else. This involved compromising one or more machines owned by TrustCor. This compromise went undetected by TrustCor/MsgSafe for 3+ years." This compromise was undetected by the CA for 3+ years. Q.E.D. And from Google [Edit: was Mozilla, thanks] "I tend to agree at this point that discussing the merits of the claims might be superfluous, because the conduct of the CA's representative is a more urgent issue [...]"
- dcow 4y ago
  It really didn't come off the way people painted it as poor conduct to me at all. Slightly annoying, sure. Partially written with input from a lawyer, likely. But all I saw was a person rightfully defending rather unsubstantiated attacks on the integrity of her business. The whole thing is guilt by association. Everyone agrees that no evidence of mal-issued certificates exists. But some other company that uses your CA product had a rougue dev and because they are financially related because of history all of a sudden the industry is in panic? If the integrity of the people funding the operations of CAs is important, like is suggested towards then end (and with which I happen to agree), then we should create policy and scrutinize every CA equally. I don’t like mob rule.
  - pifm_guy 4y ago
    > Everyone agrees that no evidence of mal-issued certificates exists. This is one thing CT logs are useful for. As soon as logging certificates to a public log becomes commonplace, then misissued certificates can't be used in private without a high chance of the world being told about what's going on.
    - j33zusjuice 4y ago
      Nice. I had no idea such a thing existed, tbh.
    - snoopy_telex 4y ago
      Don’t you have to trust the CA to actually log all the certs they issue? What’s to stop a rogue CA from logging all but a few key certs?
      - pifm_guy 4y ago
        Anyone else can log a cert too. There was talk of Chromium logging any cert that chains to a public root that they find un-logged.
  - stevewatson301 4y ago
    I already responded to your other comment here[1], however any lawyer would advise against making condescending statements to cops, judges or anyone else for that matter. Further, no lawyer would advise making a statement such as "we've been asked to avoid discussing our legal structure because we may be punished by tax authorities", because the statement itself can be taken as an admission of wrongdoing. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33814291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33814291
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    I see it differently. The person wants with wiggling words explain away technical problems to engineers, which does not work. Espcially all this "but it was a beta and never released" which is completely beside the point (which makes you wonder, did the person not understand the point at all or wants to wiggle out again). The passive agressive tone to some E.g "Who are you? Why are you here" to some security researchers does not show good intent. The wiggling out with "thats not important that happened some years ago" is not convincing. "But some other company that uses your CA product" Another company that you own had an "alledged" rogue dev, but the person says "no-one can know, thats the way of life, so we should move on". It feels like a SNL police sketch where the police asks a question and the suspect answers "I don't know what happend last week, and can we really know what is going on, does anyone know? And it was last week, we should just move on, goodbye officer" "If the integrity of the people funding the operations" It's not about the funding but the two companies had (have?) the same officers. The only way forward that could have been successful IMHO: 1. I bought the operation (Trustcor) 1 year ago and have no documents about prior company development or involvements because I didn't get any when I bought the company - and the people I bought the company from don't answer my emails. 2. But I did switch the auditor (has not happened) to make sure everything is ok 3. I will do my best to find out what has happened back then.
- charleyablaze 4y ago
  > And from Mozilla "I tend to agree at this point that discussing the merits of the claims might be superfluous, because the conduct of the CA's representative is a more urgent issue [...]" This comment was made by Filippo Valsorda, previously engineer at Google now independent, not Mozilla. edit: my bad, I didn't know Filippo had left.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - fanf2 4y ago
    Filippo Valsorda is now an independent consultant https://filippo.io/ https://filippo.io/
  - ameliaquining 4y ago
    Filippo actually left Google a few months ago and is now an independent security researcher.
- lzooz 4y ago
  >The accused being passive agressive to essentially the judges is mind boggling. They probably knew they'd end up distrusted anyway. I wouldn't be bowing to my executioner either.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  The management class is unaccustomed to this sort of questioning.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  The earlier implication was that the only unobfuscated sample of the malware sdk had msgsafe urls hardcoded in it. Trustcor's response was to claim that the rogue dev edited the sdk and that the server at the url endpoint was actually just a proxy. The initial poster is just recapping/reframing to match her claims. (her explanation how she knows it was a proxy is a fantastical story about finding a docker image in an old backup. Nothing said before or after that gives the impression she would know how to do that)
radicalbyte 4y ago
So how many of the other CAs work with spyware / NSA / MI5 etc? Or corporate espionage? I doubt that these are the only bad eggs.
- nsgi 4y ago
  Certificate Transparency should be able to detect that
  - mtgx 4y ago
- ben_w 4y ago
  My assumption is that most CAs have someone working for them who is also employed by an intelligence agency, possibly more than one from any given agency and more than one agency per CA (and more than one national government, e.g. both Russia and the USA have intelligence interests in Russia); this may be any combination of actively inserting malware, passively watching to get forewarning of zero-days before the CAs themselves know about them, and actively advising the CAs about exploits the agencies know about that aren't public yet. Most of the agencies are likely to be more subtle than this, given it took Snowden's whistleblowing for us to learn about much of what they actually got up to. But not all of them will be super-competent, and some of them will be spotted from the outside in much the way this was.
- stevewatson301 4y ago
  If you have evidence, I'm sure you can bring to the attention of the Mozilla Root Store Inclusion program and the CA/Browser forum. Moreover, "there are other criminals who have gotten away with much more" is not an argument.
  - yonixw 4y ago
    I think the steel man version of the argument is: "You showed that there is no effective monitoring or transparency that me as a user can get, and as such, Where is the trust come from. What fundamentally causes Mozilla (or any) to trust CAs more than randomly distributed certificates."
pedrovhb 4y ago
Seems reasonable to me. Although it's not ideal to distrust without a "smoking gun", it is (as pointed out) inadmissible for any ties to exist between a CA and a malware company. Seeing how a closer look by Mozilla, Google and Apple into publicly available data quickly turned up more points of suspicion, I wonder how much scrutiny is put into CAs in general, and whether it's enough. Mozilla currently lists 148 trusted certificates [0] (soon to be 145, with TrustCor's departure). [0] https://ccadb-public.secure.force.com/mozilla/CACertificatesInFirefoxReport https://ccadb-public.secure.force.com/mozilla/CACertificates...
BurnGpuBurn 4y ago
Certificates are broken anyhow, we might as well do away with them all together. How am I ever able to research, verify and in the end trust all the hundreds of certificate providers out there? Answer: I don't, nobody does, and that's why it will never work. What's wrong with SSH's encryption, btw? Can't we put that in a browser?
- pitkali 4y ago
  The point of certificates is not to encrypt the traffic, but rather to verify that the server you are talking to is who they claim they are. The server showing you their certificate is like you logging into an SSH session, which I've been doing for a long time with a certificate as well, actually.
  - BurnGpuBurn 4y ago
    In my browser it is either/or though. I can have encryption and verification, or none of those. Technically it would be feasable to have encryption without verification, and thus without CA's. Why isn't that an option?
    - Avamander 4y ago
      Because encryption without verification is practically useless.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
        More specifically, because encryption without verification allows for MITM and other chosen-ciphertext attacks which trivially break the confidentiality provided by the encryption. Encryption needs entity authentication (verifying who you're talking to), data authentication (verifying that the ciphertext has been created by one of the parties in the communication), and a cipher to provide confidentiality in practice.
    - mort96 4y ago
      You can do what you want by creating your own self-signed certificates. It's not that hard, just a couple of openssl commands. Browsers will throw up a big scary warning that the certificate can't be verified (as you'd expect), but most browsers let you click through that warning, and you get encrypted but unverified traffic.

Earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33810755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33810755 (40 comments at the moment)

tialaramex 4y ago
Right, in some sense m.d.s.policy is the more authoritative source, but unless the discussion ends up being distorted because of reporting elsewhere that's inaccurate the existing thread ought to "win". Doubtless HN has policy about this that I have not read.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

The thread is hilarious. The accused being passive agressive to essentially the judges is mind boggling. I also like how the TrustCor person in the discussion claims the spyware was by a rogue developer and they can't do anything about that and gets the reply from the initial poster: "This same rogue developer set up a proxy to receive data sent by the SDK and then forward it on somewhere else. This involved compromising one or more machines owned by TrustCor. This compromise went undetected by TrustCor/MsgSafe for 3+ years." This compromise was undetected by the CA for 3+ years. Q.E.D. And from Google [Edit: was Mozilla, thanks] "I tend to agree at this point that discussing the merits of the claims might be superfluous, because the conduct of the CA's representative is a more urgent issue [...]"

dcow 4y ago
It really didn't come off the way people painted it as poor conduct to me at all. Slightly annoying, sure. Partially written with input from a lawyer, likely. But all I saw was a person rightfully defending rather unsubstantiated attacks on the integrity of her business. The whole thing is guilt by association. Everyone agrees that no evidence of mal-issued certificates exists. But some other company that uses your CA product had a rougue dev and because they are financially related because of history all of a sudden the industry is in panic? If the integrity of the people funding the operations of CAs is important, like is suggested towards then end (and with which I happen to agree), then we should create policy and scrutinize every CA equally. I don’t like mob rule.
- pifm_guy 4y ago
  > Everyone agrees that no evidence of mal-issued certificates exists. This is one thing CT logs are useful for. As soon as logging certificates to a public log becomes commonplace, then misissued certificates can't be used in private without a high chance of the world being told about what's going on.
  - j33zusjuice 4y ago
    Nice. I had no idea such a thing existed, tbh.
  - snoopy_telex 4y ago
    Don’t you have to trust the CA to actually log all the certs they issue? What’s to stop a rogue CA from logging all but a few key certs?
    - pifm_guy 4y ago
      Anyone else can log a cert too. There was talk of Chromium logging any cert that chains to a public root that they find un-logged.
- stevewatson301 4y ago
  I already responded to your other comment here[1], however any lawyer would advise against making condescending statements to cops, judges or anyone else for that matter. Further, no lawyer would advise making a statement such as "we've been asked to avoid discussing our legal structure because we may be punished by tax authorities", because the statement itself can be taken as an admission of wrongdoing. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33814291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33814291
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  I see it differently. The person wants with wiggling words explain away technical problems to engineers, which does not work. Espcially all this "but it was a beta and never released" which is completely beside the point (which makes you wonder, did the person not understand the point at all or wants to wiggle out again). The passive agressive tone to some E.g "Who are you? Why are you here" to some security researchers does not show good intent. The wiggling out with "thats not important that happened some years ago" is not convincing. "But some other company that uses your CA product" Another company that you own had an "alledged" rogue dev, but the person says "no-one can know, thats the way of life, so we should move on". It feels like a SNL police sketch where the police asks a question and the suspect answers "I don't know what happend last week, and can we really know what is going on, does anyone know? And it was last week, we should just move on, goodbye officer" "If the integrity of the people funding the operations" It's not about the funding but the two companies had (have?) the same officers. The only way forward that could have been successful IMHO: 1. I bought the operation (Trustcor) 1 year ago and have no documents about prior company development or involvements because I didn't get any when I bought the company - and the people I bought the company from don't answer my emails. 2. But I did switch the auditor (has not happened) to make sure everything is ok 3. I will do my best to find out what has happened back then.
charleyablaze 4y ago
> And from Mozilla "I tend to agree at this point that discussing the merits of the claims might be superfluous, because the conduct of the CA's representative is a more urgent issue [...]" This comment was made by Filippo Valsorda, previously engineer at Google now independent, not Mozilla. edit: my bad, I didn't know Filippo had left.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fanf2 4y ago
  Filippo Valsorda is now an independent consultant https://filippo.io/ https://filippo.io/
- ameliaquining 4y ago
  Filippo actually left Google a few months ago and is now an independent security researcher.
lzooz 4y ago
>The accused being passive agressive to essentially the judges is mind boggling. They probably knew they'd end up distrusted anyway. I wouldn't be bowing to my executioner either.
willcipriano 4y ago
The management class is unaccustomed to this sort of questioning.
Fatnino 4y ago
The earlier implication was that the only unobfuscated sample of the malware sdk had msgsafe urls hardcoded in it. Trustcor's response was to claim that the rogue dev edited the sdk and that the server at the url endpoint was actually just a proxy. The initial poster is just recapping/reframing to match her claims. (her explanation how she knows it was a proxy is a fantastical story about finding a docker image in an old backup. Nothing said before or after that gives the impression she would know how to do that)

radicalbyte 4y ago

So how many of the other CAs work with spyware / NSA / MI5 etc? Or corporate espionage? I doubt that these are the only bad eggs.

nsgi 4y ago
Certificate Transparency should be able to detect that
- mtgx 4y ago
ben_w 4y ago
My assumption is that most CAs have someone working for them who is also employed by an intelligence agency, possibly more than one from any given agency and more than one agency per CA (and more than one national government, e.g. both Russia and the USA have intelligence interests in Russia); this may be any combination of actively inserting malware, passively watching to get forewarning of zero-days before the CAs themselves know about them, and actively advising the CAs about exploits the agencies know about that aren't public yet. Most of the agencies are likely to be more subtle than this, given it took Snowden's whistleblowing for us to learn about much of what they actually got up to. But not all of them will be super-competent, and some of them will be spotted from the outside in much the way this was.
stevewatson301 4y ago
If you have evidence, I'm sure you can bring to the attention of the Mozilla Root Store Inclusion program and the CA/Browser forum. Moreover, "there are other criminals who have gotten away with much more" is not an argument.
- yonixw 4y ago
  I think the steel man version of the argument is: "You showed that there is no effective monitoring or transparency that me as a user can get, and as such, Where is the trust come from. What fundamentally causes Mozilla (or any) to trust CAs more than randomly distributed certificates."

pedrovhb 4y ago

Seems reasonable to me. Although it's not ideal to distrust without a "smoking gun", it is (as pointed out) inadmissible for any ties to exist between a CA and a malware company. Seeing how a closer look by Mozilla, Google and Apple into publicly available data quickly turned up more points of suspicion, I wonder how much scrutiny is put into CAs in general, and whether it's enough. Mozilla currently lists 148 trusted certificates [0] (soon to be 145, with TrustCor's departure). [0] https://ccadb-public.secure.force.com/mozilla/CACertificatesInFirefoxReport https://ccadb-public.secure.force.com/mozilla/CACertificates...

BurnGpuBurn 4y ago

Certificates are broken anyhow, we might as well do away with them all together. How am I ever able to research, verify and in the end trust all the hundreds of certificate providers out there? Answer: I don't, nobody does, and that's why it will never work. What's wrong with SSH's encryption, btw? Can't we put that in a browser?

pitkali 4y ago
The point of certificates is not to encrypt the traffic, but rather to verify that the server you are talking to is who they claim they are. The server showing you their certificate is like you logging into an SSH session, which I've been doing for a long time with a certificate as well, actually.
- BurnGpuBurn 4y ago
  In my browser it is either/or though. I can have encryption and verification, or none of those. Technically it would be feasable to have encryption without verification, and thus without CA's. Why isn't that an option?
  - Avamander 4y ago
    Because encryption without verification is practically useless.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
      More specifically, because encryption without verification allows for MITM and other chosen-ciphertext attacks which trivially break the confidentiality provided by the encryption. Encryption needs entity authentication (verifying who you're talking to), data authentication (verifying that the ciphertext has been created by one of the parties in the communication), and a cipher to provide confidentiality in practice.
  - mort96 4y ago
    You can do what you want by creating your own self-signed certificates. It's not that hard, just a couple of openssl commands. Browsers will throw up a big scary warning that the certificate can't be verified (as you'd expect), but most browsers let you click through that warning, and you get encrypted but unverified traffic.