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From the original blog post. > We have to be mindful of size, but the vast majority of revocations happen for purely administrative reasons and can be excluded
by __alexs 15y ago
From the original blog post.
> We have to be mindful of size, but the vast majority of revocations happen for purely administrative reasons and can be excluded.
What could possibly go wrong here?
This isn't a security improvement, it's a performance optimisation at the expense of security for Chrome users.
> An attacker can still block updates, but they have to be able to maintain the block constantly, from the time of revocation, to prevent the update. This is much harder than blocking an online revocation check, where the attacker only has to block the checks during the attack.
OK sure. Except what's the actual correlation between time-of-detection and time-of-attack in the real world? If certificates aren't getting added to CRLs until they are actually being used in attacks then at the moment, (which previous responses from Google to CA hacks have suggested is in fact the case) then this optimization has bought you what? One-time use of the cert? (When attacking Chrome users.) What's new there?
I'm not going to deny the possibility that most CA's revocation infrastructure is so incredibly awful that this all ends up actually being a good thing for security. CA's seem to have unbounded abilities to screw up after all. This really doesn't seem like a direction we should be encouraging browser SSL to go in general though.
- agl 15y ago> It's a performance optimisation at the expense of security for Chrome users. I'm arguing that the current, soft-fail revocation checking is useless and that we're not losing anything by switching it off. The actual revocation mechanism at the moment is that a CA highlights a major problem and all browsers push a software update to block it, because nobody trusts the revocation system to work. So an update mechanism that allows us to react faster is a clear improvement on pushing full-browser updates. But, independent of that, the soft-fail checks aren't actually protecting anyone and it's past time that we recognised that and prompted the introduction of schemes that actually can work, i.e. mandatory OCSP stapling or short-lived certs.