4 ms·

Web PKI drama is always astonishing to me because it is one of the only areas of the entire world where a corporation's "fucking around" is seldom ever not foll

by jchw 2y ago

Web PKI drama is always astonishing to me because it is one of the only areas of the entire world where a corporation's "fucking around" is seldom ever not followed by a sobering "finding out" period. The various entities that decide what CAs to trust can effectively dismantle any CA business in the world, basically at the drop of a hat. If DigiCert decides to play this game and lose, it would make them the biggest such loser so far. DigiCert is, as far as I know, the largest CA on the Internet. It would certainly send a strong message, and cause a lot of chaos, if the biggest CA on the Internet found itself being removed from trust stores. Yet, there's no particular reason it couldn't happen. How exciting. Of course, I think that is unlikely, but on the other hand, it's just as cathartic to imagine whatever idiot at DigiCert thought it was a good idea to engage legal here to have the dressing down of a lifetime. I read the thread in question. It doesn't make DigiCert look good, but this action definitely is more damning to them than anything Collan said in my opinion.

userbinator 2y ago
It would certainly send a strong message, and cause a lot of chaos, if the biggest CA on the Internet found itself being removed from trust stores. How many will agree to that removal? How many will see one more reason to forever turn off automatic updates and decide what to trust themselves, having seen yet another way some faceless entity they never knew about can break things? It will certainly send a strong message, but likely not the intended one. All it will do is increase the lack of trust in centralised PKI in general.
- jchw 2y ago
  I'm not sure how to put this nicely, but I'll try my best: The normal people, who account for 99% of the end users of DigiCert's customers, are not going to disable updates on their web browser or their OS to "take a stand" against this decision. (And corporate users can't do this anyways, since it's not in their hands, and keeping things out of date is not a reasonable option for an organization that has security standards.) Most of them won't know what is going on here, and if they hear about it, probably won't care or know what to do about it. That's the Web PKI infrastructure working as intended, because it would be infeasible for billions of people to properly understand the gravity of all of these decisions. In order to ensure that TLS connections are at least minimally safe, it's pretty much necessary for things to work this way. I'm not arguing that it's good that a relatively small number of entities (mainly Google, Microsoft and Mozilla) decide which CAs are trustworthy, but that's all the more reason that it's important for all of this Web PKI work to happen completely in the open, so that the few who can spare the time and effort to scrutinize what is going on can help the rest of us have a safer Internet. We don't have a better solution. That's also why DigiCert issuing legal threats because they don't like how one of these issue reports makes them look is a serious problem that can't be tolerated.
  - LegionMammal978 2y ago
    > The normal people, who account for 99% of the end users of DigiCert's customers, are not going to disable updates on their web browser or their OS to "take a stand" against this decision. I'd imagine that they wouldn't do it to "take a stand" so much as "avoid the risk of getting their stuff broken in the short term" in this scenario, regardless of whichever party loses the blame game. See: the recent WordPress drama, which has turned customers away from both parties involved.
    - jchw 2y ago
      As I understand it, the way certificate authorities are removed from the trust store is progressive: they will announce a date after which new certificates from a given CA will no longer be trusted. I think this can be made even more progressive, by limiting the validity period of new certificates that will be trusted. DigiCert will have little recourse other than to let their customers know, and/or start providing certificates issued by another CA that follows the web PKI procedures and remains trusted. (They can still do that, of course, it's just that their own certificates issued by them directly won't be trusted anymore.) On the flip side, for user impact, it will play out like this: Some bank or other important entity could possibly, for whatever reason, continue using a (presumably expired? unless DigiCert continues issuing anyways; note that most likely, they will not.) DigiCert certificate after the cut off date, which will lead to users receiving errors. Some of them will have HSTS setup, which will lead to an emergency situation where they have to issue a new certificate ASAP, as it will basically halt their business until they do. For places where there is no HSTS, users may be instructed to simply bypass the certificate warning temporarily, and support lines will be absolutely swamped until they actually fix the problem. The WordPress situation is quite different. You don't have to use WordPress. Users don't even know what the Web PKI is to find an alternative to it, not that there is one or will be one.
    - snailmailstare 2y ago
      Sure some users would keep the CA active out of fear, while everyone paying digicert would also begin to move out of fear.. What portion of the strange sort of sites that couldn't figure out how to get off but could figure out how to renew would bother with paying for a different error message?
- edelbitter 2y ago
  Many systems do not fetch updates from the Mozilla root store, but from their (possibly Debian-derived) stable distribution of it. Meaning two highly respected entities, known for being well aware of the wider impact of their careful enforcement of strict policies, need to agree to cause any major breakage. When that happens, I can blindly trust they did the thing needed to keep the unaffected parts of that weird system working as intended.. and then still head to bugzilla and read about the background - to laugh at whoever triggered the mess.
  - SkiFire13 2y ago
    > Meaning two highly respected entities, known for being well aware of the wider impact of their careful enforcement of strict policies, need to agree to cause any major breakage. Note that this is not a "both" but a "any of them". One can disagree with the other on this and still cause wide breakage.
- pilif 2y ago
  If DigiCert were to lose browser trust (at this point, that's still a big if), it would happen the same way it happened with prior CAs, some of which were pretty big themselves (Symantec): all certificates issued after some date would not be trusted, yes. But all existing certificates would remain valid. This gives certificate owners ample time to look for a different issuer and no certificate buyer would deliberately purchase a certificate from an issuer when they know some percentage of users will not trust that cert. So for the end users, everything will keep working: the existing digicert certs stay valid and newly refreshed certs will be signed by a different authority. There is no need to turn off automatic updates over this. Between Entrust and Symantec, we've already seen this happen to large well-known CAs and everything remained fine (not for the offenders, but, hey, that's the system working as intended)
- woodruffw 2y ago
  > All it will do is increase the lack of trust in centralised PKI in general. “In general” is a broad statement, given that the overwhelming majority of people using the Web PKI have no idea that they’re doing so. DigiCert is not a legible part of the value chain for the average users; they won’t notice that the sites they use switch CAs. This strong disfavoritism towards vendors is arguably one of the Web PKI’s greatest strengths.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
twisteriffic 2y ago
It's refreshing to see folks who're obviously used to hiding behind clouds of bullshit get skewered by people who both know enough to see through it and have the time and energy to follow every thread to completion. The most recent digicert thread smells suspiciously similar to those that lead up to the Entrust debacle.
chicom_malware 2y ago
> It would certainly send a strong message, and cause a lot of chaos, if the biggest CA on the Internet found itself being removed from trust stores Their customers would be forced to give their business to Honest Achmed[1]. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959
- skissane 2y ago
  Someone should start a real CA business, complete with all the proper audits and everything to get it into the browser trust stores… and call it “Honest Achmed’s Used Cars and Certificates” (have it buy some random used car dealership in the middle of nowhere so the name is not a lie) Where’s a billionaire troll when you need one? (And a form of billionaire trolling that would upset a lot less people than Musk’s version of it.) Would be even funnier if the billionaire’s name actually was Achmed
  - justahuman74 2y ago
    What has prevented this (a good legit CA co) from happening before now?
    - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      Let's Encrypt has been around for a decade and is doing pretty well for itself. The manual validation required for EV and OV certificates precludes it from being a passion project, unless managing a call center and a squad of document reviewers is your dream job.
      - Thorrez 2y ago
        Let's Encrypt doesn't issue EV and OV. Honest Achmed’s Used Cars and Certificates wouldn't have to either.
        boricj 2y ago
account42 2y ago
> It would certainly send a strong message, and cause a lot of chaos, if the biggest CA on the Internet found itself being removed from trust stores. Yet, there's no particular reason it couldn't happen. How exciting. Trust stores and Browsers specifically have more options than simply remove a CA. A more reasonable approach for distrust process of a CA this size would be to stop accepting any new certificates issued after a certain date. Then existing customers will have a heads up and even if asleep will find out the bad news during scheduled renewal rather than while the responsible employees are on vacation.
axus 2y ago
Is there any option to turn off trust for all certificates generated after a certain date? The ideal would be to let old certificates keep working, and not trust new ones.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  It's been done previously, e.g. for Symantec: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-distrust-symantec.html https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-dist...
- wolrah 2y ago
  Yes, this has been done a few times in the past. It's unfortunate that "distrust after X date" and "distrust now" are the only penalties that currently exist but that's the reality of the current PKI world. There are a lot of efforts to get name constraints widely supported, so a given CA can only issue for certain TLDs or even domains, but it's still not there. That could be a viable punishment for misbehaving CAs in the future, or even an intentionally chosen restriction for CAs that want less strict requirements. Government CAs could be a very useful application, if a CA cert could be name constrained to only issue for .gov.cctld at that point we could basically just let them do whatever they want without concern. Likewise for any small regional CAs, if they could be limited to only regional TLDs their blast radius is reduced which also could mean less strict requirements than those applied to CAs able to sign for .com.
  - thayne 2y ago
    It would also be really useful if I could add a "root" CA for my employer's private CA to sign certificates for say .internal or .example.com, but not allow them to sign certs for any arbitrary domain. There's decent support for constraints on intermediate certs, but then you have to trust the root won't ever be used to sign unconstrained intermediates. It would also be useful for localhost. Create a private CA that is constrained to localhost and *.local, and you don't have to worry about it being used to MitM other sites if it gets compromised.
    - 2y ago

by jchw 2y ago

userbinator 2y ago

It would certainly send a strong message, and cause a lot of chaos, if the biggest CA on the Internet found itself being removed from trust stores. How many will agree to that removal? How many will see one more reason to forever turn off automatic updates and decide what to trust themselves, having seen yet another way some faceless entity they never knew about can break things? It will certainly send a strong message, but likely not the intended one. All it will do is increase the lack of trust in centralised PKI in general.

jchw 2y ago
I'm not sure how to put this nicely, but I'll try my best: The normal people, who account for 99% of the end users of DigiCert's customers, are not going to disable updates on their web browser or their OS to "take a stand" against this decision. (And corporate users can't do this anyways, since it's not in their hands, and keeping things out of date is not a reasonable option for an organization that has security standards.) Most of them won't know what is going on here, and if they hear about it, probably won't care or know what to do about it. That's the Web PKI infrastructure working as intended, because it would be infeasible for billions of people to properly understand the gravity of all of these decisions. In order to ensure that TLS connections are at least minimally safe, it's pretty much necessary for things to work this way. I'm not arguing that it's good that a relatively small number of entities (mainly Google, Microsoft and Mozilla) decide which CAs are trustworthy, but that's all the more reason that it's important for all of this Web PKI work to happen completely in the open, so that the few who can spare the time and effort to scrutinize what is going on can help the rest of us have a safer Internet. We don't have a better solution. That's also why DigiCert issuing legal threats because they don't like how one of these issue reports makes them look is a serious problem that can't be tolerated.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  > The normal people, who account for 99% of the end users of DigiCert's customers, are not going to disable updates on their web browser or their OS to "take a stand" against this decision. I'd imagine that they wouldn't do it to "take a stand" so much as "avoid the risk of getting their stuff broken in the short term" in this scenario, regardless of whichever party loses the blame game. See: the recent WordPress drama, which has turned customers away from both parties involved.
  - jchw 2y ago
    As I understand it, the way certificate authorities are removed from the trust store is progressive: they will announce a date after which new certificates from a given CA will no longer be trusted. I think this can be made even more progressive, by limiting the validity period of new certificates that will be trusted. DigiCert will have little recourse other than to let their customers know, and/or start providing certificates issued by another CA that follows the web PKI procedures and remains trusted. (They can still do that, of course, it's just that their own certificates issued by them directly won't be trusted anymore.) On the flip side, for user impact, it will play out like this: Some bank or other important entity could possibly, for whatever reason, continue using a (presumably expired? unless DigiCert continues issuing anyways; note that most likely, they will not.) DigiCert certificate after the cut off date, which will lead to users receiving errors. Some of them will have HSTS setup, which will lead to an emergency situation where they have to issue a new certificate ASAP, as it will basically halt their business until they do. For places where there is no HSTS, users may be instructed to simply bypass the certificate warning temporarily, and support lines will be absolutely swamped until they actually fix the problem. The WordPress situation is quite different. You don't have to use WordPress. Users don't even know what the Web PKI is to find an alternative to it, not that there is one or will be one.
  - snailmailstare 2y ago
    Sure some users would keep the CA active out of fear, while everyone paying digicert would also begin to move out of fear.. What portion of the strange sort of sites that couldn't figure out how to get off but could figure out how to renew would bother with paying for a different error message?
edelbitter 2y ago
Many systems do not fetch updates from the Mozilla root store, but from their (possibly Debian-derived) stable distribution of it. Meaning two highly respected entities, known for being well aware of the wider impact of their careful enforcement of strict policies, need to agree to cause any major breakage. When that happens, I can blindly trust they did the thing needed to keep the unaffected parts of that weird system working as intended.. and then still head to bugzilla and read about the background - to laugh at whoever triggered the mess.
- SkiFire13 2y ago
  > Meaning two highly respected entities, known for being well aware of the wider impact of their careful enforcement of strict policies, need to agree to cause any major breakage. Note that this is not a "both" but a "any of them". One can disagree with the other on this and still cause wide breakage.
pilif 2y ago
If DigiCert were to lose browser trust (at this point, that's still a big if), it would happen the same way it happened with prior CAs, some of which were pretty big themselves (Symantec): all certificates issued after some date would not be trusted, yes. But all existing certificates would remain valid. This gives certificate owners ample time to look for a different issuer and no certificate buyer would deliberately purchase a certificate from an issuer when they know some percentage of users will not trust that cert. So for the end users, everything will keep working: the existing digicert certs stay valid and newly refreshed certs will be signed by a different authority. There is no need to turn off automatic updates over this. Between Entrust and Symantec, we've already seen this happen to large well-known CAs and everything remained fine (not for the offenders, but, hey, that's the system working as intended)
woodruffw 2y ago
> All it will do is increase the lack of trust in centralised PKI in general. “In general” is a broad statement, given that the overwhelming majority of people using the Web PKI have no idea that they’re doing so. DigiCert is not a legible part of the value chain for the average users; they won’t notice that the sites they use switch CAs. This strong disfavoritism towards vendors is arguably one of the Web PKI’s greatest strengths.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

twisteriffic 2y ago

It's refreshing to see folks who're obviously used to hiding behind clouds of bullshit get skewered by people who both know enough to see through it and have the time and energy to follow every thread to completion. The most recent digicert thread smells suspiciously similar to those that lead up to the Entrust debacle.

chicom_malware 2y ago

> It would certainly send a strong message, and cause a lot of chaos, if the biggest CA on the Internet found itself being removed from trust stores Their customers would be forced to give their business to Honest Achmed[1]. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959

skissane 2y ago
Someone should start a real CA business, complete with all the proper audits and everything to get it into the browser trust stores… and call it “Honest Achmed’s Used Cars and Certificates” (have it buy some random used car dealership in the middle of nowhere so the name is not a lie) Where’s a billionaire troll when you need one? (And a form of billionaire trolling that would upset a lot less people than Musk’s version of it.) Would be even funnier if the billionaire’s name actually was Achmed
- justahuman74 2y ago
  What has prevented this (a good legit CA co) from happening before now?
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    Let's Encrypt has been around for a decade and is doing pretty well for itself. The manual validation required for EV and OV certificates precludes it from being a passion project, unless managing a call center and a squad of document reviewers is your dream job.
    - Thorrez 2y ago
      Let's Encrypt doesn't issue EV and OV. Honest Achmed’s Used Cars and Certificates wouldn't have to either.
      - boricj 2y ago

account42 2y ago

> It would certainly send a strong message, and cause a lot of chaos, if the biggest CA on the Internet found itself being removed from trust stores. Yet, there's no particular reason it couldn't happen. How exciting. Trust stores and Browsers specifically have more options than simply remove a CA. A more reasonable approach for distrust process of a CA this size would be to stop accepting any new certificates issued after a certain date. Then existing customers will have a heads up and even if asleep will find out the bad news during scheduled renewal rather than while the responsible employees are on vacation.

axus 2y ago

Is there any option to turn off trust for all certificates generated after a certain date? The ideal would be to let old certificates keep working, and not trust new ones.

duskwuff 2y ago
It's been done previously, e.g. for Symantec: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-distrust-symantec.html https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-dist...
wolrah 2y ago
Yes, this has been done a few times in the past. It's unfortunate that "distrust after X date" and "distrust now" are the only penalties that currently exist but that's the reality of the current PKI world. There are a lot of efforts to get name constraints widely supported, so a given CA can only issue for certain TLDs or even domains, but it's still not there. That could be a viable punishment for misbehaving CAs in the future, or even an intentionally chosen restriction for CAs that want less strict requirements. Government CAs could be a very useful application, if a CA cert could be name constrained to only issue for .gov.cctld at that point we could basically just let them do whatever they want without concern. Likewise for any small regional CAs, if they could be limited to only regional TLDs their blast radius is reduced which also could mean less strict requirements than those applied to CAs able to sign for .com.
- thayne 2y ago
  It would also be really useful if I could add a "root" CA for my employer's private CA to sign certificates for say .internal or .example.com, but not allow them to sign certs for any arbitrary domain. There's decent support for constraints on intermediate certs, but then you have to trust the root won't ever be used to sign unconstrained intermediates. It would also be useful for localhost. Create a private CA that is constrained to localhost and *.local, and you don't have to worry about it being used to MitM other sites if it gets compromised.
  - 2y ago