4 ms·
This is kind of amazing. I'm suspicious that the site operator has absolutely no idea what they're doing. > DoD Cyber Exchange site is undergoing a TSSL Certi
by amluto 7mo ago
This is kind of amazing. I'm suspicious that the site operator has absolutely no idea what they're doing.
> DoD Cyber Exchange site is undergoing a TSSL Certification renewal
I'm imagining someone searching around for a consulting or testing company that will help them get a personal TSSL Certification, whatever that is (a quick search suggests that it does not exist, as one would expect). And perhaps they have no idea what TLS is or how any modern WebPKI works, which is extra amazing, since cyber.mil is apparently a government PKI provider (see the top bar).
Of course, the DoD realized that their whole web certificate system was incompatible with ordinary browsers and they wrote a memo (which you have to click past the certificate error to read):
https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/pki-pke/pdf/unclass-cio_memo_update_commercial_certs.pdf https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/pki-pke/pdf/uncl...
saying that, through February 2024, unclassified DoD sites are permitted to use ordinary commercial CAs.
If the DoD were remotely competent at this sort of thing, they would (a) have CAA records (because their written policy does nothing whatsoever to tell the CA/B-compliant CAs of the world not to issue .mil certificates, (b) run their own intermediate CA that had a signature from a root CA (or was even a root CA itself), and (c) use automatically-renewed short-lived certificates for the actual websites.
cyber.mil currently uses IdenTrust, which claims to be DoD approved. They also, ahem, claim to support ACME:
> In support of the broader CA community, IdenTrust—through HID and the acquisition of ZeroSSL—actively contributes to the development and maintenance of major open-source ACME clients, including Caddy Server and ACME.sh. These efforts help promote accessibility, interoperability, and automation in certificate management.
Err... does that mean that they actually support ACME on their DoD-approved certificates or does that mean that they bought some companies that participate in the ACME ecosystem? (ACME is not amazing except in contrast to what came before and as an exercise in getting something reasonable deployed in a very stodgy ecosystem, but ACME plus a well-designed DNS-01 implementation plus CAA can be very secure.)
The offending certificate is:
Certificate:
Data:
Version: 3 (0x2)
Serial Number:
40:01:95:b4:87:b3:a3:a9:12:e0:d7:21:f8:b3:91:61
Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption
Issuer: C=US, O=IdenTrust, OU=TrustID Server, CN=TrustID Server CA O1
Validity
Not Before: Mar 20 17:09:07 2025 GMT
Not After : Mar 20 17:08:07 2026 GMT
Subject: C=US, ST=Maryland, L=Fort Meade, O=DEFENSE INFORMATION SYSTEMS AGENCY, CN=public.cyber.mil
At least the site uses TLS 1.3.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago> If the DoD were remotely competent at this sort of thing That's probably one of the things they were forced to contract out.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- charcircuit 7mo agoI think you underestimate the number of people who accidentally have their https carts expire. Instead of blaming the people running these systems on why they let it expires, it would be more productive to improve the system to make this less likely to happen.
- JoshTriplett 7mo agoWhich is exactly what has happened, with an automated protocol for certificate renewal.
- charcircuit 7mo agoEven with that existing there are still holes with that solution as it's still happening.
- alexjplant 7mo agoACME [1] has been a thing for more than 10 years and has been a stable specification for 7 years. There were similar vendor-specific implementations that preceded it. The DoD has employed none of these solutions for their flagship infosec public web presence. If they were going to automate this then they surely would have done so by now. The reasons why are opaque but people who have experience working in this space might be able to make an educated guess. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Certificate_Management_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Certificate_Manageme...