5 ms·

Even Akamai screws up their SSL certs

91 points by staunch 13y ago

patcheudor 13y ago
Better yet, where they absolutely mean to use HTTPS they sometimes use weak keys and ciphers and get an "F" from the Qualys SSL Labs tool. Blogs.akamai.com isn't the only place this happens: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blogs.akamai.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blogs.akamai....
- patcheudor 13y ago
  Someone's parents are going to be really mad about this report card: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=developer.akamai.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=developer.aka... https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=a248.e.akamai.net https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=a248.e.akamai... https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=network.akamai.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=network.akama... The thing is, the worst part is knowing a child is capable of A's: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=control.akamai.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=control.akama...
  - brians 13y ago
    That's my report card. The grades are up to Cs now and should be As within a day. I'm glad Ivan and Qualys are helping show us where we really are.
    - patcheudor 13y ago
      Awesome! Glad to see this getting resolved. And one more thing. We are proud of you son.
- mnordhoff 13y ago
  Not the biggest crisis. Okay, they have several awful cipher suites enabled, but no sane client would ever use them. The client report shows that almost every client uses AES; a couple crappy ones use RC4 or 3DES. They don't have PFS, either. That's bad, though unfortunately still common. As far as I know Akamai's position is that the (small) performance cost of PFS is unacceptable. They would be delighted if it was faster (which people are working on). I think the F is because of the 1024-bit, MD5 CA. That seems to be more of an argument for clients to disable that CA certificate, especially since there's another, good trust path, but maybe I'm missing something.
  - patcheudor 13y ago
    All great points. The biggest issue I see with their apparent lack of consideration towards a passable SSL/TLS configuration is that it extends outside of their own corporate web space to impact their customers. As just one example: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ozsale.com.au https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ozsale.com.au You'll see in the Qualys report that the Akamai accelerated Ozsales gets an "F" & from the Qualys report you'll note that results in a PCI compliance failure (near the bottom of this report): https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.ozsale.com.au&s=23.204.176.90 https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.ozsale.co...
  - tmx 13y ago
    > no sane client would ever use them Unfortunately, that's not the case. From RFC 5246: Note: some server implementations are known to implement version negotiation incorrectly. For example, there are buggy TLS 1.0 servers that simply close the connection when the client offers a version newer than TLS 1.0. Also, it is known that some servers will refuse the connection if any TLS extensions are included in ClientHello. Interoperability with such buggy servers is a complex topic beyond the scope of this document, and may require multiple connection attempts by the client. An attacker that can insert themselves between client and server can cause a negotiation failure - causing the client or server to negotiate a weaker protocol/cipher combination - so its still important to disable weak cipher suites on the server, especially with browsers as old as IE 6 or 7 still kicking around.
  - brians 13y ago
    Indeed, it looks like that's a bug in the SSL labs rating scheme: given two trust paths, it takes the longer one. The Baltimore root is trusted, but also signed by the old GTE 1024-bit root. It's not clear to me what harm it does to have an appendix of old roots above a well-managed, trustworthy trusted root.
    - ivanr 13y ago
      No, the issue is not with the trust paths. The old 1024-bit root is in Mozilla's trust store, where it's a danger to everyone. SSL Labs reuses their store, which is why the weak root shows up in the trust paths. Technically, the F for blogs.akamai.com was a bug (now corrected; the grade after the fix is C). I say "technically" not because I approve of export cipher suites, but because the implementation did not follow the documentation (the rating guide, linked from every report). Export suites are hopelessly weak and will be treated more harshly in the next guide revision. The new grade is certainly not something to be happy about.
agwa 13y ago
Actually, they probably don't intend for people to use www.akamai.com with HTTPS. If you add an override for the bad cert, you end up getting redirected to a non-HTTPS site anyways. I don't see anything like a login link on www.akamai.com so this is probably OK. (Of course it would be nice if everything were HTTPS...)
- pipeep 13y ago
  > Of course it would be nice if everything were HTTPS... Nice try, Certificate Authorities!
  - fragmede 13y ago
    >> Of course it would be nice if everything were HTTPS... > Nice try, Certificate Authorities! Nice try, NSA.
    - richforrester 13y ago
      >>> Of course it would be nice if everything were HTTPS... >> Nice try, Certificate Authorities! > Nice try, NSA. Nice try, HN.
      - gouggoug 13y ago
        Nice try... wait, this is not on reddit. Let's stop the joke now.
  - Shish2k 13y ago
    It would be nice if everything were HTTPS, but the default behaviour for a self-signed cert was "accept it the first time, but don't show the lock icon or anything, and then warn if it changes" - ie self-signed HTTPS is the new HTTP
- slipangel 13y ago
  The a248 cert is used for all SSL requests for properties delivered over Akamai's non-ssl network. It's useful to be able to serve SSL requests even if the cert doesn't have a the hostname in question on it. Regarding the cipher sneering below: Akamai's default settings probably err on the side of acceptance. Not all of their customers are Amazon.coms - mom & pop ecommerce are unlikely to do anything that would cause a visitor's SSL connection to fail, and changing the ciphers back to the high-acceptance settings would increase their cost of implementation per cert. I'm guessing they manage more than a few of those.
Mindless2112 13y ago
Only partly related: Most websites don't get proper certificates for their FQDN -- even Google [1]. That, to me, is screwed up. [1] https://www.google.com./ https://www.google.com./
- theGimp 13y ago
  That works just fine for me.
  - cynix 13y ago
    Works in Chrome 32, does not work in Firefox 26.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      Does not work in Chrome 26 (yeah, ancient version, I know).
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - chrismorgan 13y ago
    It shouldn't; if it does, it is most likely that your browser is removing the trailing dot which makes it a FQDN. Firefox's verdict: > www.google.com. uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for www.google.com The fact of the matter is that FQDNs are probably only used in three ways: 1. By accident; 2. As a curio; 3. In complaints about how they don't work properly—badly configured server configurations, invalid HTTPS certificates, &c.
- Buge 13y ago
  I don't think it's possible to buy a certificate with a dot at the end, so I don't see how this is Google's problem. It seems to be either a problem with Firefox or with the domain name system in general. It looks like the problem should be fixed in 2016 because then all non-FQDN certificates will have expired. Then browsers can go ahead and assume that google.com. in a url is the same as google.com in a certificate.
dredmorbius 13y ago
This issue has been hitting APM's MarketPlace website (https://www.marketplace.org/ https://www.marketplace.org/) for at least a year now. Mucks up their CSS as well, best I can tell.
dsl 13y ago
This happens with almost any Akamai'zed domain, if you drop https:// https:// in front of it you get the shared Akamai cert. Customers that pay for SSL get their own pool of IPs that respond with only their cert. Same thing happens with any shared web host that happens to listen on SSL.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- tantalor 13y ago
  So Akamai couldn't afford to pay themselves for their own IP pool and SSL cert? Poor guys.
  - dsl 13y ago
    The customer portal is at https://control.akamai.com/ https://control.akamai.com/ www is literally just a sales site.
jdubs 13y ago
I blame the keystore and the dreaded keytool.
hercynium 13y ago
chuckles This isn't a SSL cert screw-up, but certainly a silly misconfiguration. They should certainly have known better than to let that happen. To be fair... when I worked there, I thought about different ways to transparently enable SSL across all domains using a CDN that would work with all existing SSL-enabled browsers and it's a freakin' hard problem. There are potential solutions, but they're not particularly cheap or simple given the IPv4 address crunch and for Akamai even more so since the edge servers are so widely distributed. Bottom line - I never pitched the idea anyway because while I was interested in making the internet a better place, I knew that it was DOA at Akamai because they're much more interested in making it a more profitable place, and I couldn't think of a strong-enough business case...
- tantalor 13y ago
  It might compete with their current, which bundles SSL with dedicated, static IPs. Although IPv6 should solve that scarcity.
ggoddard 13y ago
https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/428228534675308545 https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/428228534675308545
acdha 13y ago
The main site is basically marketing - their customer portal, which actually has sensitive content uses HTTPS sanely: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=control.akamai.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=control.akama...

91 points by staunch 13y ago

Better yet, where they absolutely mean to use HTTPS they sometimes use weak keys and ciphers and get an "F" from the Qualys SSL Labs tool. Blogs.akamai.com isn't the only place this happens: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blogs.akamai.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blogs.akamai....

patcheudor 13y ago
Someone's parents are going to be really mad about this report card: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=developer.akamai.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=developer.aka... https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=a248.e.akamai.net https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=a248.e.akamai... https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=network.akamai.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=network.akama... The thing is, the worst part is knowing a child is capable of A's: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=control.akamai.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=control.akama...
- brians 13y ago
  That's my report card. The grades are up to Cs now and should be As within a day. I'm glad Ivan and Qualys are helping show us where we really are.
  - patcheudor 13y ago
    Awesome! Glad to see this getting resolved. And one more thing. We are proud of you son.
mnordhoff 13y ago
Not the biggest crisis. Okay, they have several awful cipher suites enabled, but no sane client would ever use them. The client report shows that almost every client uses AES; a couple crappy ones use RC4 or 3DES. They don't have PFS, either. That's bad, though unfortunately still common. As far as I know Akamai's position is that the (small) performance cost of PFS is unacceptable. They would be delighted if it was faster (which people are working on). I think the F is because of the 1024-bit, MD5 CA. That seems to be more of an argument for clients to disable that CA certificate, especially since there's another, good trust path, but maybe I'm missing something.
- patcheudor 13y ago
  All great points. The biggest issue I see with their apparent lack of consideration towards a passable SSL/TLS configuration is that it extends outside of their own corporate web space to impact their customers. As just one example: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ozsale.com.au https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ozsale.com.au You'll see in the Qualys report that the Akamai accelerated Ozsales gets an "F" & from the Qualys report you'll note that results in a PCI compliance failure (near the bottom of this report): https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.ozsale.com.au&s=23.204.176.90 https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.ozsale.co...
- tmx 13y ago
  > no sane client would ever use them Unfortunately, that's not the case. From RFC 5246: Note: some server implementations are known to implement version negotiation incorrectly. For example, there are buggy TLS 1.0 servers that simply close the connection when the client offers a version newer than TLS 1.0. Also, it is known that some servers will refuse the connection if any TLS extensions are included in ClientHello. Interoperability with such buggy servers is a complex topic beyond the scope of this document, and may require multiple connection attempts by the client. An attacker that can insert themselves between client and server can cause a negotiation failure - causing the client or server to negotiate a weaker protocol/cipher combination - so its still important to disable weak cipher suites on the server, especially with browsers as old as IE 6 or 7 still kicking around.
- brians 13y ago
  Indeed, it looks like that's a bug in the SSL labs rating scheme: given two trust paths, it takes the longer one. The Baltimore root is trusted, but also signed by the old GTE 1024-bit root. It's not clear to me what harm it does to have an appendix of old roots above a well-managed, trustworthy trusted root.
  - ivanr 13y ago
    No, the issue is not with the trust paths. The old 1024-bit root is in Mozilla's trust store, where it's a danger to everyone. SSL Labs reuses their store, which is why the weak root shows up in the trust paths. Technically, the F for blogs.akamai.com was a bug (now corrected; the grade after the fix is C). I say "technically" not because I approve of export cipher suites, but because the implementation did not follow the documentation (the rating guide, linked from every report). Export suites are hopelessly weak and will be treated more harshly in the next guide revision. The new grade is certainly not something to be happy about.

agwa 13y ago

Actually, they probably don't intend for people to use www.akamai.com with HTTPS. If you add an override for the bad cert, you end up getting redirected to a non-HTTPS site anyways. I don't see anything like a login link on www.akamai.com so this is probably OK. (Of course it would be nice if everything were HTTPS...)

pipeep 13y ago
> Of course it would be nice if everything were HTTPS... Nice try, Certificate Authorities!
- fragmede 13y ago
  >> Of course it would be nice if everything were HTTPS... > Nice try, Certificate Authorities! Nice try, NSA.
  - richforrester 13y ago
    >>> Of course it would be nice if everything were HTTPS... >> Nice try, Certificate Authorities! > Nice try, NSA. Nice try, HN.
    - gouggoug 13y ago
      Nice try... wait, this is not on reddit. Let's stop the joke now.
- Shish2k 13y ago
  It would be nice if everything were HTTPS, but the default behaviour for a self-signed cert was "accept it the first time, but don't show the lock icon or anything, and then warn if it changes" - ie self-signed HTTPS is the new HTTP
slipangel 13y ago
The a248 cert is used for all SSL requests for properties delivered over Akamai's non-ssl network. It's useful to be able to serve SSL requests even if the cert doesn't have a the hostname in question on it. Regarding the cipher sneering below: Akamai's default settings probably err on the side of acceptance. Not all of their customers are Amazon.coms - mom & pop ecommerce are unlikely to do anything that would cause a visitor's SSL connection to fail, and changing the ciphers back to the high-acceptance settings would increase their cost of implementation per cert. I'm guessing they manage more than a few of those.

Mindless2112 13y ago

Only partly related: Most websites don't get proper certificates for their FQDN -- even Google [1]. That, to me, is screwed up. [1] https://www.google.com./ https://www.google.com./

theGimp 13y ago
That works just fine for me.
- cynix 13y ago
  Works in Chrome 32, does not work in Firefox 26.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    Does not work in Chrome 26 (yeah, ancient version, I know).
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- chrismorgan 13y ago
  It shouldn't; if it does, it is most likely that your browser is removing the trailing dot which makes it a FQDN. Firefox's verdict: > www.google.com. uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for www.google.com The fact of the matter is that FQDNs are probably only used in three ways: 1. By accident; 2. As a curio; 3. In complaints about how they don't work properly—badly configured server configurations, invalid HTTPS certificates, &c.
Buge 13y ago
I don't think it's possible to buy a certificate with a dot at the end, so I don't see how this is Google's problem. It seems to be either a problem with Firefox or with the domain name system in general. It looks like the problem should be fixed in 2016 because then all non-FQDN certificates will have expired. Then browsers can go ahead and assume that google.com. in a url is the same as google.com in a certificate.

dredmorbius 13y ago

This issue has been hitting APM's MarketPlace website (https://www.marketplace.org/ https://www.marketplace.org/) for at least a year now. Mucks up their CSS as well, best I can tell.

dsl 13y ago

This happens with almost any Akamai'zed domain, if you drop https:// https:// in front of it you get the shared Akamai cert. Customers that pay for SSL get their own pool of IPs that respond with only their cert. Same thing happens with any shared web host that happens to listen on SSL.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tantalor 13y ago
So Akamai couldn't afford to pay themselves for their own IP pool and SSL cert? Poor guys.
- dsl 13y ago
  The customer portal is at https://control.akamai.com/ https://control.akamai.com/ www is literally just a sales site.

jdubs 13y ago

I blame the keystore and the dreaded keytool.

hercynium 13y ago

chuckles This isn't a SSL cert screw-up, but certainly a silly misconfiguration. They should certainly have known better than to let that happen. To be fair... when I worked there, I thought about different ways to transparently enable SSL across all domains using a CDN that would work with all existing SSL-enabled browsers and it's a freakin' hard problem. There are potential solutions, but they're not particularly cheap or simple given the IPv4 address crunch and for Akamai even more so since the edge servers are so widely distributed. Bottom line - I never pitched the idea anyway because while I was interested in making the internet a better place, I knew that it was DOA at Akamai because they're much more interested in making it a more profitable place, and I couldn't think of a strong-enough business case...

tantalor 13y ago
It might compete with their current, which bundles SSL with dedicated, static IPs. Although IPv6 should solve that scarcity.

ggoddard 13y ago

https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/428228534675308545 https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/428228534675308545

acdha 13y ago

The main site is basically marketing - their customer portal, which actually has sensitive content uses HTTPS sanely: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=control.akamai.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=control.akama...