10 ms·

The SSL Co-operative: A Member-Controlled Certification Authority

112 points by SworDsy 12y ago

JoshTriplett 12y ago
I'll say the same thing here that I said in a response to the survey: I'd be interested in taking part in a CA co-op that seeks membership/sponsorship to cover its infrastructure costs (including the huge initial cost of becoming an accepted CA), but that does not charge to issue certificates, including wildcard certificates. Certificates cost approximately nothing to issue, and most of the CA's infrastructure would not need significant scaling with the issuance of more certificates. Manual validation of human/organization identities (the type that requires reading identity documents, such as for EV) costs money, and that could have associated fees, but it doesn't need to occur on a per-certificate basis. And automatable validation costs nothing. In particular, wildcard certificates don't need to cost any more than standard certificates, and no-cost wildcard certificates would change the SSL landscape significantly. Today, any service that uses subdomains incurs significant fees to secure those subdomains.
- pugz 12y ago
  That sounds very much like the service that is already offered by StartSSL.com. You pay for identity validation, but you can then create as many regular and wildcard certificates as you wish. It's a superb service.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - blibble 12y ago
    it's a superb service, until you want a revocation, then they try to extort $25/revocation out of you (even if you've been a long term paying customer) this may be OK if you have only issued one cert, but if you've issued a few hundred (which is the main point of StartSSL: pay once and issue many), then you are SOL unless you can afford to plonk down thousands of dollars. more here: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140409/11442426859/shameful-security-startcom-charges-people-to-revoke-ssl-certs-vulnerable-to-heartbleed.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140409/11442426859/shame... the CEO (Eddy Nigg) is similarly patronising over email too.
    - dochtman 12y ago
      To be fair, it seems like they have a point that revocation is actually expensive for them.
      - aianus 12y ago
        Where does it say that? I would assume it's just as easy as issuing them in the first place.
        Someone1234 12y ago
        You would assume wrong. Revocation is a massive PITA.
        Karunamon 12y ago
        Why? It appears a CRL is nothing more than a file containing blobs of DER-encoded cert files.
        womble 12y ago
        Running a revocation service is an annoyingly fiddly job, but all of that needs to be setup and running before you become a CA. Pretty much all of the faffing around is in the need to regularly regenerate (including signing with the CA key) CRLs and OCSP responder certificates. Like the rest of a CA's operation, revoking an individual certificate should be a miniscule incremental cost, modulo the larger CRL size due to the added fingerprint. I was rather surprised that so many people are sucking down CRLs, but clearly they do (http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-hard-costs-of-heartbleed http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-hard-costs-of-heartbleed).
    - the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
      Since the revocation protocol is broken anyways I don't really think this is a real problem.
      - womble 12y ago
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    I use and like StartCom certificates, but they wouldn't solve this problem. Wildcard certificates should not require identity validation; you should be able to get a domain-validated wildcard certificate for free. Also, their free certificates expire every year; domain-validated certificates should only require revalidation if the domain changes hands.
    - womble 12y ago
      There are rules being introduced against issuing certificates for more than about three years (you can still get five years certs at the moment, but not for much longer); this is more to limit the risk of private key compromise than it is to require people to revalidate. I don't find it too onerous to have to install a new cert every year or so (he says, with several certs currently expired).
      - JoshTriplett 12y ago
        Still, I'd suggest issuing certificates for the maximum allowed length, unless requested shorter. Scalable revocation is possible; follow best practices for encryption keys by keeping a separate offline copy of a signed revocation request.
        womble 12y ago
        Revocation for X509 certs is a very different matter to that of revoking PGP keys. For X509, the CA can revoke the cert unilaterally, or at the request of the subscriber without the need for the subject private key. In fact, I'm not aware of the existence of a subject-side revocation process that doesn't involve the cooperation of the CA.
  - 0x0 12y ago
    Do take note that they will reject and/or also refuse renewal if they think the domain whois doesn't exactly identify you, even if you confirm the domain webmaster validation. Lots of hassle if your domains have other entities or business names listed as the whois admin contact.
- raving-richard 12y ago
  Pretty much what I was thinking. Here's what I almost sent as a response to the survey: This is a brilliant idea. I would pay up to $50 a year for the pleasure of being able to get domain validated SSL certs that are trusted by the major browsers. I would assume that the validation would be via emailing webmaster@domain and making them either respond or click a link or something. That could all be automated couldn't it. Also, make wildcard certificates for domains available for the same low price, because it shouldn't take any more work should it. If I control example.org, then I think it's obvious that I control www.example.org and slighly-biased.example.org. But then you have the issue of, if Org A controls com.au, that doesn't mean they control mywebsite.com.au. I don't know how you would automate that issue. The non-automated stuff, make people pay for it. Seriously.
  - ehPReth 12y ago
    Mozilla created https://publicsuffix.org/ https://publicsuffix.org/ - perhaps that could help with com.au vs. example.com.au?
    - raving-richard 12y ago
      That's brilliant. I was wondering if there was a list that actually provided the relevant information. Thanks for the link.
  - euank 12y ago
    Well, one way to automatedly ensure someone controls all the subdomains a wildcard certificate gives would be to ask them to create dns records indicating that. Basically, the CA could say "you want *.example.com, then create a dns txt record at mzzafr2pr.example.com with the following text: F5cbUl7pL2JM7z and click here. We'll get back to you once we see the dns change propagate". If I can create a random subdomain they suggest within a wildcard range, that makes it almost certain I can create every subdomain.
    - vladd 12y ago
      This breaks for obvious cases such as mzzafr2pr.blogspot.com
- joosters 12y ago
  StartCom charges $60 for a wildcard certificate that will be accepted by just about every important browser out there. You might even be able to get them cheaper elsewhere. There are not any significant costs to obtaining SSL certificates, so a new CA is hardly likely to change the SSL landscape at all.
  - cs02rm0 12y ago
    I disagree, I think free would be a significant difference. A low barrier vs. no barrier.
    - dtech 12y ago
      But this initiative (however good) will also not provide a no-barrier approach. You need to be a member of the coop (with associated fees) to request certificates. Which is logical. Running a CA and getting the root certificate into the right places is not cheap. Unless someone with money (e.g. Google, as they do with their CDN) decides to provide this service for free some money needs to be earned.
      - womble 12y ago
        (disclosure: I'm the SSL co-op guy) All of Google's free services (CDN, DNS, Chrome, etc) are centred around improving the experience of using the web, so more people use it for longer (and, hopefully, do more searches with Google and/or visit more webpages with AdSense ads on them). I'm not sure how more SSL-secured traffic feeds into that, exactly, but if anyone at Google wants to talk sponsorship, I'm all ears...
  - womble 12y ago
    (I'm the sslcoop.org guy) StartCom's $60 wildcard is the cheapest I've ever seen. I'm impressed with StartCom's model overall, and it was a great inspiration to me with the SSL co-op. I feel like the more diversity in approaches there is, the better off the CA ecosystem will be. If nothing else, another voice for sanity in the relevant standards bodies (CA/Browser Forum, for instance) can only be of value.
- lauriswtf 12y ago
  With all the cheap SSL providers[0] today, I don't really have an issue buying the certificates anymore. When they used to cost a small fortune, I was really restrained to buy a certificate for every small web project, but now the situation has improved. [0] - https://getssl.me/ https://getssl.me/
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- dtech 12y ago
  StartSSL/Startcom already does not charge for individual (wildcard) certificates, you can request unlimited numbers. You do pay a $60 fee for identity validation, which is valid for 2 years. You can also have automated validation, but they don't allow wildcard certificates (which I sort-of understand, they do need to make money some way right) So you get unlimited free non-wildcard certificates or unlimited wildcard certificates for $30/year. Not a bad deal.
  - dspillett 12y ago
    > So you get unlimited free non-wildcard certificates Do note the "no commercial use" clause on the free certificates. Not an issue for any of my uses but it may affect quite a few people. Though I'm not sure how they would enforce this. Of course if you can't afford $60 for two years for the next grade up, then your commercial venture is probably not a roaring success!
    - Someone1234 12y ago
      > Though I'm not sure how they would enforce this. Revoke the certificate.
      - dspillett 12y ago
        But how do they detect that enforcement is even necessary? (other than regular whois lookups assuming that data is correct (probably too much hassle), checking the sites secured by the certificates (even more hassle), or someone "dobbing you in")
  - IgorPartola 12y ago
    Apparently StartSSL does charge you quite a bit to revoke a free certificate. That bit a lot of people when Heartbleed happened. See https://www.startssl.com/?app=37 https://www.startssl.com/?app=37.
    - Someone1234 12y ago
      That's partly because of how the revocation infrastructure operates. It definitely adds cost, including generating CRL, trimming the CRL as certificates expire (could be 10 years into the future), and running the revocation server itself.
colmmacc 12y ago
http://www.cacert.org/ http://www.cacert.org/ is a similar-ish effort that's been ongoing for quite a long time.
- Tomte 12y ago
  Unfortunately they are so messed up, it isn't even funny. Honestly, my experiences with CAcert were awful. Pressuring people into signing legal contracts that are just laughably unfair was just one part of it. They may have been a likable organisation at the begininng (maybe with a penchant for over-the-top policy), but when they realized they wouldn't get into major browsers by default, they tried to get "serious", changing too much too fast and wrecking the whole thing. Without the big result they were hoping for.
- CMCDragonkai 12y ago
  It's sad that debian removed them. I think cacert needs more dedicated governance. If all the money we spent on ssl certificates could be pooled together to create non-profit organisation dedicated to public certificates, it would be awesome! And we could probably get opensource PKI infrastructure.
  - womble 12y ago
    (I'm the sslcoop.org guy) "If all the money we spent on ssl certificates..." And thus was sslcoop.org born! I'm not sure what you mean by "opensource PKI infrastructure", exactly, but as a long time F/OSS hacker, I'm definitely planning on putting everything that's developed for the SSL co-op under an open licence. But the software's the easy bit. The hard part is the work required to define processes and policies, get everything audited, and then getting through the inclusion process for all the browsers. That's what takes somewhat more organisation (and money) than writing some code and running openssl...
    - TsukasaUjiie 12y ago
      iirc the WebTrust Audit required for such a system is in the ~$100,000 range. Why abandon existing initiatives to start another undermanned community based authority. I think the focus should really be in jumpstarting CACert (overhauling its governance model) and building on its existing infrastructure and user/assurer base (As an assurer I'm probably biased here). Of course this would be hard work and less self fulfilling than doing the F/OSS dance and re-inventing the wheel..
meowtaxi 12y ago
Am I the only one that finds it hillarious (or troubling) that the SSL cert for this site is for a different host name?
- joosters 12y ago
  Yes, let's trust these people to run a certificate authority when they aren't competent enough to set up SSL properly on their own site...
- womble 12y ago
  (I'm the sslcoop.org guy) Yeah, well, I haven't worked out how to tell nginx to look at the SNI for a HTTPS request and bomb out completely if it doesn't match any SSL-enabled vhost. Unless you've got pervasive IPv6 -- then I can set everything up so manually mangling URLs to use HTTPS doesn't cause problems (there's no links to HTTPS resources on sslcoop.org)... Turns out the real scarce resource is IPv4 addresses -- but we already knew that. ipv6coop.org, anyone? (grin)
  - sandGorgon 12y ago
    if you find a way, could you post a gist here please !!
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - tombrossman 12y ago
    Possibly a stupid question, but why not make whichever vhost is correctly configured for SSL your default? Any traffic will go there unless another match is found. This is what I do to force SSL and redirect anything not matching another vhost. Catch-all + HTTP --> HTTPS server { # Set server name & make it the default for this IP address listen 80 default_server; listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; return 301 https://EXAMPLE.TLD$request_uri; } Or, rewrite HTTPS to HTTP for that vhost only server { listen 443; server_name EXAMPLE.TLD; return 301 http://EXAMPLE.TLD$request_uri; } Mozilla's server-side TLS wiki at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS is the best documentation I've found yet, and includes great examples of complete configs for various servers. Hope that helps.
deleted 12y ago
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leccine 12y ago
NSA, is that you? :) (Thanks for the downvotes in advance)
- codezero 12y ago
  What about this post makes you think the NSA is or would be involved?
  - leccine 12y ago
    I think the question you should ask yourself is: how is the NSA involved in the currently established CA system? The answer (to your question) is , the very same way. Besides, who does think that having an alternative CA provider is going to change anything? The crypto empowering security nowadays is un-trusted, implementations proven containing backdoors, and on the top of that all the implementations are written in languages that can't be formally verified and there are serious security bugs every other week. Back to the topic, what is this new CA group addressing? Which part of this chain that going to be fixed by any mean with this initiative? I guess the answer is none. :)
    - codezero 12y ago
      How is the NSA involved in the currently established CA system?
      - leccine 12y ago
        2 ways, A, creating rogue cert by md5 collisions (they have the capacity) B, making people believe that a CA guarantees the identity of the issuer, while having their CA in the approved list so they can sign certs (for example like gmail.com) There is good documentation about it: http://files.cloudprivacy.net/ssl-mitm.pdf http://files.cloudprivacy.net/ssl-mitm.pdf
        MichaelGG 12y ago
        Except if the NSA did sign Gmail in any non-trivial capacity, it'd certainly be noticed and the offending CA would be removed or put out of business or something like that. Plus it'd draw lots of attention to the NSA directly. If they did want to sign something publicly, they'd just compromise some third-world CA and have them take the blame. There's plenty of them in there. Or they could just sign up as a Comodo reseller.
michaelbuckbee 12y ago
There's an assumption in this that domain validated certificates can be wholly automated. But, in the same way that spammers seek out open SMTP relays, phishers seek out weak SSL validation systems for use in setting up phishing sites. CA's currently maintain internal keyword warning systems that flag domain validated requests for manual intervention. Anything that even hints that it is involved with a major company, church, charity, bank or financial institution gets flagged and approved manually.
- ademarre 12y ago
  Interesting. Perhaps an alternative to the keyword warning system you describe (for SSL certs only) could be to scan the candidate CN for existing SSL certs. If any are found, flag it for manual review, or possibly come up with a proof system whereby the applicant proves he is the holder of the former certificate.
  - michaelbuckbee 12y ago
    The problem is that phishers register sound alike domains like info-secure-apple.com or atlanta-usbank.com, that were completely clean prior to issuance.
    - ademarre 12y ago
      One could argue that should be okay for a class of certificate without identity/organization verification.
      - MichaelGG 12y ago
        Actually, yeah, they should. Info Secure Apple. Make a comment forum about fruit-borne illness. Why should that be denied because there are companies using one of those words? What we "need" more of is EV-style validation, so I can see that the site I'm on is an actual company registered in whichever territory. Otherwise all it indicates is that an email address with the associated domain is linked to the private key for this site. Not really what most people are looking for.
renarenasaini 12y ago
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DoubleMalt 12y ago
A couple of questions: - Where do you plan to place the infrastructure of the cooperative? - What is your expected timeline to issue Browser accepted certificates? - Are you planning to provide an API for signing CSRs? I am currently working on a solution for self hosted messaging and file synchronization, and your project would complement our efforts to give people the possibility to self-host securely.
- womble 12y ago
  (I'm the SSL co-op guy) - Probably in Australia, at least at first, since that's where I'm based. I'd like the DR site to be in Europe, if possible, but that might not be a day 1 achievement. - I'd like to be able to issue certs from day one of the co-op, via a reseller or other arrangement -- that might cost a few dollars per cert, though. It's a minimum of two years from "let's do this!" to being accepted in all the browsers, though (look at the Mozilla inclusion timeline for an idea of best case: https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:How_to_apply#Timeline https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:How_to_apply#Timeline) - An API is definitely intended from day one. My general architecture for these kinds of systems is API for everyone, and the website just talks to the same API that the general public does. I'd love to talk to you more about how the co-op could help you with your system.
opendais 12y ago
I'm mainly favor in this because I could trust the cooperative more than I trust the existing CAs. As long as it doesn't cost me more than the existing cheapest options [e.g. StartSSL, NameCheap's cheap ssl certs] and had 99.7%+ coverage, I'm 100% sure I'd pay for it.. :)
darrenkopp 12y ago
I'm failing to see how this differs from http://www.cacert.org/ http://www.cacert.org/, though perhaps this would be more strict on participation?
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  Well, currently CACert certs are not accepted by any major browsers, so while it's a great idea, without funding it's dead in the water.
- womble 12y ago
  (disclosure: I'm the SSL co-op guy) CAcert's goal is to issue certificates for free, by implementing an alternate identity validation model. The SSL co-op's goal is to issue a subset of certificates for free, by having those who take advantage of that service share in the costs of running the infrastructure required to do so. CAcert's determination to stick to its guns on doing everything "on the cheap" is admirable, and I'd quite honestly much prefer it if they succeeded (it'd be a lot less work for me, for one thing). However, looking at the browser inclusion landscape as it currently exists, I have doubts that CAcert has much hope of ever being widely accepted in the browsers. Worse, you can only change the rules about inclusion if you're already in the club... it's a nasty chicken-and-egg problem.
IgorPartola 12y ago
What would make sense to me more than an SSL co-op would actually be a registrar that gives you a free wildcard certificate for every domain you register. You almost always need a certificate for every domain you use, so why not bundle the two? I wonder if doing a crowdsourced bootstrap of such a registrar would work.
- womble 12y ago
  I'm not averse to that idea, in principle. Heck, that sounds like a nice complementary business idea -- you run a DNS registrar that offers a free domain-validated wildcard certificate with every domain sold, and get your certs from the co-op. The costs would be minimal -- there's bugger-all required to start a domain name reselling business, and SSL co-op membership is shaping up to be more on the "consumer" end, rather than "retailer" cost structure, so there wouldn't be significant costs there, either. I don't think it would need crowdsourced funding to get started, honestly. The game-changing of the SSL co-op has already started! New business models are taking shape! (grin)
eximius 12y ago
I will gladly run a member organization to lower the barrier of entry to end-users and non-businesses. No one should have to sacrifice security because they don't want to fork over that kind of cash. I run a forum I want Wildcard SSL on but I don't want to buy one since I currently spend no more than $30/year to host it. The Wildcard SSL Cert alone would cost double that at some of the cheapest places. If I can fix my problem and others, count me in.
- womble 12y ago
  "No one should have to sacrifice security because they don't want to fork over that sort of cash" It's a bit long to be the SSL co-op's tagline, but as a motto, you've pretty much hit the nail exactly on the head.

112 points by SworDsy 12y ago

I'll say the same thing here that I said in a response to the survey: I'd be interested in taking part in a CA co-op that seeks membership/sponsorship to cover its infrastructure costs (including the huge initial cost of becoming an accepted CA), but that does not charge to issue certificates, including wildcard certificates. Certificates cost approximately nothing to issue, and most of the CA's infrastructure would not need significant scaling with the issuance of more certificates. Manual validation of human/organization identities (the type that requires reading identity documents, such as for EV) costs money, and that could have associated fees, but it doesn't need to occur on a per-certificate basis. And automatable validation costs nothing. In particular, wildcard certificates don't need to cost any more than standard certificates, and no-cost wildcard certificates would change the SSL landscape significantly. Today, any service that uses subdomains incurs significant fees to secure those subdomains.

pugz 12y ago
That sounds very much like the service that is already offered by StartSSL.com. You pay for identity validation, but you can then create as many regular and wildcard certificates as you wish. It's a superb service.
- deleted 12y ago
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- blibble 12y ago
  it's a superb service, until you want a revocation, then they try to extort $25/revocation out of you (even if you've been a long term paying customer) this may be OK if you have only issued one cert, but if you've issued a few hundred (which is the main point of StartSSL: pay once and issue many), then you are SOL unless you can afford to plonk down thousands of dollars. more here: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140409/11442426859/shameful-security-startcom-charges-people-to-revoke-ssl-certs-vulnerable-to-heartbleed.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140409/11442426859/shame... the CEO (Eddy Nigg) is similarly patronising over email too.
  - dochtman 12y ago
    To be fair, it seems like they have a point that revocation is actually expensive for them.
    - aianus 12y ago
      Where does it say that? I would assume it's just as easy as issuing them in the first place.
      - Someone1234 12y ago
        You would assume wrong. Revocation is a massive PITA.
        Karunamon 12y ago
        Why? It appears a CRL is nothing more than a file containing blobs of DER-encoded cert files.
        womble 12y ago
        Running a revocation service is an annoyingly fiddly job, but all of that needs to be setup and running before you become a CA. Pretty much all of the faffing around is in the need to regularly regenerate (including signing with the CA key) CRLs and OCSP responder certificates. Like the rest of a CA's operation, revoking an individual certificate should be a miniscule incremental cost, modulo the larger CRL size due to the added fingerprint. I was rather surprised that so many people are sucking down CRLs, but clearly they do (http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-hard-costs-of-heartbleed http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-hard-costs-of-heartbleed).
  - the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
    Since the revocation protocol is broken anyways I don't really think this is a real problem.
    - womble 12y ago
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  I use and like StartCom certificates, but they wouldn't solve this problem. Wildcard certificates should not require identity validation; you should be able to get a domain-validated wildcard certificate for free. Also, their free certificates expire every year; domain-validated certificates should only require revalidation if the domain changes hands.
  - womble 12y ago
    There are rules being introduced against issuing certificates for more than about three years (you can still get five years certs at the moment, but not for much longer); this is more to limit the risk of private key compromise than it is to require people to revalidate. I don't find it too onerous to have to install a new cert every year or so (he says, with several certs currently expired).
    - JoshTriplett 12y ago
      Still, I'd suggest issuing certificates for the maximum allowed length, unless requested shorter. Scalable revocation is possible; follow best practices for encryption keys by keeping a separate offline copy of a signed revocation request.
      - womble 12y ago
        Revocation for X509 certs is a very different matter to that of revoking PGP keys. For X509, the CA can revoke the cert unilaterally, or at the request of the subscriber without the need for the subject private key. In fact, I'm not aware of the existence of a subject-side revocation process that doesn't involve the cooperation of the CA.
- 0x0 12y ago
  Do take note that they will reject and/or also refuse renewal if they think the domain whois doesn't exactly identify you, even if you confirm the domain webmaster validation. Lots of hassle if your domains have other entities or business names listed as the whois admin contact.
raving-richard 12y ago
Pretty much what I was thinking. Here's what I almost sent as a response to the survey: This is a brilliant idea. I would pay up to $50 a year for the pleasure of being able to get domain validated SSL certs that are trusted by the major browsers. I would assume that the validation would be via emailing webmaster@domain and making them either respond or click a link or something. That could all be automated couldn't it. Also, make wildcard certificates for domains available for the same low price, because it shouldn't take any more work should it. If I control example.org, then I think it's obvious that I control www.example.org and slighly-biased.example.org. But then you have the issue of, if Org A controls com.au, that doesn't mean they control mywebsite.com.au. I don't know how you would automate that issue. The non-automated stuff, make people pay for it. Seriously.
- ehPReth 12y ago
  Mozilla created https://publicsuffix.org/ https://publicsuffix.org/ - perhaps that could help with com.au vs. example.com.au?
  - raving-richard 12y ago
    That's brilliant. I was wondering if there was a list that actually provided the relevant information. Thanks for the link.
- euank 12y ago
  Well, one way to automatedly ensure someone controls all the subdomains a wildcard certificate gives would be to ask them to create dns records indicating that. Basically, the CA could say "you want *.example.com, then create a dns txt record at mzzafr2pr.example.com with the following text: F5cbUl7pL2JM7z and click here. We'll get back to you once we see the dns change propagate". If I can create a random subdomain they suggest within a wildcard range, that makes it almost certain I can create every subdomain.
  - vladd 12y ago
    This breaks for obvious cases such as mzzafr2pr.blogspot.com
joosters 12y ago
StartCom charges $60 for a wildcard certificate that will be accepted by just about every important browser out there. You might even be able to get them cheaper elsewhere. There are not any significant costs to obtaining SSL certificates, so a new CA is hardly likely to change the SSL landscape at all.
- cs02rm0 12y ago
  I disagree, I think free would be a significant difference. A low barrier vs. no barrier.
  - dtech 12y ago
    But this initiative (however good) will also not provide a no-barrier approach. You need to be a member of the coop (with associated fees) to request certificates. Which is logical. Running a CA and getting the root certificate into the right places is not cheap. Unless someone with money (e.g. Google, as they do with their CDN) decides to provide this service for free some money needs to be earned.
    - womble 12y ago
      (disclosure: I'm the SSL co-op guy) All of Google's free services (CDN, DNS, Chrome, etc) are centred around improving the experience of using the web, so more people use it for longer (and, hopefully, do more searches with Google and/or visit more webpages with AdSense ads on them). I'm not sure how more SSL-secured traffic feeds into that, exactly, but if anyone at Google wants to talk sponsorship, I'm all ears...
- womble 12y ago
  (I'm the sslcoop.org guy) StartCom's $60 wildcard is the cheapest I've ever seen. I'm impressed with StartCom's model overall, and it was a great inspiration to me with the SSL co-op. I feel like the more diversity in approaches there is, the better off the CA ecosystem will be. If nothing else, another voice for sanity in the relevant standards bodies (CA/Browser Forum, for instance) can only be of value.
lauriswtf 12y ago
With all the cheap SSL providers[0] today, I don't really have an issue buying the certificates anymore. When they used to cost a small fortune, I was really restrained to buy a certificate for every small web project, but now the situation has improved. [0] - https://getssl.me/ https://getssl.me/
deleted 12y ago
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dtech 12y ago
StartSSL/Startcom already does not charge for individual (wildcard) certificates, you can request unlimited numbers. You do pay a $60 fee for identity validation, which is valid for 2 years. You can also have automated validation, but they don't allow wildcard certificates (which I sort-of understand, they do need to make money some way right) So you get unlimited free non-wildcard certificates or unlimited wildcard certificates for $30/year. Not a bad deal.
- dspillett 12y ago
  > So you get unlimited free non-wildcard certificates Do note the "no commercial use" clause on the free certificates. Not an issue for any of my uses but it may affect quite a few people. Though I'm not sure how they would enforce this. Of course if you can't afford $60 for two years for the next grade up, then your commercial venture is probably not a roaring success!
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    > Though I'm not sure how they would enforce this. Revoke the certificate.
    - dspillett 12y ago
      But how do they detect that enforcement is even necessary? (other than regular whois lookups assuming that data is correct (probably too much hassle), checking the sites secured by the certificates (even more hassle), or someone "dobbing you in")
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  Apparently StartSSL does charge you quite a bit to revoke a free certificate. That bit a lot of people when Heartbleed happened. See https://www.startssl.com/?app=37 https://www.startssl.com/?app=37.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    That's partly because of how the revocation infrastructure operates. It definitely adds cost, including generating CRL, trimming the CRL as certificates expire (could be 10 years into the future), and running the revocation server itself.

colmmacc 12y ago

http://www.cacert.org/ http://www.cacert.org/ is a similar-ish effort that's been ongoing for quite a long time.

Tomte 12y ago
Unfortunately they are so messed up, it isn't even funny. Honestly, my experiences with CAcert were awful. Pressuring people into signing legal contracts that are just laughably unfair was just one part of it. They may have been a likable organisation at the begininng (maybe with a penchant for over-the-top policy), but when they realized they wouldn't get into major browsers by default, they tried to get "serious", changing too much too fast and wrecking the whole thing. Without the big result they were hoping for.
CMCDragonkai 12y ago
It's sad that debian removed them. I think cacert needs more dedicated governance. If all the money we spent on ssl certificates could be pooled together to create non-profit organisation dedicated to public certificates, it would be awesome! And we could probably get opensource PKI infrastructure.
- womble 12y ago
  (I'm the sslcoop.org guy) "If all the money we spent on ssl certificates..." And thus was sslcoop.org born! I'm not sure what you mean by "opensource PKI infrastructure", exactly, but as a long time F/OSS hacker, I'm definitely planning on putting everything that's developed for the SSL co-op under an open licence. But the software's the easy bit. The hard part is the work required to define processes and policies, get everything audited, and then getting through the inclusion process for all the browsers. That's what takes somewhat more organisation (and money) than writing some code and running openssl...
  - TsukasaUjiie 12y ago
    iirc the WebTrust Audit required for such a system is in the ~$100,000 range. Why abandon existing initiatives to start another undermanned community based authority. I think the focus should really be in jumpstarting CACert (overhauling its governance model) and building on its existing infrastructure and user/assurer base (As an assurer I'm probably biased here). Of course this would be hard work and less self fulfilling than doing the F/OSS dance and re-inventing the wheel..

meowtaxi 12y ago

Am I the only one that finds it hillarious (or troubling) that the SSL cert for this site is for a different host name?

joosters 12y ago
Yes, let's trust these people to run a certificate authority when they aren't competent enough to set up SSL properly on their own site...
womble 12y ago
(I'm the sslcoop.org guy) Yeah, well, I haven't worked out how to tell nginx to look at the SNI for a HTTPS request and bomb out completely if it doesn't match any SSL-enabled vhost. Unless you've got pervasive IPv6 -- then I can set everything up so manually mangling URLs to use HTTPS doesn't cause problems (there's no links to HTTPS resources on sslcoop.org)... Turns out the real scarce resource is IPv4 addresses -- but we already knew that. ipv6coop.org, anyone? (grin)
- sandGorgon 12y ago
  if you find a way, could you post a gist here please !!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- tombrossman 12y ago
  Possibly a stupid question, but why not make whichever vhost is correctly configured for SSL your default? Any traffic will go there unless another match is found. This is what I do to force SSL and redirect anything not matching another vhost. Catch-all + HTTP --> HTTPS server { # Set server name & make it the default for this IP address listen 80 default_server; listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; return 301 https://EXAMPLE.TLD$request_uri; } Or, rewrite HTTPS to HTTP for that vhost only server { listen 443; server_name EXAMPLE.TLD; return 301 http://EXAMPLE.TLD$request_uri; } Mozilla's server-side TLS wiki at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS is the best documentation I've found yet, and includes great examples of complete configs for various servers. Hope that helps.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

leccine 12y ago

NSA, is that you? :) (Thanks for the downvotes in advance)

codezero 12y ago
What about this post makes you think the NSA is or would be involved?
- leccine 12y ago
  I think the question you should ask yourself is: how is the NSA involved in the currently established CA system? The answer (to your question) is , the very same way. Besides, who does think that having an alternative CA provider is going to change anything? The crypto empowering security nowadays is un-trusted, implementations proven containing backdoors, and on the top of that all the implementations are written in languages that can't be formally verified and there are serious security bugs every other week. Back to the topic, what is this new CA group addressing? Which part of this chain that going to be fixed by any mean with this initiative? I guess the answer is none. :)
  - codezero 12y ago
    How is the NSA involved in the currently established CA system?
    - leccine 12y ago
      2 ways, A, creating rogue cert by md5 collisions (they have the capacity) B, making people believe that a CA guarantees the identity of the issuer, while having their CA in the approved list so they can sign certs (for example like gmail.com) There is good documentation about it: http://files.cloudprivacy.net/ssl-mitm.pdf http://files.cloudprivacy.net/ssl-mitm.pdf
      - MichaelGG 12y ago
        Except if the NSA did sign Gmail in any non-trivial capacity, it'd certainly be noticed and the offending CA would be removed or put out of business or something like that. Plus it'd draw lots of attention to the NSA directly. If they did want to sign something publicly, they'd just compromise some third-world CA and have them take the blame. There's plenty of them in there. Or they could just sign up as a Comodo reseller.

michaelbuckbee 12y ago

There's an assumption in this that domain validated certificates can be wholly automated. But, in the same way that spammers seek out open SMTP relays, phishers seek out weak SSL validation systems for use in setting up phishing sites. CA's currently maintain internal keyword warning systems that flag domain validated requests for manual intervention. Anything that even hints that it is involved with a major company, church, charity, bank or financial institution gets flagged and approved manually.

ademarre 12y ago
Interesting. Perhaps an alternative to the keyword warning system you describe (for SSL certs only) could be to scan the candidate CN for existing SSL certs. If any are found, flag it for manual review, or possibly come up with a proof system whereby the applicant proves he is the holder of the former certificate.
- michaelbuckbee 12y ago
  The problem is that phishers register sound alike domains like info-secure-apple.com or atlanta-usbank.com, that were completely clean prior to issuance.
  - ademarre 12y ago
    One could argue that should be okay for a class of certificate without identity/organization verification.
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
      Actually, yeah, they should. Info Secure Apple. Make a comment forum about fruit-borne illness. Why should that be denied because there are companies using one of those words? What we "need" more of is EV-style validation, so I can see that the site I'm on is an actual company registered in whichever territory. Otherwise all it indicates is that an email address with the associated domain is linked to the private key for this site. Not really what most people are looking for.

renarenasaini 12y ago

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DoubleMalt 12y ago

A couple of questions: - Where do you plan to place the infrastructure of the cooperative? - What is your expected timeline to issue Browser accepted certificates? - Are you planning to provide an API for signing CSRs? I am currently working on a solution for self hosted messaging and file synchronization, and your project would complement our efforts to give people the possibility to self-host securely.

womble 12y ago
(I'm the SSL co-op guy) - Probably in Australia, at least at first, since that's where I'm based. I'd like the DR site to be in Europe, if possible, but that might not be a day 1 achievement. - I'd like to be able to issue certs from day one of the co-op, via a reseller or other arrangement -- that might cost a few dollars per cert, though. It's a minimum of two years from "let's do this!" to being accepted in all the browsers, though (look at the Mozilla inclusion timeline for an idea of best case: https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:How_to_apply#Timeline https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:How_to_apply#Timeline) - An API is definitely intended from day one. My general architecture for these kinds of systems is API for everyone, and the website just talks to the same API that the general public does. I'd love to talk to you more about how the co-op could help you with your system.

opendais 12y ago

I'm mainly favor in this because I could trust the cooperative more than I trust the existing CAs. As long as it doesn't cost me more than the existing cheapest options [e.g. StartSSL, NameCheap's cheap ssl certs] and had 99.7%+ coverage, I'm 100% sure I'd pay for it.. :)

darrenkopp 12y ago

I'm failing to see how this differs from http://www.cacert.org/ http://www.cacert.org/, though perhaps this would be more strict on participation?

IgorPartola 12y ago
Well, currently CACert certs are not accepted by any major browsers, so while it's a great idea, without funding it's dead in the water.
womble 12y ago
(disclosure: I'm the SSL co-op guy) CAcert's goal is to issue certificates for free, by implementing an alternate identity validation model. The SSL co-op's goal is to issue a subset of certificates for free, by having those who take advantage of that service share in the costs of running the infrastructure required to do so. CAcert's determination to stick to its guns on doing everything "on the cheap" is admirable, and I'd quite honestly much prefer it if they succeeded (it'd be a lot less work for me, for one thing). However, looking at the browser inclusion landscape as it currently exists, I have doubts that CAcert has much hope of ever being widely accepted in the browsers. Worse, you can only change the rules about inclusion if you're already in the club... it's a nasty chicken-and-egg problem.

IgorPartola 12y ago

What would make sense to me more than an SSL co-op would actually be a registrar that gives you a free wildcard certificate for every domain you register. You almost always need a certificate for every domain you use, so why not bundle the two? I wonder if doing a crowdsourced bootstrap of such a registrar would work.

womble 12y ago
I'm not averse to that idea, in principle. Heck, that sounds like a nice complementary business idea -- you run a DNS registrar that offers a free domain-validated wildcard certificate with every domain sold, and get your certs from the co-op. The costs would be minimal -- there's bugger-all required to start a domain name reselling business, and SSL co-op membership is shaping up to be more on the "consumer" end, rather than "retailer" cost structure, so there wouldn't be significant costs there, either. I don't think it would need crowdsourced funding to get started, honestly. The game-changing of the SSL co-op has already started! New business models are taking shape! (grin)

eximius 12y ago

I will gladly run a member organization to lower the barrier of entry to end-users and non-businesses. No one should have to sacrifice security because they don't want to fork over that kind of cash. I run a forum I want Wildcard SSL on but I don't want to buy one since I currently spend no more than $30/year to host it. The Wildcard SSL Cert alone would cost double that at some of the cheapest places. If I can fix my problem and others, count me in.

womble 12y ago
"No one should have to sacrifice security because they don't want to fork over that sort of cash" It's a bit long to be the SSL co-op's tagline, but as a motto, you've pretty much hit the nail exactly on the head.