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Microsoft quietly pushes 18 new trusted root certificates
- caf 11y ago"RXC-R2" is certainly insufficiently verbose. I think the author might be a bit behind the news on Tunisia, though.
- gnoway 11y agoFor anyone wondering, it's the Cisco CA/B-F Root CA: http://www.cisco.com/security/pki/policies/CiscoRXC-CP.pdf http://www.cisco.com/security/pki/policies/CiscoRXC-CP.pdf They should know better.
- joosters 11y agoFrom that document: 3.1.2 Need for Names to Be Meaningful The Issuing CA shall ensure that the subject name listed in all certificates has a reasonable association with the authenticated information of the subscriber. The hypocrites can't even manage that with their own 'RXC' CA name.
- boardwaalk 11y agoDoes anyone know why Cisco would need a root CA on Windows machines...?
- chinathrow 11y agoTo have $largeCompany buying their security suite where they can MITM on the proxy/appliance/gw/whatever without generating any alerts on the client side?
- HoochTHX 11y agoThis.
- MichaelGG 11y agoIf they misused the CA for that, there'd be a lot of backlash (cause it'd be detected). Apps would start blacklisting it. Seems like they'd have a better plan than that.
- eli 11y agoI don't think it is intended to be undetected. Plenty of large organizations use security appliances that MITM all traffic. Though I'd prefer they do it by pushing their own BigCo certificate to the boxes they own than relying on a cert that exists in all copies of Windows.
- jessaustin 11y agoThey want people to be able to BYOD and not know what's going on. (I'm sure that most employees were informed in some opaque memo, but that only goes so far.) "Our shared network works best with Microsoft phones." Hey, this is a new marketing effort for all those crap Lumias they're trying to unload!
- MichaelGG 11y agoSo you're positing that Microsoft is going to intentionally destroy their TLS-CA verification system so any company can compromise any Windows device in the name of BYOD, without explicit action from the user?
- jessaustin 11y agoAs we've been told many times, "it ain't a bug it's a feature". Sure, you and I don't want to tell the DLP guys our bank passwords, but most people already don't care. It's not feasible anymore to just block TLS, and supporting client proxy config is so tedious.
- MichaelGG 11y agoThink about how it'd have to work. By including a "compromised" cert that any company can get use, and that every Windows customer trusts, the CA system would be entirely destroyed. Microsoft wouldn't do that - it makes zero sense. Cisco might have something that having a CA for makes easier, but including a MITM cert in every Windows install is not close to reality.
- MichaelGG 11y agoMaybe as part of a way to secure the connection to their appliances? They could auto issue certs after verifying ownership. Maybe they're gonna give appliances a name off their own DNS <whatever>.mycloud.cisco? Hell maybe they're becoming a real CA and gonna sell trust services. Dunno how MS's process is, but with Firefox there's a nice application process that's very open and you can see their claims.
- chinathrow 11y agoIndeed. https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:How_to_apply https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:How_to_apply However, nothing to bee seen in bugzilla about Cisco regarding their new CA. I wonder if it is MS only? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=cisco https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=cisco
- e12e 11y agoRequiring Internet Explorer for switch management sounds like exactly the kind of stupid Cisco might go for. These days Chrome/chromium uses the system store AFAIK, so at least you can get surprising breakage in your management tool that isn't due to TLS, but rather some kind of IE compatibility hack... ;-)
- chinathrow 11y agoQuick question: How did you find that document? It's not even indexed in Google so far.
- gnoway 11y agoI used DuckDuckGo.
- castillar76 11y agoOne might gently point out that the SubjectName in that cert is "C=US, O=Cisco Systems, CN=Cisco RXC-R2". Microsoft just seems to have abbreviated it to "RXC-R2".
- jbarciauskas 11y agoI saw that and was wondering what he was thinking of. I had to double check to make sure the most recent parliament hadn't been up to any shenanigans, but seems like everything is on the up and up politically there. The ISIS situation is scary, but that's a whole other ball of wax.
- userbinator 11y agoIt's good that someone noticed... if you have automatic updates enabled, you have implicitly consented to giving Microsoft what is essentially a root account on your system. They can modify it to both fix - and break - things just as easily.
- x5n1 11y agoif you deploy an os from a company, consider your box belongs to them.
- themartorana 11y agoLet's be honest - if you don't vet every single line of code in your OS and software toolset, you run the risk of exposing yourself. There are levels of trust to be sure, but there is always trust.
- x5n1 11y agoHonest is that if all the source code that is compiled is available as open source and a binary with the same signature can be built using that code then the chances that the code acts against your interests is much less than binary blob that you can not vet... etc.
- Lennie 11y agoI'm a Debian user: https://reproducible.debian.net/reproducible.html https://reproducible.debian.net/reproducible.html Partly because they do care about these things and they are sending patches upstream as well so as many as possible applications in Debian can eventually be build reproducible. I hadn't seen it before, but even better they added this piece of text on that page: "we care about free software in general, so if you are an upstream developer or working on another distribution, we'd love to hear from you! Just now we've started to programatically test coreboot and OpenWrt - and there are plans to test Fedora, FreeBSD and NetBSD too."
- jsjohnst 11y ago
- 0x0 11y agoThe CA system is so broken. Letting a vendor decide who you should trust to issue intermediate certificates that your software will automatically trust to not issue illegitimate certificates doesn't make the system particularly trustworthy, especially seeing as they are still adding new root CAs for entities with unknown agendas (governmental agencies etc). Maybe the system could be changed to one where domains can only be signed by the DNS registrar, or something. It's pretty crazy that any CA can issue a certificate for any domain. And paying for more validation doesn't help you at all, since it won't keep the "bad guys" from getting an illegitimate one from a cheaper/lazier CA.
- hmottestad 11y agoIt still works to hinder that guy who sits at the coffee shop trying to man-in-the-middle attack people connected to hit fake wifi. If you want a system that can hinder a government doing that, or a large organisation, or a corporation. Then look elsewhere. Do you remember to wipe your hard drive when you get your computer back from the repair shop? They could very well have installed a new root CA without you noticing....
- tokenizerrr 11y agoI always recommend people to take out the hard drive before sending it in. This has caused some small issues, but most stores don't seem to mind as long as you are very explicit about telling them.
- 0x0 11y agoI wipe before AND after, if I have to hand the computer in for repairs. :)
- snowy 11y agoI agree it works against most adversary's. Wiping your HDD might not be enough: https://blog.kaspersky.com/equation-hdd-malware/ https://blog.kaspersky.com/equation-hdd-malware/ Theoretically you could hide malware in your GPU, USB, FireWire, webcam, NIC, baseband, Bluetooth, where ever. No matter who you are or how smart you think you are if your adversary is determined and has the required resources they are going to get you.
- Mojah 11y agoI'm glad someone noticed, and at the same time it's a shame it took a month before the news actually came out. I think this demonstrates 2 very major problems with SSL Certificates we have today: 1. Nobody checks which root certificates are currently trusted on your machine(s). 2. Our software vendors can push new Root Certificates in automated updates without anyone knowing about it. More content on this rant: https://ma.ttias.be/the-broken-state-of-trust-in-root-certificates/ https://ma.ttias.be/the-broken-state-of-trust-in-root-certif...
- Teapot 11y agoI trust Mozilla more than Microsoft. Is there any way to simply purge all Windows certs and import everything from cert8.db?
- jahnu 11y agoI don't think we can really trust anyone more than anyone else any more. I think it would be trivial for any three letter agency to insert, blackmail and/or buy employees anywhere they want.
- carboncopy 11y agoWhy do you think it would be trivial for three-letter agencies to do those things? Is there a legal mechanism, authority, or track record for such a thing? If you're talking about Dual_EC_DRBG, that was a non-trivial, poorly-kept secret that failed on launch. An alleged $10 million secret deal, plus development of the algorithm doesn't sound trivial to me.
- JupiterMoon 11y agoYou have heard the news since Snowden whistle-blew right?
- clord 11y agoI think jahnu was referring to obtaining the private keys for a trusted signing authority, which would enable said agency to create valid-looking certificates for the purpose of MITM. Weak algorithms are also concerning, but not really the subject of OP.
- mythz 11y agoDouglas Crockford has an interesting video on why CA system is broken and how it can be fixed in his recent "upgrading the web" talk at: https://angularu.com/VideoSession/2015sf/upgrading-the-web https://angularu.com/VideoSession/2015sf/upgrading-the-web Essentially he's proposing side-loading a new application under a custom url scheme so that the browsers will launch a helper app that's used to handle web applications with the following url format: web: publickey @ ipaddress / capability The url contains servers ECC521 public key as part of the url so that it gets around the CA System and clients can just encrypt requests with the servers published public key directly. He's planning on developing the helper app that's based on a sand-boxed node.js and QT application which just uses a TCP session to communicate with the server.
- deckar01 11y agoI had an interview with Douglas Crockford 2 years ago to work on a project that sounded a lot like this. I'm glad to hear it is out in the open.
- throwaway5435 11y agoProblem with 'ECC521' is that Google have all but killed P-521 support in Chrome. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=478225 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=478225 Mozilla are considering doing this also. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1128792 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1128792 This is not just browser support -- its TLS library support.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoHmm. Are these actually new? Did the OP look at Microsoft's full certificate store and notice some additions, or did they look at their local machine? Because in the latter case, Windows does not include a full certificate store. Rather, it fetches them on demand. EDIT: I googled the first two. "GDCA TrustAUTH R5 ROOT" and "S-Trust Universal Root CA" are both new certificates (~Novemeber 2014). The latter is in Firefox already, and is a new SHA-256 root certificate to eventually replace a SHA-1 certificate for an existing CA.
- facepalm 11y agoThey silently installed all the previously existing ones on my system, too. So did Apple on my Mac, and Ubuntu on my old notebook. Maybe I should, but I am not going to individually double check every root certificate. I don't think I have the means to do so either.
- pdkl95 11y agoWe need dynamically selectable trust. I don't mean the simple ability exposed in most browsers to add/remove certs. That still assumes one set of trust that used globally, which is completely incorrect. Maybe I don't trust $COUNTRY to handle their root certificate for most uses. Currently we handle that case by removing the cert completely. Trust, however, is not a simple boolean value, and maybe I do trust that certificate for $COUNTRY's official government pages. I should be able to specify that I trust some certificate for some domain (or other, non-domain based use!), but not for others. As another example, consider a local Web Of Trust. whenever Web Of Trust is brought up, people complain about the difficulty of key exchange. Well yes, that's a difficult problem, but there is no reason that it has to be solved for all use-cases before anybody starts using it. Maybe a circle of (usually physically local) local friends want to have secure communications. They can share a key in person easily, and so it should be easy to give access to a private forum by simply sharing a key/cert on a USB disk. We can currently approximate those cases, but it is not well supported, and is certainly not something that most users would be expected to be able to do. We can fix some of that with a better UI, but I'm suggesting a far more fundamental change, because actually solving problems like key sharing will not be easy, and I suspect they will only be solved once we have infrastructure in place. HTTP was successful because it did not require that everybody implements the full, fairly complex specification. Instead, we had a fluid, extensible protocol that allowed anybody to extend it, and that allowed for the development of a wide variety of software. The problem with traditional PKI (at least as implemented) is that it assumes that we can assign an absolute trust value to anything. In reality, trust is relative, and may in fact have multiple values at the same time. Until software is designed around those realities, it will always be inflexible and insecure for any use case where the needed trust assumptions do not reflect the assumptions made by the authors the software. Unfortunately, I'm a old-style UNIX nerd who is fine with using GPG, and I'm not sure what the UI for a dynamic-trust system would even look like. sigh
- calgoo 11y agoI agree with you on this. The only way we can trust, is if we know thee people. And even then it's normally not 100%. For example, if you want to take someone out to a nice restaurant. You might ask friends and colleagues, but some might have different tastes or some might just have an incentive for you to go there. So once you have a few options, you can then Google those choices to see if they match what you are looking for. So for something as simple as a dinner, we are already doing several checks to validate the place and comments that people have made. The issue comes when the web is involved, as we expect instant reaction and response. We also hate having to answer repeated question as it interrupts our though process. So we need a web of trust, but also with the option of sharing in you personal web of trust. So for an example, I want to go to page: newcorp.com, but the certificate warns me it's not allowed by my chosen web of trust. So I query so see if anyone on my local web of trust has an allowed setting for this page. It finds that Bob does, but I have set Bob as a low trust setting so it won't allow me to go there, but it will say that Bob's web of trust does. Do you trust Bob's choices to allow access? This would at least allow people to make choices of trust that they understand. As humans we thrive in groups, as long as they are not to big, and the Internet is a huge group of people. It's a lot easier to choose if I trust Bob from the office then for example Google, ICAN or even Mozilla. That way, the non-tech people can see the web of trust of their tech friends and make a choice on what they have set. It's a thought, but I think we need to bring trust and security back to our local, controllable environment. The Internet will keep on integrating with our every day life's in ways that are hard the even think about now. So we need to figure out security and trust now, not once my jacket is talking to the street lamp telling it that the light should be lower because I had eye surgery yesterday and should not have strong lights around me. How the hell do we add security to all those types of functions that will come. Sorry for the long rant, but it's something that worries me about the future.
- chinathrow 11y agoIt's easy to call the CA system broken (and I think it really is), but other, better solutions are not that easy currently. We want an open, yet secure web, anonymous at best. With the current setup, that is not so easily possible. Letsencrypt might help, but even with that, there is still someone you need to beg for a signed cert. Maybe we need to think ahead.
- nicolas314 11y agoFor information: OpenTrust (3 roots) is just the new name of the entity that was once Certplus (1 renewed cert).
- cabirum 11y ago@svenfaw, your RCC scanner says "Exiting... [Reason: signature database appears to be out of date.]", why is that?
- svenfaw 11y agoSorry about that, the website still had an old RCC build. If you download it again, you should get the current version (1.49).
- sneak 11y agoIt's okay, most apps don't bother checking certificate validity anyway.
- Hello71 11y agoEverything you Need to Know about HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP): http://blog.rlove.org/2015/01/public-key-pinning-hpkp.html http://blog.rlove.org/2015/01/public-key-pinning-hpkp.html > A flaw in this system is that any compromised root certificate can in turn subvert the entire identity model. If I steal the Crap Authority's private key and your browser trusts their certificate, I can forge valid certificates for any website. In fact, I could execute this on a large scale, performing a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack against every website that every user on my network visits. Indeed, this happens. > HPKP is a draft IETF standard that implements a public key pinning mechanism via HTTP header, instructing browsers to require a whitelisted certificate for all subsequent connections to that website. This can greatly reduce the surface area for an MITM attack: Down from any root certificate to requiring a specific root, intermediate certificate, or even your exact public key. related previous articles: Firefox 32 Supports Public Key Pinning (188 points by jonchang 304 days ago | 100 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8230690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8230690 About Public Key Pinning (72 points by tptacek 43 days ago | 5 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9548602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9548602 Public Key Pinning Extension for HTTP (70 points by hepha1979 242 days ago | 28 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8520812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8520812
- godgod 11y agoSponsored by the NSA
- mkramlich 11y agoone word. or 4 letters. understand them and you understand everything else about this issue: MITM
- mkramlich 11y agoahhh, 18 new ways that random faceless hackers and/or not-exactly-white-hat governments can MITM me. what's not to trust?