hip2b2 asks:
"SSL over HTTP is becoming a very popular way of securing websites for eCommerce and other forms of secure transactions. A vital ingredient of a SSL protected website is an SSL certificate.
In the Philippines, most of the secure website here buy their certificates from Verisign.
Why should we trust a certification authority that is located in a different country and charges and arm and a leg for a certificate instead of a local one? I can pay 349USD for a Verisign or 125USD for one from Thawte, which is not cheap here. With an exchange rate of around 48.50PHP per USD, this amount is beyond the reach of most local sites who just want to setup secure sites to try out the technology or use it for some charitable purpose. How do we expect to promote the use of SSL in our websites locally with these prohibitive costs? This problem is not limited to the Philippines, I presume that other countries could also relate to this issue." Right now, the cost of an SSL certificate is one of the prices for doing business on the internet (in addition to bandwitdh costs), but what would it take to start up another company that issues CAs, especially if you want to do it outside of the US?
"Is it a question of trust? Do local ecommerce and secure sites trust verisign more that say a local company that provides secure certificates? What confuses me is why is there no proliferation of trusted local institutional CAs? In the future, Verisign might end up being another Network Solutions.
Oh wait! Network Solutions is a Verisign company!
What are the barriers for setting up local country CAs? Right now, I presume that browser makers are the ones listing the trusted root CAs on their browsers by default. If my university were to setup a root CA how would we get netscape and the other browser makers to recognize us? or is there some sort of governing body for assigning root CAs like ICANN is supposed to be for name resolution? or could this be one of ICANN's eventual functions?"
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the insurance aspect of the big-time cert companies is nice, but more important for many businesses that do B2C ecommerce is that the "VeriSign" logo, like one from the Chamber of Commerce or Better Business Bureau, helps assure customers that there's a substantial business behind the Web site they see. But plenty of businesses do well without joining a CoC or the BBB (the best auto repair shop I've found locally belongs to neither, for instance), especially those that foster close personal relationships with customers.
I have never taken credit cards directly online for my limo business. I started it in pre-Internet days and still have the same old XON credit card terminal I got in the late 80s, and it still works fine. Customers either hand us their cards when they get in one of the limos or, if it's something like a business person whose company is paying or a celeb whose travel is being covered by a production company (which is how most celebrity transport is handled, BTW), a secretary or other admin person usually calls or faxes directly with the trip/charter information anyway and includes the credit card number and expiration date in that call or fax.
My limo partner and I are considering taking cards directly online before long. Small businesses (like ours) that don't have (*cough*) huge amounts of VC or IPO cash tend to be far more conservative than wing-ding companies because if we don't make a profit almost every single month we go broke. (The garage where we take our limos is *just now* thinking about putting up a Web site.)
But if I decide to take credit cards online, I am *not* going to fork over $200 or $300 or $400 for a third-party cert. I'll just put an ordering page -- one page -- on Joes's server and ride on *his* cert in return for a small fee, like maybe a six-pack or two.
- Robin
The reason for having these expensive certs from these companies is that you are paying for that level of trust. If i was giving out certs for free there would be no reason at all to trust me. However having a big name like verisign as the provider of your cert is like wearing brand name cloths, its a status symbol and it brings with it a level of trust, which is very important for ecommerce sites to have.
Form what I've seen, it's not at all hard to get a bogus cert. You're basically paying for a rubber stamp. The primary reason certs are used is simply to convince the browser to open an ssl session without popping open 6 dialog boxes worth of FUD.
The certs themselves are simple enough to create (including a CA cert).
What is really needed is various levels of cert from self generated ones that simply allow encryped connections all the way up to one that represents careful auditing and controls to surely verify the identity of the server on the other end.
I notice that it costs a lot more to get a wildcard cert (*.my-domain) than a single one (www.my-domain) even though the level of verification is the same.
- A CA will just have to convince the open source projects (possibly by donating money and/or servers and/or people contributing to the browser code) to get their cert in the default setup.
This is a Bad Thing(tm). By allowing an open-source project to include the CA's they want, I anticipate a veritable fuckload of weird CA certs embedded in Mozilla. (Maybe the Powers That Be on Mozilla or other OSS browsers will be hyperclued, but I, for one, don't want to take that risk.)Instead, OSS browsers should contain no CAs. Upon install, the browser may bring up instructions on how to find the most popular CA root certs. Then Joe Six-Pack will have to get them, or find himself constantly nagged on SSL sights. The upshot will be that the browser is not quitely trusting anyone, and Joe Six-Pack now has an awareness of CA certs and how to load them.
You do not at any time in the registration process (or afterward) give your site's private server key to Verisign. You only send them your public key, and that is what they sign.
This is not a back door, because ANYONE connecting to your SSL'd server gets that very same public key.
If the NSA can break the public key crypto and use your public key to compute your private key, they certainly don't need (or want) Verisign involved in the process.
Two main reasons:
Trust - These certs are often a stamp of approval when conducting electronic commerece, etc, that the connection is secure, and that the party is who they say they are.
The first part is fairly straightforward. If you are using SSL then the connection is encrypted, and very likely secure.
It is the second part that makes certificates expensive. The Certificate Authorities (CA's) require a certain amount of information from you upfront before they issue a certificate. This is then used whenever you certificate is used to verify that you are indeed the person who originally received the certificate.
There are varying levels of assurance for this process. Most people opt for the basic level of assurance, which requires some paperwork and verifiable contact information.
There are additional levels which in some cases require your physical presence, a notary public, and some other contraints which I cannot recall, however, these are not used to my knowledge.
So, the root of the problem is that of trust. And trust is not cheap, when accounting for processing, maintenance, liability, etc. I beleive there is also a fair amount of cost to be considered a 'trustworthy' CA by the big browset CO's. Like Internet Exploder and Nutscrape.
Trouble is, you probably have to run the server on an MS-DOS machine, using M-LINK to communicate. Even after 2-3 months of talking to them, I couldn't get them to understand that our modems were not attached to the PCs, were not on COM2 and did not work with DOS. Their answer? Buy more phone lines, and a modem for each PC. It's 1999, you should have a modem for each PC.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
CA's are used to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks. SSH survives without CA's because it is assumed that a client will only be connecting to a handful of hosts, and therefore the user is able to personally verify each host key through physical means *. This assumption fails when applied to the web.
Your web browser currently ships with two (maybe more?) hard-coded keys: Verisign's and Thawte's. These keys are used to securely transfer the host keys of secure web sites you connect to.
I think each country needs its own CA, and I think browsers should ship with keys for all of those CAs. But it's really up to the browser vendors (by that I mean Microsoft, realistically).
* I know this doesn't often happen in the real world, but it should. You never know if your SSH connection is being relayed through another host unless you can verify the authenticity of the host key.
Hands in my pocket
The use of the word "legitimate" in this case refers to the identity of the organization who have recieved the certificate. Verisign has gone to some length to verify that the certificate has been issued to the correct organization. So sure, Versign will ensure that the certificat they issue to Visa is actually being isued to Visa and not some Joe Scamartist looking to fish for credit card accounts.
But once again - this does not mean the business in question has legitimate business practices. Just because the Verisign certificate was issued to Joe's Imports, it doesn't guarantee that Joe's Imports will really honor the order for a PS2 I just placed and paid for with my credit card.
It might be worthwhile to point out that Verisign DOES support an ADDITIONAL program called WebTrust ( http://www.aicpa.org/webtrust/index.htm ). This seems to be a further step to linking a legitimate identity to a legitimate business practice.
While it costs almost nothing to make the certificate per se, checking the identity of the requestor, and maintaining the security of your certificate DB and CA private keys does have a cost. And what happens if somehow somebody tricks the CA into issuing him a fraudulent certificate which will then be used for hacking? Would the CA be liable for damages? Does it have to take out an insurance to cover these kinds of risks? What is the price of this insurance?
Why would they care what OS you run and how you are connected? Oh, they don't, they even list Apache + ssleay in their list of supported servers.
Equifax offers certs for as little as $79 per server. http://www.equifaxsecure.com/ebusinessid/
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
So with that little marketing gem in the back of your head, go poke around the web and view the certificates for every SSL site you come to. Since I bought a cert last summer, I've taken a peek here and there, and the vast majority of sites with SSL certs are using Verisign, with a minimum price of $349.
The conventional marketing wisdom of pricing, Thawte is a give-away at $125. Verisign acquired Thawte some time ago, and they still haven't raised Thawte's long-standing price that's about 1/3rd of when Verisign charges. Since I use Thawte, I hope they don't raise the price... though it would probably be a good business decision, absent of other considerations (they're probably smarter than most monopolies and know they'd be acused of monopoly pricing).
Now these slashdot threads often are all sorts of comments about what's "right", when "should" and what "ought" to be. I'm sure a number of slashdot regulars reading this post will feel it's morally wrong... but before flaming, remember that setting prices is about Marketing. If some marketing guy came to me and starting spouting off about how to write code and design circuitry, he'd be just as far outside his area as I'd be (an engineer) trying to tell marketing experts that a price "ought" to be low because some small customers in other countries can't afford a cert (or at least will complain about the price).
Are the Thawte/Verisign prices a "rip-off"? Even if the product costs absolutely nothing (which isn't the case here), a good metric for pricing is what the market will accept. Thawte did quite well offering a lower cost alternative, but the truth is that they didn't overtake Verisign offering the same product at 1/3rd the price, so for most customers the price certainly isn't too high.
There was a brief time when I wasn't happy about having to pay $125. Maybe I even felt is was a "rip-off" for a while. The truth though, in the larger picture, is that even Verisign's price, at nearly three times when Thawte charges, isn't a big deal to most customers. It would be a very bad business decision to lower the price based on whining from a tiny fraction of the potential customer base.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
It has little to do with trust. For all practical purposes, web users trust exactly the CAs that their browser distributor "trusts". Except that "trust" is not the right word for the latter relationship. Probably only a few people really know a CA gets into the default "trusted" list of the major browsers, but it's not likely to be trust.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
You guys need to check out http://www.freecert.org. The project is designed to provide free or low-cost SSL certificates to individuals and qualifying organizations. It's a great project - and it would get a big boost with some more people. So go check it out and volunteer!
Why do people prefer MasterCard, Visa, or AMEX? These are credit companies with history, and a somewhat good repulation. When I login to a secure site, and my brouser presents me with a cert, I like to see that Verisign or Thawte has "branded" that cert. While most slashdot users remember that https = secure, more "average" users just don't have a clue. Why Verisign? be cause they are the one that the masses know, and think that they trust.
As to startig your own CA, i quote from Webopedia
The role of the CA in this process is to guarantee that the individual granted the unique certificate is, in fact, who he or she claims to be. Usually, this means that the CA has an arrangement with a financial institution, such as a credit card company, which provides it with information to confirm an individual's claimed identity
So, you have to have money and connections, but it is possable to start one, even outside the US, as proved by this artical that talks about a CA in asia. Again with references to close ties with financial institutions.
Maybe there is hope, but it seams a pretty slim chance that just anybody can come up with code for encryption and then start selling them...
Yet, Thawte, which Verisign owns, has no such requirements. You can get a certificate from them that works just as well, for much less money.
Last time I applied for one, the only documentation they needed was a faxed copy of the Secretary of State's acknowledge of receipt of incorporation papers, and maybe an old phone bill or something.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
You should read the article... Think about the CA business really good for a second.
CA sells certificates to ensure your data is encrypted between client and server. You, yourself as a vendor can create your own certificate which costs nothing. Now... do you know entirely that the CA company is entirely secure, simply because they claim to be?
Things to think about:
Who gave the right to these companies to issue certificates, their is no governing entity to monitor these companies security policies. Are their employees trustworthy, is their network trustworthy, whats the difference between seeing a "Trust-E" certificate and "Vendor Company" certificate?
Most people aren't really keen on whats going on between SSL on the client and server side, and when was the last time those who did know check the validity of a cert or the company that issued it?
So you mean to tell me you would dish out a couple of grand because a company "says its so and xxx certificate is the definitive line on secure services?"
No thank you I would rather create, monitor, and control our own certs in house, and ensure that our information is to be used by our company solely.
who's that girl?
360 degrees of Karma
Ten Risks of PKI: What You're not Being Told about Public Key Infrastructure By Carl Ellison and Bruce Schneier
Very informative (mirrored) document explaining this question and others in detail.
Swedishporn
360 degrees of Karma
Root CA's are not just added to the browser's by default. The companies representing the CA must PAY Netscape and Microsoft to have them in there. And trust me, it is ALOT of money. I worked for a company that has a CA, and when we wanted to put it in the browsers, it cost us on the order of $200,000 US$ to get it in both. And if you don't have your CA in the browser's, and you try to setup SSL with the browser using a certificate issued by your unlisted CA, the browser freaks out, basically telling the user the site is NOT TRUSTED. This is a good mechanism in theory, but when the browsers charge this kind of money, it borders on holding a company hostage.
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Of course, you can always manually import a root CA, but this is generally beyond the scope of Joe Six-Pack just trying to login to check his stock quotes.