Slashdot Mirror
Thawte Protects The World From Crypto
nutsaq writes: "Thawte.com, a South African Certificate Authority, in a move of astonishing wrong-headedness, has inexplicably changed it's developer certificate policy. To quote from the site: 'Due to current world circumstances developer certificates can no longer be issued to individuals.'Sucks to be working with crypto these days. Apparently I'll get no help from Thawte to encrypt stuff, oh wait, I didn't need it, the browsers did."
Crypto is now one of those 6 letter words better left unsaid in public!
;)
Something else will come along... if that doesn't work, just form a Limited Partnership or some other 'legal' low risk corp....
This is about signing certificates, nothing with "oops, my browser encrypted" bla. This is a very interesting move, that I cannot quite follow. Why in the world would you only limit signing certificates and blame it on the "world". Excuse me? I mean if it was about global server IDs, strong encrpytion, etc. I might find some reasons in current events to limit the distribution. But code signing certs? Quote from the Site: "Your customers can be confident that a Thawte Developer Certificate will guarantee that your code remains tamper proof, and that the content originated from the source on the certificate. Important Notice:
Due to current world circumstances developer certificates can no longer be issued to individuals." Or am I totally missing the point here (probably too late here on Pacific Time)
Before we claim another atrocity forced upon the "little guy" let's take a look at the situation. Thawte is not the only provider of certificates out there. There are others and if individuals demand the ability to work with crypto (as they will) someone will provide the service.
Thawte is not Microsoft. They cannot strongarm other businesses, let alone individuals, into working just how they see fit. There's no chance for Thawte to rule the world.
So before everyone gets all up in arms realize that all you have to do to correct the situation is not use Thawte for anything until they reverse their stance or simply use another certificate provider. Write a nice email and let them know why you don't agree with them and move on. This isn't a crisis...
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
I think this is a real shame, and is probably originated by some badly informed member of Thawte-management.
How do they plan on catering for the self-employed? What about small companies where the corporate and technical contacts are the same person? Why should an individual have any less right to certifying their code than a corporate?
Of course it is up to Thawte who they sell their product to, but given the mind-set of people they are selling to (technical staff), this is not going to do them any favours.
Generally Thawte are very forward thinking... Their "Web of Trust" model brings free X.509 email certificates to the masses by using a PGP-like trust model (extended through face-to-face authentication) on top of the CA signing model.
Enjoy Y2K? Roll-on Year 2037!
I my opinion, the concept of code signing is flawed. The user is tempted to think "this piece of code just loaded by my web browser is signed, so I can trust it."
In fact, the signature only proves that the code really comes from a specific developer and has not been tampered with during transmission. It says absolutely nothing about the trustworthiness of the developer. So, as long as I don't know if I can trust the developer, the signature doesn't help.
Here are some first thoughts, if you end up talking to the media:
- The strongest form of cryptography was invented in the 19th century and does not require a computer (XOR against one-time-pad), though computers certainly make it faster.
- Cryptography technology that is available for free to the general public is very sophisticated. Weakening the cryptography available to shoppers on the Internet will not prevent the best and strongest software being used by "bad guys".
- Stunting the public's ability to encrypt will hurt everyone from dissedents in oppressive countries to Internet retail companies to international corporations.
It's time to fight back in the war of words. Make this "Internet shopper" vs. "public ignorance". Make it "my credit card for sale". Public opinion is carried on sound bites, so let's get some!Why not just have a non-profit organization that issues certificates to anyone that wants one for a nominal fee?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Actually, I know that it was, because I wrote it for the Wipout competition, which is spookily enough another /. story of the day.
I wrote this story in early September, pre-11th. It postulates a society where knowledge of crypto is so strongly controlled that... well, read the story.
At the time that I wrote it, it was science fiction. It now looks like I was way too conservative, and events are already on the way towards overtaking my predictions. Hey ho.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Now that closed source companies are starting to really restrict what end users can do, and what they can see, and what licensing they will even give out to people, it'll be a lot easier for open source organizations to really shine.
:)
While everyone else is adding restrictions, we should be in a mad dash to catch up where the closed source versions are leaving off, increasing public acceptance of how convenient and useful open source products are compared to the rest of the software industry.
CSS people are actually giving OSS people the opportunity to be BETTER, not just feature-equal! Yaaaay
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Now only real companies, like the MANY that bin Laden's network runs, can get encryption tools.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Oh but you CAN experiment with the technology. See, all they are is a certificate authority. OpenSSL, for example, has a fairly robust (but not recomended for mass comercial use) facillity for doing the same exact thing they do. Check the OpenSSL documentation for the 'ca' subset of commands. Sure, you'll have to install your own root cert to test it out, but at least that won't stop you from doing the testing itself.
I really doubt that much signed code is distributed with authority from certificates issued to individuals. Chill out. They will lose some money, and I'm sure Thawte doesn't like that, but crypto is not going away.
If you use GnuPG (GPG) - you can create your own circle of trust.
You sign your own certificates (verifying them over the phone or through some other means) and then you in turn publish your keys to open key servers around the world.
The more places your identity exists the harder it is for someone to steal it - that is why Slashdot allows you to put your public key into your account (you can see the box for it just below the signature box)
The key servers are run mostly by institutions around the world (I think Stanford is a main hub here in the US) - they basically hold a bunch of public keys that have been signed.
So this story isn't a big deal for jo shmoe because if you need to securely transfer something from yourself to someone else you can do that for free using GPG.
So let the companies have their closed ring of trust and you can create your own.
Derek
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Read before you reply.
The original poster wasn't talking about experimenting with the technology. He/she/it wanted to test the service. You can't do that without using the service.
Duh.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I e-mailed them and got this response from Jeanne Fourie:
Dear Marius
Thank you for emailing me with regard to your concern. Due to the current
international threat of terrorism we have been advised by
our parent company VeriSign to refrain from issuing developer certs to
individuals, for the mean while.
As you will be aware, there is a need right now for companies like ourselves to be
extremely cautious in all aspects that concern
security and encryption.
Developer certs are issued to individuals based on verification of passports and
drivers licenses. These documents are however easily
forged and we have therefore had to take the executive decision of not issuing
certs where the verification process may be
questionable.
We are positive that we will be able to resume this service in the near future. I
do apologize for any inconvenience that this may have
caused you.
Regards
Jeanne
As can be seen it seems to be Verisign who requested this....
Hmm...
Am I right in thinking that this has no bearing on users actually using certificates as anyone can create certificates with Openssl on a i386.
So all they are doing is removing the convienience of the extra dialog box that the certificate was not from a trusted source.
I don't get the paying money for Certificates in the first place...
so now verisign can take more from the individual.. once verisign bought thawte, they wanted to raise the prices.. but couldn't.. this is a way that they can.
1. letters to newspapers. this can be the first, lowest-effort thing to do. the net is full of good examples of how crypto is good, first of all the writings of Phil Zimmermann, that could be at least inspiring. here's the link and a quote:
"You don't have to distrust the government to want to use cryptography. Your business can be wiretapped by business rivals, organized crime, or foreign governments. Several foreign governments, for example, admit to using their signals intelligence against companies from other countries to give their own corporations a competitive edge. Ironically, the United States government's restrictions on cryptography in the 1990's have weakened U.S. corporate defenses against foreign intelligence and organized crime."
.2Euros :)
2. for those of you who have good capabilities/reputation, start spreading the word. Not only among your friends (no matter how commputer-illiterate they are, public opinion is independent from tech skills, unfortunately), but also at work.
3. the main goal is to make the idea of 'banning crypto can make more damage to your business than give benefits to the country' reach the higher levels. letters to newspapers will perhaps lighten a few minds, but enlighten a CEO of a multinational or a big company will help things better. It may seem unreal, but if you think that anyone in the world is just seven hops away, why don't try it? Never underestimate the power of coffee-break gossiping.
4. all the 'geeks' and technician all over the world have a great power over "regular user". When a techie or a sysadmin talks, everybody is listening. Make good use of it. Be responsible, and be clear. Make people think. 5. talk to newspaper writers, friends working for the media, whoever you think can spread the world.
6. wait
7. repeat
8. listen to other ideas and possibly invite your "opponent" to post it somewhere, to publish it, basically don't treat who does not agree with you as a stupid.
that's what I'm doing with my friends, parents, et cetera. I'm posting opinions on public forums in newspapers, and although I cannot see an immediate feedback, I'm positive about it.
Just my
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
Thanks for opening up your skull and letting us peek at the cavern inside. I normally wouldn't reply to flamebait such as yours, but I'll make an exception in this case to try to stem the flow of ignorance that pours from your keyboard.
1)
Script kiddies do not break ciphers. They do not find exploits. They do not reverse engineer systems. If they could do any of these things, they would not fall under the derogatory category, "script kiddie".
2)
Pick any of the following algorithms and break it: IDEA, 3DES, RSA, DH. I guarantee you will be famous, at least within security/cryptography circles. These are algorithms that have been scrutinized for decades by professors and professionals. I don't think a 12 year old could break these, except in a movie.
3)
SDMI (I assume this is what you mean by SDMA), was a copyright protection system not an encryption system. Anyone who believes they can create a secure, stand-alone, software copyright protection scheme is either ignorant or a genius. Given the ratio of ignorance to genius in the world, I know how I'll bet.
4)
The reason so many crypto systems are broken usually falls into one of two categories
a) The developers think they can design a system just as strong as the professionals who have devoted their lives to making and breaking ciphers.
b) The designers were forced to use limited strength crippto due to stupid crypto laws.
Incidentally, the DVD CSS system was broken by the combination of government-mandated 40 bit key length, and a home-made algorithm that reduced the effective keylength to around 30 bits. This makes it possible for an attack to be completed in seconds. FWIW, a 40 bit key search takes 1024 times longer than a 30 bit key search.
You can never equivocate too much.
Make your homebrew CA private key:
openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 1024
Create your CA self-signed public key:
openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -key ca.key -out ca.crt
OK, you're set up as a homebrew Certificate Authority (CA) and ready to start signing your own home-brew certs:
First, create a homebrew private key:
openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024
Create the unsigned public key (AKA certificate signing request) At one point in the process, it asks for "Your Name" - if this is for personal identification, then put in your name. However, if this is for a development web server, then put in the web site address "dev.www.wherever.com" when it asks for "Your Name"
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
Get the sign.sh script from the Apache mod_ssl distribution, use this to sign the certificate:
There you go, you now have the private (server.key) and public (server.crt) keys. Install them on your webserver.
They will work, but your browser will whine about them being signed by an untrusted source. No problem there, give a copy of CA.crt (NOT CA.key!!) to any developers using your web server and have them install it on their machine, from then on, their browser will consider any certs signed by your homebrew CA key to be valid. To install the cert on IE browsers, a hint: you do not use your browser to do it, even though there is an "Install Cert" button on the window that pops up to let you know that the cert is signed by an unknown CA. Instead, you give them CA.crt, have them save it to their hard drive, then open up Windows Explorer, right click on CA.crt, and pick Install Cert from the menu, a Certificate Wizard will pop up, go with the defaults, then your machine will trust the homebrew certs.
The root certificate game has always been just a money scam, especially for dev certs.
To become a registered company in Germany, you need to get a license. In the smallest case, that's going to cost you all of 15 DM ($7.50).
What a stupid and useless move at the side of Thawte...
You can hit my pages with http or https. If you do the https version with Netscape, you get a happy little dialog telling you Netscape doesn't know who signed the page. Fortunately the dialog box defaults to "Trust for this session only" as it's pretty well certain that most users, conditioned to hit "OK" when a dialog box pops up, will do so. I make a note that you really shouldn't trust my certificate permanently on my page.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Don't forget about the other type of CA - corporate (or educational) internal CAs. These CAs don't issue certs to the general public, they issue them to employees, students, whatever, so the individual can access corporate or school resources.
This solves a *lot* of problems, since you can assume all authorized users have a valid cert. If someone is fired, leaves school, whatever, you can revoke their cert immediately. Some resources might not check the CRL, but others definitely will.
But this, of course, requires installing your own cert. Oh, to be sure, you can outsource this operation to a commercial CA and be covered by their root cert. At a modest cost of something like $20-$100 per employee per year. (It's been a while since I checked the prices.) A lot of organizations won't mind that cost, but others will. It's not like this system is hard to maintain, once installed.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
This is not only about trust; it is about economics. Small development studios representing a single owner, or a partnership, produce a vast amount of software for the Internet. OpenSource development teams likewise have no corporate presence, and rely on the identities of individuals.
This may sound like an innocuous move now, but consider the general direction of the intellectual property movement. The only way to truely secure digital content is to tie it to an identified user. That means hardware capable of decrypting content on the fly using a user-specific key. It is unreasonably difficult to reencrypt each piece of content for different hardware, so a license certificate is used to associate the content key securely with the user's identity.
CPUs already exist to do this for secure computing applications, and its hardly improbably that Intel and/or MS have considered this as a route for development. Whether it is the hardware or the OS that enforces it doesn't matter awfully much: at some point a corporation is responsible for issuing a license certificate which will marshall the association between your software certificate and a user's identity certificate.
In other words, someone has the power to determine if your software is allowed to run on their hardware, or not. By denying you a developer certificate, they can prevent your software from running.
Right now that's not a reality. Unsigned code isn't prevented from running, it just causes a miriad of warning and threats which most users will back away from.
So the moral of the story is be a big corporate, pay lots of money, and your product will be used. Otherwise you're sleeping in the sewer, my friend.
Twylite
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Just to add to point 2:
At the moment, the only evidence we have that asymmetric cryptography techniques is that it hasn't been compromised by 'better minds than mine'.
However, that is not to say that it will always remain like this; it is possible that in the future we can prove mathematically that an algorithm is unbreakable (or at least only breakable by an exponential complexity brute force attack. Of course this relies on proving that P!=NP This trivial proof is left for the reader)
This is directed at the post claiming that encryption will *always* be broken; one day we may have provably secure asymmetric encryption.
Quantum computers counter my argument nicely as they don't care whether they are working on a problem in P or NP. As such I shall ignore them and hope they go away.
The only use for a code signing certificate is to tell a user that a piece of code is safe to use.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Well, not a lot of people/companies anyway.
Half the time I try to download an application/plugin I get the message 'this code was not signed'. This happens so often that the average user will simply click 'run anyway'.
This will only affect companies that have actually taken the time to set the system security policy to 'never run unsigned software'. Which nobody on this planet has done, because all the really useful software has not been signed. *sigh*
Code signing is rather useless anyway, it's a good concept. However, the certificate issuers only certify that a company writes software (which you knew anyway, you just downloaded a piece of their work), they do *explicitly* not certify 'this is software written by a company that will not copy all files from your harddrive and publish them on IRC'.
In it's current implementation it makes software somewhat tamper proof. Which is nice...
that someone already cracked their system and there are bogus personal certs out there now but to say that would RUIN Thawte. I have a personal cert from them but I've given up using it in general.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
So Thawte now thinks their verification process is flawed. So they're not revising their verification process, or revoking their existing certificates (which they presumably issued based on their flawed process). And it's not like someone planning to do something with a developer certificate would wait until the last minute to actually get the certificate.
In any case, PKI is inherently broken in a number of ways, including that the signer doesn't specify what about the key is being certified. So there's no way for Thawte to certify that they checked a passport and you look like the photo. There's no way for them to say, "This person is who he says he is, unless he accidentally emailed his private key to a total stranger or duped the Portugese passport authority."
Doing 2) above would be a DMCA violation (because there is some intellectual "property" which is "protected" (restricted) by those ciphers.
You could get 5 years per count.
Sklyarov is facing a 25 year prison sentence (total of 5 years times 5 counts)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
What developer certs let you down is put ActiveX controls on your web pages that the user can download without going through a scary dialog saying "the browser can't tell who created this file". You do get a dialog saying "This file was created by so-and-so, click 'yes' if you trust them" but that dialog is designed to not be scary, and encourage the user to download whatever crap is about to take over his computer.
There are also developer certs for signed objects in Netscape browsers, but not too many people care about those any more. :(
But OpenSSL allows you to create a CA cert as well. Just preload your clients' browsers with your CA's public key cert and then you are every bit as safe against man in the middle attacks as you would be if Verisign or Thawte had signed your server's cert, SO LONG AS you keep your private CA key safe on your servers.
Which you have to do in the presence of a Verisign or Thawte-signed server cert anyway. All that having Verisign or Thawte sign your cert gets you is convenience (so you don't have to distribute your public cert keys to your browsers) and the ability to provide data to a wider audience.
The big hole that I wonder about is that most browsers have cert keys for a whole lot of CA's.. do they cross-check with each other to ensure that more than one Cert Authority among them are issuing keys for a given host or domain? If my web servers' keys are signed with Verisign and someone else can get a cert for the same domain signed by Joe Fourth Party CA, then new visitors to the fake site would be none the wiser.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
The whole decision is silly. All thawte is doing is loosing business. If a terrorist wants to encrypt a webpage, it's easier and faster to just set up OpenSSL/mod_ssl and sign your own cert.
If the visitor is another terrorist looking to download encrypted content, all he has to do is click OK to the browser box that says it's not trusted and then the encrypted stream of content will begin.
All thawte is doing is removing the part where the cert is trusted. I doubt a terrorist would care.
It doesn't emulate the uptime of their servers, or their customer service, or any of that. Jeez.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Do you actually trust ALL corporations because they are a corporation? There are many corporations I do not trust. For me, Verisign and Thawte are slipping over the edge now, and might find themselves in the heap with Microsoft, Intel, and Dell.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If Usama bin Laden were to apply for a certificate, and proved he was who he said he was, would they issue one? Remember, this is all about identity, which is trusting the CA. It's not about making judgements about sexual prowess, or whatever else the person may represent. As for whether this enables Usama bin Laden to engage in cryptographic traffic, I can assure you that the lack of a certificate is not going to prevent him from hiding messages from authorities.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This is related to Microsoft's concept of blaming others for security problems. Since they demonstrably can't make their OS secure, and chose a fundamentally insecure technology (Active-X) for their browser, their answer is to require that all code run on their systems be signed by somebody who can be blamed for problems. Microsoft may also use this to obstruct free software from running on Microsoft boxes. Remember that Windows XP can be configured to run signed code only.
All of the algroithms are 'broken' in one sense, that we know how to decode something encoded in it. However, it will take a lot of CPU cycles to do so.
I'm no crypto expert, but my guess is that they would want to minimize the risk of an individual acquiring a certificate in a bogus name, creating a virus or something and then signing the virus code with the cert - thus making it appear more valid
In other words, you claim Thawte has restricted granting code signing certificates to avoid another debacle like this where Verisign granted a certificate to "Microsoft Corporation".
Will I retire or break 10K?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe I'm a dunderhead but I didn't see anything funny at MSN.com using netscape 4.77 in linux. The head page came up OK, looked like crap, it's IE optimized but it's their world. I didn't try to sign in, don't know my passworld or UID do to passport signin years ago. Guess that one bit'em in the kester.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
You can build a reputation around your identity, and insure that no one would be able to tear that down using the authentication aspects of the encryption. I think in the long run, the authentication aspects will be more important than the data hiding aspects.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?