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Self-Regulating SSL Certificate Authority?
bcg asks: "It has come that time again to renew some of my SSL certificates and part with substantial amounts of cash. This has got me thinking - why should we pay large amounts of cash for authorized certs when so little is done by the companies issuing them? Sure they get you to send them a copy of a business certificate but how does this prove the character of those running the SSL server? What ideas can we come up with for a self-regulating certification authority? Could we set something up along the lines of the many free DNS servers around but use it to authenticate SSL certs?"
We last touched on this subject in October, when someone was searching for cheap
SSL certs. We've also discussed why certs are so expensive. Why not take it one step further and discuss ways of making and authenticating our own certs for free...or as close to free as possible?
>Sure they get you to send them a copy of a >business certificate but how does this prove the >character of those running the SSL server?
They aren't supposed to be verifying your character, they verify your identity.
Just self-sign a certificate. Truly, if it's not signed by some big name registrar, most internet users (IE of course) will get messages notifying them that it's not a "trusted" certificate anyways.
Personally I see very few reasons why these should not be obtainable openly.
All that a Trusted CA issued certificate says to me is that the potential scammer had the money to buy an SSL certificate.
Want them cheap? Let the GOVERNMENT handle SSL certs! After all, they're already handling drivers licenses, social security numbers, and ten kazillion other things that are supposed to prove that you are you, why not just give you a cert, too? For a small government fee, of course.
You call this a signature?
the reason that we're shelling out big time bucks for these SSL certificates is because the certificates come from a "trusted" source which in turn means that the people using the certificates (i.e. customers, etc.) feel more comfortable accepting said certificate. I personally would feel more comfortable making purchases online if I knew the SSL certificate was from a verified source and not just some certificate that some Joe Schmoe created.
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" -- Homer Simpson
Hell, even Microsoft says that on their windows update site for the active X download it throws onto your computer during your first visit!
Someone should do a study on this, sounds like a great high school science fair project! I can see the display in the gym now, pasted on the cardboard display case "Are people idiots?" and have nice pie charts and tabular data from your research. It beats boiling something in a test tube to see how long it takes at different temperatures or testing the growth rates of different molds...
A certificate lets the client know that the server belongs to an organisation and that that organisation was verified by somebody else.
In a network like the Internet there's no God in a security sense - so we choose to trust people who Verisign trust (and issue certificates to).
It's a pain in the ass to get the certs issued because you have to get you organisations legal certificates and get authorisation from a senior staff member - but thats a Good Thing because they make sure that you are who you say you are (and are authorised to get a certificate on behalf of your organsation, yadda yadda).
If you have a private network, or have an existing relationship with the end users, who cares? Go to wwww.openssl.org download the toolkit and play around with the certs! You'll get a secure channel and not have to pay loads to establish something you already know.
Julian.
Zimmerman solved this whole problem over a decade ago. Think web, not hierarchy. You can emulate a hierarchy with it if you really want to.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
My standard rant about why I use my own certs:
Digital certificates are available, for a fee, from a commercial certificate authority (aka CA) such as Verisign. For about $15 a year Verisign will claim to know who you are though you provide no proof other than the grand American Dollar. If your credit card clears, then Verisign says email from you is from you. Why is this worth $15? If I send a signed email to someone and they verify that signature based on the cert I send them, then the only reason to trust that the cert is based on the trusting the signing CA. Verisign says that if I have a credit card with a name on it, then I am the person with that name. Unfortunately due to identy fraud, this is often not the case. In our family we have been victims both of simple credit card fraud (where are card number was stolen and the card duplicated) and full on identity fraud where our social security number was used to open credit accounts by people other than us. So merely the possession of a credit card number does not imply identity. By trusting Verisign you are trusting the US credit industry, which is corrupt and insecure.
Assume that you do trust that credit cards are valid identifications. Why would you trust the CA who took that as ID? How do you know who the CA is? CA's are identified by certificates just as users are. How did you get a certificate for the CA? Usually it is because Microsoft and Netscape include a set of certificates from trusted CA's in their products. If the cert comes from one of those CA's then Microsoft and Netscape say it's valid. Therefore you must trust that Microsoft and Netscape included authentic certs, and you assume that those certs have not been compromised since you installed the software. Maybe you think I'm paranoid. Really I just object to paying money for something I can do better myself.
I have created the Greenbaum.Org Certificate Authority to create digital certificates which are free and trusted. If you get an email from me, signed by a certificate issued by me, verified by the CA certificate you download from this site, then the email was from me. If you get an email from me, signed by a Verisign certificate, then it could have come from the gangsters who stole my credit card to buy Nikes and chinese food.
I see several difficulties with a free SSL-CA (as I see with free DNS/TLDs/whatever):
:-)
It's a great idea, but... who will use them? To be more specific: Verisigns capital is that it's root-certificate is in every browser on this planet. I don't want to know how much cash they had to throw at M$ to get their cert. into IE, but I doubt that a free CA can come up with that amount. Sure, we can probably get the certs into mozilla etc. and joe-schmoe IE-user can add the root-cert to his known certificates, but question is: what impression will your trustworthy buissiness give him, if he gets lots of warnings when on accessing your gimme-your-visa page. 'It's the value of trust(tm)'
just my two cents...
You could perhaps add the idea of a threshold -- once a cert is signed by enough well-trusted individuals, the cert becomes "good enough" to go public.
Of course, there might be an issue of startup time -- a requestor of a new cert wouldn't get one until it has had time to make the rounds and get signed by many trusted individuals.
There is also a bit of a seeding problem. How do you establish a large enough trusted community in the beginning, so that sufficient signings can be made on new certs.
Also, I would guess that one of the things that current commercial cert corporations provide is a source of culpability, should something go wrong with the cert they issued. With a public signing group, you might not have this same level of responsibiliy. This could be good or bad, depending on your perspective.
The only reason the big companies charge so much (their claim, not mine) is the insurance they provide, and the fact that they are "trusted" by the various vendors.
Any new group wanting to be a trusted CA will face the liability issue -- if one of your customers sues you, even if you try to disclaim all liability up front, you will still face massive court fees. Even if you won in court, you would lose financially if not insured.
There is no technical or logistical problem with setting up a Free (and free) common-geek's CA, the problems are entirely legal ones. I know because I looked into it right after SSL came out. It looks like a good business plan, right up until someone takes you to court.
frob.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Basically the security behind SSL certificates (and all certification technologies) is that you trust the CA (the root of the certificate path).
Commercial companies are trusted because they would go out-of-business if they lost your trust. So basically you trust in the fact that they want to make money.
So here is my point, besides financing and all the other issues, how do we establish a chain of trust?
Why not have a self-regulating authority? Well, let me submit a request to sign my certificate saying I'm Amazon.com, hijack the domain and steal credit cards. The point of CA's is to do some background checking to verify you are who you say you are. Debatable, agreed, but is you're average script kiddie, cracker, etc. gonna shell out bucks to get a fake cert? Probably not. Not to mention once money is involved, there is an audit trail of some sort.
As for whether the prices are gouged a bit, I won't argue with you there. Seems that it shouldn't cost as much as it does, but at the same time I'd think most companies rack it up as a cost of doing business (just like rent, equipment leases, etc)
-- A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard
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Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
What I'm suprised to see is that no one has created an "Open Source Certificate Authority." Sign keys for a nominal fee ($5, 50% donated to FSF, EFF or something), and get this key published in OpenSSL and Mozilla (IE might be harder to do). The idea is simple, but would you be willing to bother?
I'm so used to mis-constructed (read self-signed, out of date, poorly named, etc) certificates that after a few moments of consideration, I usually just click "yes" to trust these things. Anyone out there who wants to start a backyard signing authority can just go for it. Just call your company FreeCert, put up some futzy web page and don't charge a cent. Freeloading certificate-junkies will come flowing to your website generating certificates. They can then put up weenie graphic-links back to your site as payment, and you can sponsor the crapped out server you've got with banner signs and t-shirts with "FreeCert Forever - They'll Never Take Our Freedom" sold online through the online shopping e-commerce solution you've whipped up. Choose life. Choose a sofa. Choose 1024-bit encryption. Choose a f$%#ng great motherboad with dual CPUs. Choose Linux. I chose not to choose linux. I chose something else...
-BM
http://melbournephilosophy.com/
Its about the same as a dollar bill drawn in crayon.
Some trusted authority must be able to (freely) offer certs with some type of identification.
Just create your own CA certificate and then write an html page for Netscape and another one for IE so that it loads your CA certificate into the browser's certificate database.
Then use your CA certificate to issue as many certificates as you like. As long as the DN matches the hostname or IP of your HTTPS server, your users' browser will play along happily.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xca/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/php-ca/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/stealthisca/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/mkcert/ Alas - most of these are in alpha....
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Most of us just want the encryption features of SSL; most of us don't want it for authentication.
If you are a bank or something, then by all means authenticate your identity. If you just want to keep packet sniffing from being effective, self sign it.
GPG/PGP keys are always self-signed, yet no one complains about authentication of identity. Maybe we should all carry a compact flash card of our SSL keys!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
And how would I know that the content of some online store that sends me a self-signed or home-brewed-CA certificate is not entirely faked by man-in-the-middle credit card # collector ?
And while you are 'thinking web, not hierarcy' also set aside some time to think how you would be building that web in first place. In particular - how you would be establishing trust with comletely foreign parties.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
The best way I can think of to do this is setup an infrastructure similar in principle to Google's PageRank. So, anyone can be granted a certificate, but the strength of that cert is based upon an index of reputation. Which to me personally, is somewhat more meaningful than any given company(TM) buying a certificate. What method you'd use to create such an index would require more investigation, with considerations for security and spoofing prevention.
At it's base though, I like the concept. And would like to hear some ideas on what we could use as "karma" *cough*... Realistically though, (and this is where I need help from those more familiar with SSL certificates than I...) is there a facility in the signing process which allows for extra certificate information at the time of request? To my memory, I think there is. For instance:
With the infrastructure already there, methinks the implementation is somewhat trivial. Can anyone help me refine the method?
Remember: umount it before you fsck it.
Nevermind all the other uses for ssl certificates.. if you are referring to secure web sites, which you probably are, the reason we don't all make our own is because the browsers will whine about not recognizing the CA.
This is percieved to turn customers off... so you pay up so things are smooth.
That is the real reason.
If you are talking about certs for vpn stuff, etc.. there is no reason to go with verisign or anyone else.. by all means, make your own. All you need is openssl.
I always thought the idea was to secure the transmission of data. If I hunt down foo.com on the web, I'm not really worried that their IP has been spoofed, I just don't want my transaction to be sniffed.
Shouldn't the browsers accept any cert for an SSl connection and that the "norm" be that everyone self signs?
What am I missing?
chuck
You'd make the person show up, in person, with 100 points of ID including 2 primary documents and 3 secondary documents, and you'd take a picture and fingerprints before you handed over the keys. You think all that's going to cost $15? I think not, expect the price of a simple certificate to go up.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I can appreciate that companies might find value in the corporate levels certs which bestow a certain degree of authenticity but certainly not email certs.
Someone such as gnu.org, or another free software group such mozilla.org should set up a free server that dishes these things out on demand - sign up, wait for the confirmation email, click on the unique link and get your cert. It's certainly no less secure than what the likes of Verisign would sell you and it would dramatically increase the use of encrypted and signed email. This would be a good thing by any measure.
Any discussion of certificate authority isn't complete without a review of Schneier's view on security certificates.
http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-9904.html
He goes into further detail in "Secrets and Lies," but the essential message is the same, need for a top-level authority basically debunks the notion.
This is evident in the legal mumbo-jumbo of the cert authorities and e-commerce in general. No one is selling non-repudiation with a certificate. The only way to achieve a truly legally-binding non-repudable(sp?) connection is to escrow it to a third-party. All the third party does is run the risks and shoulder the liability in case of a fraud. Thought this was straight crack the first time I looked at it, but my boss explained it very well, "encryption keys and trust chains have been broken."
Guess it would be nice to have a cheaper solution for matching certs to names, but I guess for me that is to self-sign the damn thing and tell my users to deal with it.
Have a ranking system that would base trust off the number of certificates, the age of the certificates and complaints from users.
So basically a centralized authority that gives out free or cheap (as in as cheap as domains) certificates.
You sign up with them as a reseller. All of your customers buy certs from you.
I'm thinking of this in terms of being a hosting provider as I am.
So I sign up with this centralized authority and purchase certificates for my customers.
Browsers could have a blacklist check on certs. So you try to hit one of my sites, it validates against your list of blacklisted sites that you updated last month and either:
A. Shows up with a good rating.
B. Doesn't show up because it's too new.
The user could then set a threshhold of trust and if the cert passed that threshhold it wouldn't warn them.
This idea isn't very thought out, just an idea I threw together. Run with it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
"The Web of Trust is a unique, community-driven certification system based on face-to-face ID validation on a peer-to-peer basis. It's a "bottom-up" CA, compared to traditional "top-down" CA systems. You can be notarised, and then you in turn can act as a notary and certify the identity of your friends"
The trust model of X509 Cerifitates is fundamentally flawed, in that it does not mimic the trust model applied in "the real world", but an authoritarian one.
:)
In the real world, you trust someone if enough "peers" that you trust trust that someone, and probably a bit less
Hey wait, that's PGP's model!
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
Certs cost money because they are trying to certify things like "This key belongs to real representatives of Microsoft corporation, which is really the incorporated company headquartered in Redmond, WA, etc. etc."
And as we all know, even Verisign goofed on their efforts to confirm this for somebody who came in wanting an MS Cert.
The reason they cost too much is we're asking them, in many cases, to certify too much.
When it comes to SSL certs for a browser, all that we're really testing is that the web server we are talking to really is the one at domain foo.com and ip address a.b.c.d.
We never check to see if foo.com is really owned by Foo Industries. We can ask to see the certificate, and find out that it says that, but in practice this is never done.
We could have free certificates that certify that the holder, at the time of issue, controlled the domain foo.com, was able to get mail at postmaster@foo.com and at the time of issue, foo.com resolved to a.b.c.d. That would prevent man in the middle attacks on SSL that are done later, at web connection time.
However, they would not prevent MITM attacks done at the time of certification. ie. if I can spoof the DNS server of the certificate authority, I can convince it that I own yourbank.com, for example. Then later I can spoof yours, so that when you ask for yourbank.com, you get my evil machine, and my machine has a cert that confirms it is microsoft.com, and the golden lock appears.
To get around that, somebody has to verify that you own the domain with a means outside the internet. That's the part that's hard to figure out how to do for free. Ideas include certifying the caller ID (except anybody with a SIP phone can set that to whatever they want.)
There are some tricks you might be able to pull, like having the CA have secure connections to a wide array of distributed net entry points, or a secure connection to the root servers for the major TLDs it is certifying in.
All sounds harder to do for free.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
You can get free ones from cacert.org.
I use them to SSL enable my website at glasgownet.com and any other stuff I need certs for.
Well worth it.
Grassrooted certificates are not a new idea (as discussed here). My company is planning to start a free certificate issuing authority funded by pop-under advertisements that will get it's root certificates registered with Microsoft when enough revenue has been collected to do so. The URL will be www.grassrooted.org.
Let's face it, there's no real security in third party validation anyway when hackers have regularly had certificates issued by third party certifiers in the names of legitimate companies (including microsoft). Transitive trust doesn't work beyond the inherent biometric authentication of vouching for those you know personally, period.
If anyone is interested in participating early, e-mail me at mbs(a)connetic.net
Matthew Strebe
aka Matthew at SlashNOT/!
Wasn't it Verisign's CA who gave out a cert to some guy claiming he was from microsoft giving him access to microsoft's vpn?
I'm not sure how you define trusted sources but I for one wouldn't rely on verisign to validate anything.
Some enterprising domain registar should start handing out free certs with domain registrations. It would be a good way to boost their domain registration business. If you trust the registar enough to handle your domain you should be able to trust them to handle your certificate too.
All the registar has to do is bribe MS into including their root CA in the next daily IE patch.
In general, there's a lot of confusion about Public Key Infrastructures, partly because of the big gap in the middle of "1. Write Marketing Hype!! 2. ???? 3. ???? 6. PROFIT!!" chain, but mainly because there are different ways to answer questions about "Who's certifying whom or what to do what or be who or what?" which lead to different applications and solve (or fail to solve) different business problems. One major effort to address this systematically is the IETF SPKI Simple Public Key Infrastructure group, much of which is based on the work of Carl Ellison and Ron Rivest (RFC2692, Requirements, RFC2693, Theory.) It turns out that, while the "Some Authority Certifies that You have Documents with your True Name" model that's popularly used is often useful, it's often not the right model, and there are often more useful relationships, such as the DNSSEC authentication used for web sites and email.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The short and the long of it is - there is no reason to have a free cert organization. They aren't going to be added to the major browsers by default because they can't really certify identities without some form of energy expended, which requires money. Therefore there is little reason to go with an 'organization' or follow the current top-down approach since each site is going to have to be clicked-through by the user anyway, or directed to add that org's top-level cert to their browser manually. How many top level certs can current browsers handle efficiently?
This is essentially the same problem as host name resolution, and more currently spam. Rather than rely on a few large organizations to provide credentials, there should be in place a 'web of trust'. I trust certian individuals and companies. These individuals, companies, and I have PGP keys. These people I trust are on my first level of trust. If you trust me, the people I trust are on your second level of trust, and I am on your first level. I would have a list of people who trust me. If you don't know me, you can check my list of people who trust me, then check their lists and find out, within a few mS, how far away I am from your first level of trust. This is a doubly linked list, and every list is signed by the list owner, and verifiable (ie, I may say that MS trusts me, but you can check their list of people they trust and find out)
The potential for abuse is high, though, so a rating system is used. If you get burned by someone you can 'negatively' trust them. This effectively pushes them further away from the edges of your web of trust, and everyone who trusts them will become suspect, and less trusted.
Verisign can continue its cert program, and you can trust them at the first level and have the same benefits you get now by default in your browser.
It's the beginning of an idea, anyway. Lots of issues yet to be resolved, but a lot of them have been tested on peer-to-peer networks, and it could easily be applied to those networks to improve them as a test bed before writing an RFC and moving forward with it.
-Adam
How about with modifying existing web browsers' dialog-boxes to make them less scary, and explain that an unknown root CA doesn't mean end of the world. Then a user could visit the free CA's site, decide if they can trust it, and add it to the configuration if desired.
Regardless whether it's a big known CA or not, people make mistakes, and a certificate signed by any CA still carries risk IMHO.
I've always thought some entity like the Apache foundation should get in the certificate business. They are already issuing the most Web server software, why not web site certificates as well.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
Otherwise, you've got a model that says you've got One True Name, usable for everything, and anybody who steals your wallet or hacks your PC (Microsoft and wu-ftpd and sshd would NEVER have bugs!) now 0wnz you. The Social Security Number, with one number that gets used for everything, is a terrible idea, and guarantees that it's easy to correlate any two databases from any groups that have either been forced to use your SSN as a tax number or found it convenient as a "unique" identifier. Besides, then Californians who can speak Spanish wouldn't be allowed to have web sites, just as one of our previous governors decided they shouldn't be allowed to drive. No thanks.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I used to work on Microsoft's Public Key Cryptography QA team. We worked with Verisign to create fake certificates to test IE's SSL and Authenticode signed downloads. When we were done testing, someone on our QA team called Verisign customer service and said, "hi, I work on Microsoft's QA team. We are done using those fake certificates for our tests. Can you please revoke (cancel) them?"
Without any further verification, the Verisign customer service agent pushed a button and canceled the real Microsoft certificate, the one used to sign all of Microsoft's downloads, device drivers, and CDs. oops. Luckily, no one pays attention to Verisign's CRL (Certificate Revocation Lists) because certificate revocation is off by default in IE. Since no one really used the CRL, Verisign was able to the remove Microsoft from the CRL and reinstate the Microsoft certificate after a couple days.
So when you "trust" Verisign, think hard about what that really means..
cpeterso
In addition to establishing identity, certificates also allow the transmission of securely (for now) encrypted data. This is the feature everyone wants - the identity aspect is just something for Verisign to hype.
Self-signed certificates are ludicrous - it takes only a few moments longer to create your own CA (certificate authority, what Verisign is) and issue yourself a certificate. Then just link incoming clients to the CA certificate, which will be added to their CA list if they accept it, and after that your site will be free of certificate warnings.
Any benefit that 'root CA' lists may have had has been overridden by uninformed sysadmins. Too often are servers moved to new hostnames or domains, or certificates forgotten to be renewed, etc.
Users trust you to take their data and charge their credit cards, protect their personal information, send them material by delivery and provide information that is true. Why, then, wouldn't they trust you to generate a certificate yourself?
As mentioned above, the endorsement of an arbitrary company means nothing, but responsiblity and security awareness of sysadmins means everything. Owning a credit card does not prove the latter.
-Elentar
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
My problem occured when trying to get a cert for a small group of alumni. We've got about 50 people in it. We're just trying to make it possible for us to discuss things on our bulletin board with passwords protected with SSL.
We payed our money to Entrust. We still have not gotten a certificate or a refund. They first required that we prove we have a relationship with the school. We aren't an official organization, don't pretend to, and don't use their domain at all. It's completely separate.
So next they required we show articles of our encorporation. Is this what's required to have a certificate? Why can't joe-random-webmaster have a valid certificate from the "big guys"? Sure, you can go with smaller outfits, but their certs aren't in older browsers.
IMHO, a cert should simply say "This cert was given to the folks who run www.this_domain.com." They can check and verify whois data and your ability to receive email. Any other requirements are just stupid. Just because you want SSL doesn't mean you want to be an e-commerce site.
...ICANN?
What's this Submit thingy do?
No, I'm not trying to be funny - while it's convenient to have your browsers come with certs for cert authorities that your browers' authors trust, the real certificate authority that a PKI tool should support is keys signed by you, the reader. (That's different from self-signed keys, which are signed by you, the keyholder, though you the reader at 127.0.0.1 will presumably have a self-signed key.) If the browser's certificate checker tools can't handle a hierarchy, where you get to sign the members of the hierarchy and what they can do, they're deficient. That's not exactly the same as "being able to add CAs to your browser", though it's pretty close; you may have different preferences for how deep different parts of the tree can be. For instance, there are some organizations you'll trust to sign certs for subdomains of their domain name, but not to sign other sites, while there are other organizations you'll trust to sign almost anything (e.g. Visa if you only use Visa credit cards on line), and others you'll trust for email addresses in their domains (e.g. you'll trust FreeEMail.Example.Com certs for sending encrypted mail to FreeEMail.Example.Com accounts, but you won't trust them to tell you that georgewbush@FreeEMail.Example.Com is owned by any particular George W. Bush that you might know from other channels.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
DNSSEC is vaporware. AFAIK It was never finished, much less deployed by Verisign or anyone else. Quoting Vixie:
... ...
"We are still doing basic research on what kind of data model will work for dns security. After three or four times of saying "NOW we've got it, THIS TIME for sure" there's finally some humility in the picture... "wonder if THIS'll work?"
It's impossible to know how many more flag days we'll have before it's safe to burn ROMs that marshall and unmarshall the DNSSEC related RR's, or follow chains trying to validate signatures. It sure isn't plain old SIG+KEY, and it sure isn't DS as currently specified. When will it be? We don't know. What has to happen before we will know? We don't know that either.
2535 is already dead and buried. There is no installed base. We're starting from scratch"
TLS (SSL) does not need the ugly PKI technology to operate. SSL/TLS could very well use PGP keys. The difference is that PGP technology is more well designed and lends better to help building a web of trust.
Some people might say that newbies can't handle the complexity. Well it's the responsibilty of software developers to help them overcome this. Example: As the same PGP keys would be used for mail, the web of trust could be linked to the addressbook handling.
Besides, the current model gives a sense of security which is not real. Do we really trust CA's? When you go to an "internet cafe", do people check that the list of trusted CA's haven't been altered. In this way, PGP would bring the real sense of security/insecurity which is currently "masked".
this seems like it's got some interesting technology behind it - definitely has a rigorous security model at its core.
It's great that someone is handing out free certs, but CA Cert isn't trusted by Internet Explorer.
If 90%+ of your users are going to get the warning "The security certificate was issued by a company you have chosen not to trust," you might as well be signing your own certificates. The whole point of having a certificate is that your users won't get that pop-up window when they go to buy something from your store.
Thanks for the info, but until CA Cert gets in the trusted list for IE, it's not worth it... even if it's free.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
FreeSSL offers free certificates. They confirm by email and an automated phone call. You'll be certified in 10 minutes or less. I found them after reading this article and looking around a bit. Absolutely no problem getting it working. Wish I had know about this sooner.
Yes, they also have non-free certs, but for the life of me I can't figure out the difference. My only question is how they make any money offering free certs and making automated long distance confirmation calls.
Gotta say, it's pretty cool when you press # on your telephone and the web page updates to show you've been confirmed.
Now if only I could figure out a way to get SSL working better with name-based virtual hosting.
My uni does this internally... all the paranoid students complained about the untrusted certs when they tried to view their records, it took ages for everyone to have the uni installed as a root CA on everyone's machine (it took ages for people to be convinced the uni COULD be trusted) and you have to reinstall them everytime windows dies.
Most annoying.
-Mark
- Some browsers do not allow you to click 'yes' at all. Think older IE browsers which simply gave you the "something is wrong" page. It may be a completely valid cert in Mozilla, but with this browser you can't view the page no matter how much you want to.
- If you do get the ssl warning and the option to say "yes", how do you know you're not the victim of a man-in-the-middle attack?
Unless you actually control both endpoints (say you are setting up SSL using Stunnel on machines you run) then self-signed certs are not perfectly secure. Or, if you do verify everything as you should, you have introduced a huge hassle in performing secure SSL.For example the latest version of Blazer for my palm has no such feature, so I'm screwed.
In order to click "yes" you should verify that the SHA1 and MD5 fingerprints are correct. Do you carry a copy of these around in your wallet so you can use that web page when you're on the road? I didn't think so.
I only wish I had one.
I use so many SSL certs that I became a reseller for InstantSSL. It basically costs $200 and you get the ability to generate all the certificates you want without first providing business licenses. It also costs about $8 less, too. There's also zero turn around time...I get the completed cert immediately. It's *extremely* convenient but it kind of defeats the concept of a trusted source.
Why can't SSL support encryption without a certificate? I mean, how often do you really look at the certificate details to "make sure the website is who it says it is"? The whole point of SSL for me is to reassure the customers that their credit card details aren't going to be intercepted in some way en route from their browser to my server - so why can't I just offer them encryption without having to go through the expense and rigmarole of getting a certificate?
how does this prove the character of those running the SSL server?
I think you're thinking about SSL in slightly the wrong way. It's intended to guarantee that
1) The person you're talking to and who is talking to is precisely who they say they are
and
2) Nobody else is listening in to or interfering with the communication without the consent of either you or the other party.
Besides, it's widely known that proving oneself virtuous is an NP-complete problem, and therefore beyond the scope of SSL.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
freessl.com provides free ssl certificates. I use one on my site and you don't get the error saying its from an untrusted source. Pretty cool.
This is the problem with X.509 model. They have 2 different entities - certificates and certificate authorities. When you purchase certificate you could not use it to certify other entities, like people within your company. I think it is doene intentionally to keep revenue stream locked between selected few.
In this respect PGP model is way better. You can use your key to sign others.
We need to divest SSL from CAs. Encryption should be CA-less. If a user and site want to require identification securely, then there should be a separate way (or optional way within SSL) to accomodate that.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Think Kerberos. The two parties don't really trust each other so they ask a key server they both trust to verify their identities. The whole point in encryption is secrecy of the channel key so you want to make shure this isn't snooped by anybody. The site uses certification to publish it's public key so you know where your random session key is being sent (no MITM poser) and keep trusting it.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
The SSH protocol as defined by the IETF SECSH working group does pretty much what you ask of it. The major caveat to not using a certificate is that you can't be sure that the communication isn't being intercepted (man in the middle attack). However most (all?) implementations of the SSH protocol use a concept called "known hosts". The known hosts list is the public keys of the hosts you have previously connected to - most (all?) implementations store the name, and the IP addresses.
The known hosts allows you to ensure that on subsequent visits to the same site it is still the same as the one you agreed to trust the first time you connected.
There is no reason why a web browser couldn't implement the same thing. In fact it does when it is telling you that it can't validate the path of a certificate and asks if you want to trust the subject of the certificate.
For example OpenSSH asks a question like this on
the first connection to sourceforge.net:If I answer yes the public key of shell.sourceforge.net is recorded in my known hosts database.
This is assuming that you have made some effort (or don't care) to verify out of band that the fingerprint of the public key is what you expect. This is exactly the same as what you are expected to do when you get the dialog in your web browser that says the issuer of the certificate wasn't recognised.
The difference ? PKI Certificates attempt to tell you who you should trust by using Trust Anchors. If you want to simulate the PGP model, simply remove all the Trust Anchors from your browser and start from scratch.
I have a Thawte cert. They are free but don't include your real name, more like this:
You can get your name into your cert if you can find a Thawte "Web of Trust" Notary. You present your ID's, maybe pay a small fee, and you get notarized and can have your name in your cert.
The freebie certs work well enough for encrypted email anyways, the only annoying thing is that MSIE won't recognize Mozilla style certs, still, I have an Outlook cert for work and enables me to clearsign a message which gives it a distinctive looking red prize ribbon icon that nobody else has figured out how to get (going on two years now :-)
Note that these are only for email. You cannot use one of these certs for your SSL encrypted Apache server, for instance. I am not currently aware of a do-it-yourself SSL cert, but I'm sure such a thing exists. Unfortunately it will give a security alert as being from an untrusted source.
Clickety Click
What many people commenting on this story fail to realize is that the Certificate Authorities (CAs) are guaranteeing the integrity and security of their process, and not so much the identity of the person or entity applying for the certificates. In our messaging system, we had set up our own CA to issue personal certificates signed by signing certs that we bought from verisign. Since non-repudiation was an important feature of our messaging system, we did not rely on Verisign to verify identities for personal certs. Typically, a company would contract for us to provide personal certs for their people, and they would be responsible for connecting people with certs.
The idea of connecting site certificates with the issuing of domain names is a good one because the organization issuing the domain names already has a relationship with the owner of the name. This seems like the important link for site certs, and since it represents the potential for additional profits for the issuing organization, I would think they would jump on it. Of course, that's probably part of the problem as well, that nobody wants to pass up the potential revenue, so it is hard to set up the necessary relationships.
That said, it should be clear that it wouldn't be that hard to create a 'public' CA, but it couldn't be free either. When this came up before I outlined how it could be done in a comment, but how would you know you could trust this. I could create certs for myself and my friends, but who else would trust it. It isn't that hard to add new root certs to most browsers, so there is no reason you couldn't do this for your company or organization. If more organizations were actually using client certs to authenticate, it probably would be worthwhile to create a cheap, but secure, public facility.
If anyone has the persistance to actually make this happen, I would certainly be open to helping design the processes and maybe write some software. It really is an excellent idea. Ultimately, I would consider it a complete success when the root certs are pre-loaded into most common browsers. It is completely doable, and although there are important details to get right, it isn't really all that complex.
Think chamber of commerce running this instead of Joe GNU. They already charge money for membership, know who their members are (and thus are superior to Verisign in most cases), and are generally trustworthy members of their community.
My first thought as to what you are buying is that Verisign has dealt with microsoft and netscape to make sure their root certificate is in the browser so you don't have to worry about users getting a popup.
What I would like to see (and never will because of profit) is for me to buy a SSL cert, have Verisign or whoever REALLY verify I am who I say I am. Then from my cert be able to generate as many as I need, and so on.
That way, say school.edu could buy a cert, then generate certs for www.school.edu, pop3s.school.edu, otherwww.school.edu, or even generate one for department.school.edu who could then generate one for www.department.school.edu
After all, aren't they supposed to be about a chain of verification up to the root cert?
Some ISP's make their own... Like zet.no (see cert author) They're a norwegian small isp, with a few hundred clients (mostly companies.).SO why not other could do this I wonder. What is wrong with making your own? At least it ensures that only the other end can read, not any sniffer, and at least for me it is the most important. Usually I don't think it is as easy to replace a entire site as to sniff. So for me it is most important to ensure that only 1st and 2nd part can read the message. However, I understand that some have a need for authentiacting that remote is the one it is claiming to be. But how many users would notice if it were zet.nu instead of zet.no? And how difficult would it be to replace the papers needed to get a VeriSign cert? Panaroid users could even request a mail (snail mail) with a floppy with the ssl pub cert on, so they could check! It would also not be a problem to enable something like the PGP keysigning, that sites sign each others certs. Then you, for example, would be pretty ensured that a site who had a cert signed by slashdot.org;) and Google you would be pretty ensured that it actually would bethe site it was claiming. I do not think it is right that you should pay for encryption. Encryption is a Human Right, it is a part of Freedom of speech, to be able to communicate without that 3rd part is reading!
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
I have recently had to get SSL certs for a couple of sites that i am admin to and decided to go with http://www.securessl.co.uk I did a check of the certs and they were just as accepted as the expensive Thawte/Verisign and the verification process is damn near identical. So more secure and excepted than FreeSSL/Entrust/Geotrust ETC. I know that this company is a reseller of InstantSSL but the staff were more efficent and friendlier with suppoer issues and the cost was the same so went for them. $49 for a year now that is a more realistic price for certs that are trusted and have a warranty which none of the other players offer.