Free Certificate Authority Unveiled by Aussies

SonOfGates writes "Well, the Aussies have invaded Boston but at least they're not throwing tea into the harbor. AU-based nonprofit CAcert Inc has spent the last few days at USENIX '04 registering new users by the truckload. They bill themselves as a 'Community-Based CA.' Could this be the begining of a true 'open' certificate authority? See the O'Reilly story and press release."

Comments

About time...

[mindmaster064]

There is precisely no reason why these "authorities" should be getting any money... The servage is cheap since it doesn't even involve talking to their servers, just checking acceptance via a signing key... ANYONE can do that..! NO infrastructure!

-Mind

Re:About time...

[dj42]

Yes they "should" be!

Re:About time...

[torinth]

No infrastructure? No talking to servers? Que?

Without CA's and revocation information, SSL-style (RSA) public key infrastructures are useless. That means every client needs access to recently updated and TRUSTED revocation lists to make sure that no cert's have been forged or stolen. Every meaningful SSL client should periodically verify that any server certificates it uses are and remain valid. Using the CA's public key is absolutely NOT sufficient.

Re:About time...

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

The servage is cheap since it doesn't even involve talking to their servers, just checking acceptance via a signing key... ANYONE can do that..! NO infrastructure!

I think you're forgetting the part about actually verifying the authenticity of what they're signing.

IE, If I send them a certificate signing request with my public key and a name of George W Bush on the CSR, are they just gonna go ahead and sign it and give me a certificate stating that I'm George W Bush?

Certficate authorities usually require you to provide them with proof of your identity, like faxing you a driver's license, birth certificate, buisness license, trying to contact you at the stated address and phone number, etc... if they didn't do this, they wouldn't be very useful CAs... the certificates they issue would be meaningless.

Of course, this is not to say that the expensive commercial CAs are trustworthy simply because they charge money... not at all. But to be an useful CA you need to have the manpower to verify the stuff people ask you to sign. I wonder how this free CA will accomplish that.

Re:About time...

[mindmaster064]

Exactly how many certificates have you seen revoked? And how many of these revocation lists are going around? I agree that the implementation of the certs is screwy, since basically it means nothing at this point other than the fact that you are communicating over SSL. Basically from a browser standpoint the implementation of certificates is completely worthless since the authentication checking is just not there. The X.509 cert's were originally designed to completely authenticate that you are talking to the host/person you intended to. Since browsers currently do absolutely nothing but a check vs. the public CA key basically any cert the CA issued regardless of status (other that those that have expired with time) are complete valid certs. They could have been forged, stolen, or otherwise abused but we trust them anyway... Really a sad state of things.... X.509 revocations do exist, but since there really is no universal Public Key Infrastructure (for the non-security guru), or rather the browsers don't even TRY or HAVE A WAY to validate them in most cases they really don't mean much at all...

-Mind

Re:About time...

[mindmaster064]

They require paper proof which doesn't mean that the digital property hasn't been misappropriated from its true owner. As it stands now if someone stole your server key and you wanted to use it on their own box they can, and you cannot revoke it and have your CA reissue your cert the way it should work. Sure, the user of that site gets a browser message but big whoop... people are used to pop ups and just click shit away that they don't care to see.

This physical paper trail does nothing to increase the security of the browser, it only works to increase the security of the information the CA has. Someone can forge documents and open up a site in your name and since you cannot "revoke" a cert there is no way for you to shut them down once the process is completed. All it takes it a little bit of letterhead, a borrowed ID, and some other (possibly faked) documentation. The last time I got a cert I lied about 90% of the information.. I think the only thing that was true was the phone number. Let's fact it... The CA has no authority to shut down your key once it is issued (since there is no revocation mechanism) and once you get past the screen it is game over. That basically means these certificates are worthless for identifying people since a particular cert doesn't identify a particular host or person since they are never EVER revoked... These companies are primarily concerned with making money rememeber.... Too much scrutiny is an empty wallet... It is not in their interest to turn you away... (you are a guarranteed $200 every 1-2 years, after all)

If there was a good PKI that all the web browsers in the world could plug into this wouldn't be a problem at all. But these browser guys are competing and patenting, and I doubt it will ever happen.

- Mind

Re:About time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as an employee of the US government with a security clearance, let me say that these certificates do little to protect anyones privacy, and have little to do with security, and have everything to do with serving up ways to authenticate user habits. We (the U.S. government) don't care about what you look at unless it APPEARS to be something terrorist related. God, why doesn't anybody understand that? It seems that everybody here thinks that they are somehow SO important that the government is personally watching them, and are ready to strike at any moment. God, please just lighten up concerning certificates. Nobody cares what you look at except advertisers.

Re:About time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes me worry about how good they would be at validating users and writing good software when they can even write a decent website!!!

Re:About time...

[SpecBear]

SSL certificates assure two things:

1) You communications are encrypted and can't be interecepted in transit. These days this is a trivial thing and can easily be provided with a self-signed cert.
2) The identity of the site owner has been verified. The trusted certificate authority has taken some measures to assure that the site has been authorized by the entity named in the certificate. This is not trivial.

Without #2, it's not too hard to set up a fake site and hijack someone's traffic. You can then collect usernames and passwords, or distribute false information. Imagine if someone uses a BIND exploit to take over your ISP's DNS servers and reroutes yourbank.com to a fake site. When you pay for a certificate from a trusted CA, you're paying for #2. If you don't care about #2 for your purposes, then you can act as your own certificate authority.

Re:About time...

[scott_evil]

I guess you didn't check out the website did you? To be trusted, you need to get assurance from at the very least 2 well trusted third parties who have met you in person. Until that stage, your certificates are given a generic username.
For more info on this process and the type of third parties that are trusted, check out this page and the links therein.

Re:About time...

[DrXym]

I think you're forgetting the part about actually verifying the authenticity of what they're signing.

The thing is, a email / personal cert from Verisign etc. comes with no guarantees that the signer is actually who they say they are. You could impersonate someone quite easily just by typing in bogus details.

Verisign doesn't audit you or vouch for you, so the cert is essentially worthless. It's a few bits that say Verisign touched it but that's about all you get for your ten dollars or whatever it is these days. If you want Verisign to actually vouch for you, you're looking at paying hundreds or thousands for a cert.

And after a 6 months, a year or two the cert expires and you have to start the process all over again.

A free CA is a good thing, but again it says nothing about the authenticity of the site / person who obtained it. I think that in itself would be an extremely valid reason for Microsoft to refuse to acknowledge them for anything but email. i.e. recognize the cert for email addresses, but not for SSL or signed executables.

On the small scale, PGP is a much better model. Anyone can make a key and start passing it around. You can get other people to sign the key if you want, but it's perfectly usable for crypto from the get go. Not only usable but faster too - as anyone who's tried to encrypt something large with RSA already knows. In fact extensions such as Enigmail for Mozilla are arguably easier to use than the built-in S/MIME.

On the signing front, I really wish Mozilla / Firefox would use PGP certs too to sign their XPI files. At present no one signs XPI files (reason: they're too expensive). If an XPI file were signed with a PGP key, you could drill down through the signers and reasonablly gauge the trustworthiness of the author. Hell, PGP doesn't even preclude CAs from doing business since they can sign keys just as well as the next person and charge for it.

Re:About time...

[wfberg]

X.509 revocations do exist, but since there really is no universal Public Key Infrastructure (for the non-security guru), or rather the browsers don't even TRY or HAVE A WAY to validate them in most cases they really don't mean much at all...


Both IE and moz can use OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) - if the cert containes OCSP information (basically a URL where you can check whether the cert is revoked) the browser can check against that. Fully up-to-date windows systems actually do this by default, it's in the crypto libraries. Which caused some problems for Norton Antivirus earlier this year when their cert expired, their OCSP server wouldn't hand out an updated cert, and their liveupdate application silently(!) failed.

Why they were even using a public CA's cert, when there's no way for the end user to look at is, is another matter..

Re:About time...

[shokk]

Some time this past year, Sun revoked their cert they use for the PatchPro automated patch system. I use the system so infrequently (as opposed to the monthly use of Microsoft's SUS) that when it was revoked I had to look up how to get the new cert onto all the Sun systems (update the SUNWcert package).

Re:About time...

[shokk]

How is this different from the Web of Trust free cert service that Thawte provides? Same notarization scheme.

Re:About time...

[dritan]

With Thawte, you can only get free email certificates. With this, it looks like you can get server certificates as well.

Re:About time...

[FU_Fish]

I think you're forgetting the part about actually verifying the authenticity of what they're signing.

Have you read their site? They give you a certificate that validates the e-mail address or server, but not necessarily the person. You must then get in contact with two asurers and present them with the proper documentation to validate your identity. Once you've done that, your certificate is given your name, instead of the default "CAcert User Cert". More information here.

Re:About time...

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>Exactly how many certificates have you seen revoked?

Not enough. Everyone whose web server gets rooted should revoke their certificate.

Re:About time...

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>you cannot revoke it

I was all set to tell you that you're wrong, and point you to Thawte's revocation list page at http://www.thawte.com/roots/crldatabase.html.

Then I tried following the links from there to the actual revocation lists. They're all 404'ed.

Re:About time...

[collinl]

I'm not sure the CA are all that useful with revocation lists.
The multiple US government CA/PKIs now have CRLs that reportedly take up to 14 minutes to process in a PKI-using client - a bit of a mess when you've a few dozen emails to verify every day.

Distributed revocation is a bad thing.
Just like DNS - PKI is distributed revocation since every user/client must do their own revocation status checking - imagine getting a DNS record for a web site once, then always trusting it to be accurate?.
Every PKI-protected message/session should be checked for revocation status - that's the benefit of centralised revocation/user management (and it's waaayyyy cheaper to operate).
lyal

who else remmbers

[ErichTheWebGuy]

when Microsoft released that update for IE that included lots of new CAs? Anyone think this one will be included in the next one? My guess is no, judging from Microsoft's general resistance to anything open.

But, we might be surprised. Opinions anyone?

ps. Maybe they should patch the browser first ;)

Re:who else remmbers

[mindmaster064]

Yea, I remember it... But, if you use anything mozilla like you can import the CA cert of any certificate authority you'd like. I am not sure how you do this with IE (since I wiped that right the hell off my boxes, my windows boxes don't even use it).

Not as big an impact as you think..

-Mind

Re:who else remmbers

[0racle]

Microsoft has no resistance to *everything* open, despite what you read on Slashdot.

Re:who else remmbers

[ErichTheWebGuy]

Yea, you can do it in IE too. The problem is that end-users do not know how to, and the whole concept is completely foreign to them.

Sad as it may be, IE is still used by something like 85% of the world.

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually quite simple to do this with Windows/IE as well - if you open Outlook Express or IE and try to access an SSL site that isn't in your current list, it'll give you a warning, with the option to 'view the certificate'. Do this, and then you're given an option to 'Install this certificate'.

So, yes, easy to do with Windows if isn't included.

Re:who else remmbers

[ErichTheWebGuy]

Microsoft has no resistance to *everything* open

That's not what I meant, my bad for being unclear. I was getting at their general tendancy to shy away from things that are open, not proprietary. I know they are not opposed to everything open, just look at their recent open-sourcing of some of their code.

Re:who else remmbers

[ryen]

My guess is no, judging from Microsoft's general resistance to anything open.

that depends on what your/their meaning of 'open' is. I couldn't find any information on this project being open-source, on their site or the articles. And if its not, i'd strongly suggest it should be given the open source community's need and want for something like this and the ability to make it better. hopefully i just overlooked something and it is open source and not just free as in beer.

Re:who else remmbers

[ErichTheWebGuy]

It's actually quite simple to do this with Windows/IE as well

Simple for people like you and me. Unfortunately, get your average end-user on the phone and ask them to go to https://www.cacert.org/ and install their certificate:

"What? What's a certificate? What's this error message (about not having this certificate installed)? Ah, hell. An error. Time to reboot."

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, you can do it in IE too. The problem is that end-users do not know how to, and the whole concept is completely foreign to them.

Like everything else in IE, you just click on it! It pops up a window and you click YES! and INSTALL!

It's been proven time and again that most people will click on anything! So installing another CA cert into IE is really easy.

Re:who else remmbers

[Rabbitt]

I don't think the recent 'open sourcing' of windows 2000 / et al, was their idea - not that it's one I'm opposed to mind you ;-)

Re:who else remmbers

[mrchaotica]

Considering all the malware windows accumulates, if people rebooted every time they got a weird popup/error they'd never get anything done.

illustrative anecdote: Today, at my girlfriend's house, she was trying to use IE to check her webmail. Every time a new page loaded, a message popped up saying she needed activex (or something, she was so used to the messages that she clicked the close box really fast), and then another box popped up with something to the effect of "are you sure?".

Anyway, I installed firefox for her before letting her finish checking her mail, but the point is that people get quite tolerant of popup crap.

Re:who else remmbers

[mrchaotica]

I'm curious (not trolling, despite my sig), could you name something that Microsoft has that's open, that they weren't forced to use in order to compete (e.g. "shared source")? I'm trying, but I can't think of any myself.

Re:who else remmbers

[Azari]

MS has absolutely no opposition to open wallets.

Re:who else remmbers

[DNS-and-BIND]

Just make an unsigned ActiveX control to import the cert. People click "yes" on those things all the freaking time.

For that matter, just tell people to click "yes" to accept your uncertified cert...they'll do that too.

Re:who else remmbers

[0racle]

Services for Unix is widely known to use BSD licensed code and utilities from the OpenBSD project. The TCP/IP stack in early NT products was BSD code, and its possible some of the utilities, the ftp client for example, is still BSD code.

Microsoft doesn't like the GPL, but the GPL is not the be all and the end all of Free Software. Microsoft has no problems with other open licenses.

Re:who else remmbers

[nexex]

kerberos, oh wait...

Re:who else remmbers

[mlk]

I dont think the two on SF.net were due to MS being forced.
(WIX and WTL, search SF.net for 'em, they are under the CPL)

Re:who else remmbers

[_Sprocket_]

Microsoft doesn't like the GPL, but the GPL is not the be all and the end all of Free Software. Microsoft has no problems with other open licenses.

Oddly enough... Services For Unix includes GNU tools. That's right - GPL code.

Re:who else remmbers

[olderchurch]

This is all about instructing the user. When switching banks my mother could not get the site to work. The damn thing gave an error and I was trying to find out what the error was. After a week of emailing I finally found the time to go to her place and told her to show me what she did. Apparently the bank wanted to instal an ActiveX control. I had told here that she always had to close all pop-ups she encountered. So when confronted with the pop-up asking if the ActiveX should be installed, she closed it!

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

M$ happily use BSD licensed code because they don't have to worry about the GPL. In SFU they are re-distributing the BSD and GPLed code, not adding it to any of their own code.

Anyway the object of SFU is to help you migrate from unix to Windoze (of course it can just as easily be used to help migrate folk to *bsd or linux).

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

True, they like you to open your wallet or check book.

Re:who else remmbers

[julesh]

This often happens if you've set scripting of ActiveX components in the Internet zone to 'prompt' (which is a good idea) and not set your webmail host to be a trusted site (which is also a good idea, imho - who knows how good they are at stripping out weird HTML?).

Re:who else remmbers

[panxerox]

"Microsoft doesn't like the GPL, but the GPL is not the be all and the end all of Free Software. Microsoft has no problems with other open licenses." Ya like the RIAA only has a "problem" with Kazaa...

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

"GPL is not the be all and the end all of Free Software"

Well no, there's LGPL too, and the GNU FDL. The definition of Free Software kinda ends there though; the FSF doesn't like being associated with the Open Source movement ;)

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

> I refer to those citizens of The United States of America not as 'Americans', because I don't believe the Mexicans, nor the Canadians (even the French ones ;) deserve the stigma of being associated with them.

Then why in the hell do they keep sneaking over the borders and getting the benefits (e.g. medical, welfare) of "Americans"?

Nice quote from War and Peace. Here's another one: Just because an ape reads Nitchze, doesn't mean he understands it. Thank you for entertaining us with your high drama.

Oh, and the United States is a world leader because (1) your country follows us in servitude and (2) our country has to bail out your sorry country's ass any time someone gets out of line.

We're the playground monitors of the world. You might not like the fact that we're there, but just get rid of us and see how often the other kids beat the shit out of you.

And that, boys and girls, is how you do a Troll. ;)

Re:who else remmbers

[VivianC]

...judging from Microsoft's general resistance to anything open.

You are obviously one of those /. anti-Microsoft trolls. How could you accuse them of being against anything open? Outlook and IE are two of the most "open" programs I've ever seen. And don't even get me started on how "open" Windows is in general when you stick it on a broadband connection without a firewall. That was four hours of cleaning at my cousin's house last weekend.

Re:who else remmbers

[internic]

Well, another point to consider is whether the person will have any way in hell to judge if the CA is trustworthy. I mean, I've added CAs to my browsers before but only from organizations I know personally (like my university). Before today if I were asked to add CAcert Inc. to the list of CAs in my browser I would have declined, because I would have had no idea whether they were trustworthy.

If you can't be sure the CA is trustworth, then what good are the certificates? Admittedly, having the browser makers determine this probably isn't such a great idea either, but they most likely have a better idea than I do.

Re:who else remmbers

[IamScared]

Of course not, they get good code for free (as in beer). The porting effort is almost trivial and the publicity is enormous: "Microsoft is ditributing open-source software for interoperability with UNIX systems! This must be a hell of a company!"

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

ha. thx for the laugh this morning, i needed it.

Re:who else remmbers

[mrchaotica]

Perhaps I should have been more clear; the popup wasn't for the website, it was because there was malware of some kind on her computer.

The same 2 popup messages were activated on every site, including Yahoo! Mail, Google, etc.

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Mods should set the parent post funny as hell

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you also tell her to move her money to a bank that doesn't use ActiveX?

Re:who else remmbers

[SEWilco]

It took you four hours to install Linux?

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

My company believes Microsoft's stance on the GPL is entirely natural.

Sincerely,
Darl

Re:who else remmbers

[VivianC]

Damn. You got me on that one.

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the point to speculating on that?

Re:who else remmbers

[Anonymous Coward]

"Before today if I were asked to add CAcert Inc. to the list of CAs in my browser I would have declined, because I would have had no idea whether they were trustworthy."

And yet Verisign, Inc is in your list of trusted roots. You won't include new CAs because you don't know if they are trustworthy, but you don't remove existing CAs that are obviously not trustworthy?

Re:who else remmbers

[ogl_codemonkey]

Playground monitors, at least here - allow all the little kiddes to play whatever games they like. Their role is, as it should be, to stop them from beating up on each other. They are also recognized by those under their care as a valid supervisor, with morality, integrity, and importantly the juristiction to assert their legal authourity. Why do 'you' have authority over European nations?

>I refer to those citizens of The United States of America by whatever I choose to; and, at least untill 'you' come up with and agree upon an 'official' noun unique to your country, government, juristiction, and social values, I will continue to exercise my intellectual freedom to do so.

I believe they 'sneak' over 'your' borders to get 'your' mecical and welfare benefits because they are superior to those where they came from. No, I don't believe they are entitled to your taxpayer-funded ordinances, but from their perspective I'm sure they're better off cheating to get them than starving and dying at home. Arresting, detaining, incarcerating, or extraditing them is not going to change this.

Maybe you should invade and occupy their countries to free them from their legal and soverign government, because their people are not 'happy' or 'free' under it; but 'you' won't, because they have no vast supply of easy to extract oil, because you complain about paying $2/gallon for it (btw, that's still 30% cheaper than 'my country'), as you should have been since the sixties.

Or maybe 'you' could use 'your' authority while they are in 'your' country to employ them (no preference over 'native' citizens, just fairly according to their abilities, as I hear the job-finding portion of the USAs welfare system works, ICBW), give them citizenship, and fund the medical and welfare needs of your 'native' citizent from *their* taxes. Because they are not 'American', or at least, not as 'American' as 'you', does not mean they could not function as a valuable member of 'your' society.

What gives 'you' the right to impose your freedoms upon other nations? Invasion and occupation is still an act of war as far as I know - what provocation do you have?

Enjoy your biometric passports and RFID credit cards. You can keep them.

But what browsers will support

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Mozilla/Opera might, but what about Microsoft? If Internet Explorer doesn't support it's unfortunately not very useful.

Re:But what browsers will support

[Anonymous Coward]

If the certificate is a standard SSL cert, then obviously it's already supported in IE, no?

This is a good thing, and not something to get annoyed with Microsoft about, but rather something which is a nice alternative to Verisign, etc.

Re:But what browsers will support

[Anonymous Coward]

They only trust known CA's. If this is new, and not taking over an already established one, it won't be known.

Re:But what browsers will support

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. The mozilla team has an issue in bugzilla about cacert. They've decided to support this ca for the next release.

Re:But what browsers will support

[njdj]

If Internet Explorer doesn't support it's unfortunately not very useful.

Translation: You still use Microsoft Internet Explorer.

People who use MSIE obviously are not concerned about privacy or security, so CAs are irrelevant to them.

Consequently, people who still use MSIE are irrelevant to those of us who are concerned about privacy and security. People who are concerned about privacy and security are a small minority of Internet users. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get the privacy and security we want.

Re:But what browsers will support

[Anonymous Coward]

Bug 215243, if you want to read more about it. I for one will deactivate that RootCA certificate if they include it. I think Mozilla needs a per SSL-host list which asks whether you trust that the given CA is correct on the first visit and then warns whenever the CA of the certificate of that host changes.

Re:But what browsers will support

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. I'm using Firefox. However, I realize that most people do use IE and most people will be confused if it's not already a known good authority.

Sounds like...

[kai5263499]

The mythical "web of trust" we were supposed to have in Verisign/Thawte/etc... is finally comming true in a NON-PROFIT entity.

Too bad this cert isn't defaultly trusted by IE/FireFox.

Interesting side note: when I recieved the registration email from them, Outlook 2003 (yeah, I know...) marked it as "junk mail".

Re:Sounds like...

[casuist99]

I know it's not non-profit, but Thawte does provide personal certificates for free. You can use them for email encryption and signing without any difficulty. As for server certificates (https, etc), I think you'd have to pay for, but for personal email usage, Thawte is a pretty good option.

Re:Sounds like...

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

I use a Thawte p.cert to sign my email - there's a good writeup on configuring it to work with OSX's Mail.app here -- also a good example on how to provide visually appealing technical documentation that I can talk non-technically inclined people into reading.

-- YLFI

Re:Sounds like...

[Anonymous Coward]

Verisign/Thawte/etc weren't about a web-of-trust. The X.500 design is all about hierarchy and military-style trust trees. You're probably thinking of PGP, whose web-of-trust idea was kind of unusual at the time. Thawte's managed to build a slightly weblike system on top of the X.500 design, but it's still awfully centralized and hierarchical.

Re:Sounds like...

[Gollum]

Slow down, cowboy. Thawte has been offering free personal certificates for at least 5 years already, along with a "Web of Trust" that allows for distributed certification of identity, exactly as this group is doing.

Admittedly, these are not usable as server certs (I think), but don't be so quick to slam things you wot not of.

Re:Sounds like...

[ryanvm]

I know it's not non-profit, but Thawte does provide personal certificates for free.

They do and they're actually pretty useful. However, they do expire after only one year which is pretty annoying for people who have gone through the trouble of getting their mail client to send you encrypted mail.

Good for them

[A. Pizmo Clam]

Many ISP's and low-budget group have self-signed certs. They're easy to make. Hopefully this project will make it easier. I have quite often seen sites with a self-signed cert and another page giving the fingerprint of the cert. Most vendors allow these, but they aren't "trusted".

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.

Re:Good for them

[RAMMS EIN]

``Even if you won in court, you would lose financially if not insured.''

Unless you win the case, and the losing party pays for your court fees. This is common in countries employing civil law, as opposed to (mostly) former members of the Commonwealth that employ common law.

Australia might not have been the best place to found this organization.

Re:Good for them

[A. Pizmo Clam]

If you, as a small corporation, non-profit or individual, go up in court against a large corporation or an ambulance-chasing shark, your chances or losing are better than not. Loser-pays systems therefore discourage discourage lawsuits by the little guy against the big guy, and make the little guy more likely to throw up his hands and settle when sued by the big guy.

Although they certainly do make for litigation-happiness, overall the non-loser-pays system is healthier for democratic participation in the legal system.

Re:Good for them

[mrchaotica]

The problem with non-loser-pays is that small organizations/individuals can't afford to fight at all, even with a rock-solid case, because they'll run out of money before it's over.

Re:Good for them

[joggle]

Although they certainly do make for litigation-happiness, overall the non-loser-pays system is healthier for democratic participation in the legal system.

Very good point. It's a shame the same doesn't apply in criminal court. The accused (almost always a little guy) can be charged with virtually anything by the prosecution (ie, high potential cost), being coerced into accepting a plea-bargain for probation 90% of the time regardless of guilt (at least here in the US). So when it really counts litigation-happiness isn't an option. Go figure.

Re:Good for them

[RAMMS EIN]

I see it rather the other way around.

In a system where everyone pays their own legal fees, smaller parties are more likely to avoid lawsuits against bigger parties, because chances are the bigger party will continue the suit until the smaller one goes bankrupt.

I observe this in the Real World, too. Many important court cases in the USA seem to get settled, even though in Europe, the smaller party would probably have continued and won. This fits my expectations. That said, I have not done any solid research. If you can up with some data that proves me wrong, please do. The fewer unfounded prejudices, the better.

Re:Good for them

[phallstrom]

What's the liability? Seems all you are doing is making it easy for them to encrypt data b/n them and the end user. Anything beyond that is beyond your involvement.

I don't think I'd get very far suing Amazon because someone stole my credit card from them even though their web server was using Verisign (this is all just an example). Odds are it happened way after I transmitted it to them via HTTPS.

It doesn't make any sense... of course I've never understood why CA's where needed anyway. Just cause joeskillerdeals.com has a Verisign certificate are you really going to trust them?

No way.

Re:Good for them

[ofdm]

To the contrary, it's not at all uncommon in NSW (and the other states) for costs to be granted against the unsuccesful party in a civil matter. The amount of costs is however determined by the court.

For the interested ./ers (and I can't imagine there are many who would cherish the thought of reading legislation) Part 11 of the Legal Profession Act 1987 discusses some of the issues of costs as applicable in NSW.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF?

The same could be said the other way.

The fact that a big guy can sue you and you know its going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars for minor inconviences means that you will also pay, thus its more likely that you will settle up for the fraction of the cost regardless of whether you were right or wrong.

Look at the folks settling up for the RIAA cases...granted most of these people were in the wrong and knew they were -- but some of the ones falsely accused also realized it would be cheaper just to pay up than deal with it.

Either way you are screwed. Overall, one way discourages one from sueing the big guys, while the other discourages going to court when being sued by the other. Its a null sum and as such, it would be healthier to make the looser pay up -- but this of course would require folks to have true conviction in their beliefs instead of the morons that sue for anything...it would also mean big business wouldn't be throwing out C&Ds and otherwise knowing that no one wants to deal with them and as such removing law firms acting as a private law enforcement agencies.

Re:Good for them

[A. Pizmo Clam]

In a system where everyone pays their own legal fees, smaller parties are more likely to avoid lawsuits against bigger parties, because chances are the bigger party will continue the suit until the smaller one goes bankrupt.

You're assuming an open-and-shut case. For open-and-shut cases, this is probably true. But most cases are not open-and-shut. Loser-pays tends to discourage lawsuits whose favorable outcomes are not assured - i.e. most of them. Which I'll grant you includes most frivolous lawsuits, but some legitimate ones as well.

Case in point: guitar manufacturer Ernie Ball. When you get hit with a software EULA violation, you have to pay the SPA's legal fees if you fight it and lose. As Sterling Ball says in the linked interview, no one wants to fight it - everyone settles.

In terms of statistics, just compare the total number of lawsuits in the US and Europe. We have more suits of every kind, including more David vs. Goliath ones. Whether that's worth the price of ubiquitous litigation is open to question, but it is the case.

Re:Good for them

[A. Pizmo Clam]

Look at the folks settling up for the RIAA cases...granted most of these people were in the wrong and knew they were -- but some of the ones falsely accused also realized it would be cheaper just to pay up than deal with it.

Yeah, but knowing you're innocent and knowing you're gonna win are two different things.

Either way you are screwed.

Indeed. The law is a bear.

Re:Good for them

[ziplux]

A cert from a CA tells you _for certain_ that "joeskillerdeals.com" is really the website for Joe's Killer Deals. Whether you trust Joe is up to you, but the cert ensures that Joe is getting your information, and not some random third party. Without the "web of trust" that the CA helps create, it is impossible to verify the identity of anyone on the Internet.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

"Web of trust" is a peer-to-peer concept. CAs create a hierarchy of trust. There could be mixtures of both, but in reality they don't exist.

Re:Good for them

[julesh]

If you, as a small corporation, non-profit or individual, go up in court against a large corporation or an ambulance-chasing shark, your chances or losing are better than not.

That's not the way it works in the UK. As a director of a small company that has taken a few larger businesses to court, I can tell you that most of the time, the smaller business wins. That's because most of the time, the smaller business is _right_, and that's what the court is interested in.

I'm convinced that the UK civil court system (which is not entirely a loser-pays system, but similar -- it's a "loser pays winner's reasonable costs if loser's case was unlikely to win from the beginning" system) works, and would suggest to anyone not to knock it unless they've tried it.

Re:Good for them

[cthugha]

The legislation you cited generally regulates the manner in which lawyers charge their fees generally, although there are provisions dealing for lawyers who act "without reasonable prospect of success" (which is very wrong, IMNSHO). Awards of costs in litigation are usually a matter within the discretion of the court, and are governed generally by common law and the rules of the court making the order.

And you shouldn't really use Austlii for legislation, it's usually not up to date. The offices of legislative counsel for each state's Parliament usually keep up-to-date, but unauthorized, electronic reprints, and you can check Scaleplus for Commonwealth legislation.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless someone gets control of the DNS servers that the client browser use.

Re:Good for them

[PSUdaemon]

Yes, thank you guys! And thanks for the free wireless in the Hotel from which I post this!

wifi0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"cacert.org"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.442GHz Access Point: 00:0F:66:0C:4B:EF

Re:Good for them

[cmowire]

I was thinking about that this morning, mostly in the server case.

Really, certificates "should" just have been stuffed into DNS records because you need to prove some set of information and otherwise protect your records there. However, the DNS protocol isn't encrypted and sometimes DNS gets things wrong.

This CA is mildly more secure than DNS simply because it's defense in depth. It trusts the DNS contact information to hand out server contact info properly, however only at the time reqeuested. Plus, your certificate has been signed by CACert, which is harder to mess with than DNS. Verisign requires a seperate thread of authentication entirely, so it could perhaps be represented as even more security.

Really, the problem is that nobody who wrote SSL/TLS thought to include an in-between level of security, a.k.a. "semitrusted". If a certificate was "semitrusted", you wouldn't get a little key icon, but you wouldn't get a warning, either (i thought of making a different key icon, but that is too complicated without explanation) so that you'd benefit from some level of universal encryption, but there is still a system of really-secure certificates for things like shopping carts and online banking, where the standard of security is higher.

great news!

[terrymaster69]

There is no reason to pay for certificates - initially the issue was about trust. The infrstructure to set up a cert authority is not complicated, as mentioned...you just need people to trust the certificates that you issue. God (and slashdotters) know the kind of crap that VeriSign has pulled before. It's good to see alternatives.

Re:great news!

[Anonymous Coward]

you just need people to trust the certificates that you issue.

Yes well for that to happen one would have to trust the authority that signed the certificates to do some identity checking on the stuff they sign. Now verisign once signed a cert for microsoft.com to someone not from microsoft probably charging their usual amount for that. I would hate to think how accurate someone doing signing in his/her spare time would cope with thousands of certificate applications. I also wonder how secure someone can keep a private key without at least some cash for some secure computers.

There is a simple solution to the certificate price though. Use a pgp style webs of trust. The gnu implementation for TLS (ssl) is already there. Also isp`s could give a cheap/free certs to their customers. They already should know something about their identity (billing) and signed e-mail makes it really easy to identify mail as non-spam. That means the recover their cost in no time once the spam starts to drop.

On a side note, verisign which owns thawte sells comverse/verint spying equipment. Reason enough to doupt if their private key is used for just making money from signing certificates.

Where's the government for a change?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I normally think the government should keep its nose out of most places, I think this is one place where the goverment could actually do some good. Just like many states and goverments proved offically accepted picture IDs to individuals, I think they could easily set up a service to provide offical digital IDs to all the citizens. Companies like Verisign may still have a role in providing corporate certs, etc, but I think the goverment is the best way to provide a universally recoginized digital ID to everyone.

Re:Where's the government for a change?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how non-profits work in Australia, or really in the states either for that matter. But they do have a greater degree of transparency. A non-profit who's responsability is to the community they serve is probably the IDEAL way for the government to be involved in regulating this activity.

Re:Where's the government for a change?

[Anonymous Coward]

But the question is .. which government?

The net spans more than one country. Or each government could provide certs for its own citizens; but then there will be trusted and untrusted goverments.

Possibly this is a role for the UN ( who have been searching for a role for some time now ;] )

Re:Where's the government for a change?

[njdj]

I think this is one place where the goverment could actually do some good.(...) offically accepted picture IDs to individuals

There are two problems with this. As another message pointed out, not all governments are equally trustworthy. Would you trust an ID issued by Nigeria? Or would you wonder how easy it is to bribe a Nigerian official to issue one in any name you wanted?

Now look at it from the viewpoint of a Nigerian citizen. How can he/she get acceptable ID? Clearly, not from the government.

The second problem is that some people are stateless, i.e. no government acknowledges them as its citizens. There are many countries which do not grant automatic citizenship to persons born there (Germany is one). And there are a few governments which give themselves the right to cancel the citizenship of one of their own citizens.

Re:Where's the government for a change?

[badzilla]

Governments are in fact extremely keen to do precisely this, or at least partner with commercial CAs to recognise their certificates for official business such as authentication when filing tax returns and so on. Unfortunately in the UK it has not gone so well up until now; last time I looked the official client certs were expensive and had their private key escrowed.

A useful side-effect of all citizens having government client certs for authentication would be that one of the major obstacles to routine use of encrypted e-mail would be removed. Which would be great, however if that actually happened I sure would prefer the government not to have a copy of my private key...

Re:Where's the government for a change?

[Cerebus]

There are privacy problems inherent in X.509 that should make you nervous. There is no way to do an anonymous transaction (say, via cash) secured with an X.509 certificate because your *name*, not the key, is the important part of X.509. That means you must always reveal your name.

In addition, an X.509 certificate can bind any number of attributes to that name, and it's up to the CA-- not you-- to decide what those are. Once they're in the certificate, *you cannot decide not to provide them*. Kinda takes away your control over your private information.

Look up the work of Carl Ellison & Ron Rivest and others on X.509 and privacy, particularly in contrast to how SPKI handles things.

Re:Where's the government for a change?

[AKnightCowboy]

But the question is .. which government?

I think it would only make sense for the United States government to be the root CA for the world... afterall we did invent the Internet. (j/k).

Re:Where's the government for a change?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all well and good, except then all the conspiracy theorists will jump up and start screaming "1984!" at you.

Seriously, I once thought it would neat if you could show up at the Post Office, present ID and $5, and be given an authorization number, which when used at verisign or thawte, would provide you with a valid certificate (and easy renewal rights).

But then I realized (being a mild paranoiac helps) that there are some people in the world who would immediately denounce this as another Big Brother intrusion into privacy ("How can the gov't provide us this certificathingy without tracking you?", they'd say. "You trust them with your info?" the cajoling would never cease, until the process became an American institution.).

All this, despite the fact that the government already has waaaaay more information on you than your name, address, and vital stats. Anyways, if there's ever an easy-to-implement id verification system, I think I'll skip it - you'll get websites redirecting you to their 'secure' servers, simply so they can scrape your info from your cert!

Re:Where's the government for a change?

[Your Pal Dave]

Seriously, I once thought it would neat if you could show up at the Post Office, present ID and $5, and be given an authorization number, which when used at verisign or thawte, would provide you with a valid certificate (and easy renewal rights).

Your'e not too far off. Form the Federal Regester for June 17, 2003:

The following is a brief description of
how IPP would work. An organization
can establish a relationship with a
qualified U.S. Certificate Authority to
integrate digital signing with improved
identity verification into an online
application. Any individual desiring to
use digital certificates that include
USPS IPP will complete an application
online. The online system will verify
the individual's identity via commercial
data base checking. The system will
then produce a standard Postal Service
form to be printed out at the
''applicant's'' personal computer. The
individual requesting the service will
present this form to a participating post
office where the ''In Person Proofing''
process is conducted. After successful
completion of the IPP event, the CA will
notify the applicant to download their
digital certificate. For clarity, the steps
in the IPP process are outlined below.

Myself, I'd prefer to see USPS be the CA, but that would never fly with "Less Government" conservatives since it would compete with private businesses.

Re:Where's the government for a change?

[SEWilco]

Obviously North Korea should be in charge of global certificates.

Re:Where's the government for a change?

[cubic6]

The whole point of X.509 certificates is that your name is attached. It's meant for verification of identity, not anonymous transactions. If you took away the name component, there would be no security because the other party has no guarentee that you are who you say you are. It'd be like having a driver's license with no name or picture, just a little notice saying that "someone" is licensed to drive. If you need some secure way of making anonymous transactions, I'd imagine a one-way auth system like SSL would work better.

Re:Where's the government for a change?

[Cerebus]

You should read the work on SPKI by Carl Ellison, Ron Rivest, et.al. Your X.509 name is, effectively, meaningless-- worse than meaningless, it's assumed to be global when in fact it's local. Most of X.509's implementation problems stem from this simple fact.

Once you free yourself from the concept using human-readable names, you'll realize that in any PKI-- including X.509-- it's only the key that matters. Since the key is unique (the chances of two people randomly selecting the same key are infinitesimal) the key itself is used as the name.

The fact that the public key is cryptographically bound to the private key is all that's needed for authentication.

Binding a key to a person-- now, there's a real problem. But X.509 doesn't solve that. In fact, *no* PKI *can* solve that problem. You only solve it by having good policies issuing and protecting private key storage.

Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[mabu]

The whole notion that a Cert authority is needed is essentially bogus in my opinion. We've been rolling our own certs for years for all but the main e-commerce web servers. Who wants to pay the outrageous extortion fees Verisign/Thawte charge and jump through the goofy hoops? I bite my lip and do this every two years for the main web server just so my clients don't totally (unnecessarily) freak out at the prospect of a dialogue box popping up in SSL mode warning them that Microsoft's "paranoia-protection-money" wasn't paid-off.

The Cert authorities are a joke. We registered one CA with Verisign with virtually no documentation, and another time, when renewing an existing, different cert, they demanded everything short of a blood test for "authentication." It's nothing short of criminal considering they charge $200+ for something that takes 10ms to generate that they make people wait weeks for, and in no way guarantees superior security, and they'll make certs for anyone with money so the identity checking is BS and moot.

I'm all for a free certifying agency, but you can also roll-your-own with OpenSSL.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[justMichael]

While I agree with you completely. It all depends on what you are using it for.

The problem with rolling your own is when a browser hits it, it burps up an error saying it can't verify the validity of the cert. Depending on what you are using the cert for, who cares.

I have my webmail server forced through https with a self signed cert. If someone that uses my webmail server doesn't like it it's no skin off my butt (I provide free mail to a few friends).

For any business sites that I setup I suggest InstantSSL, they are cheap, fast and trusted by pretty much any browser around. And that is the important part when selling to the public, that they don't get some warning. Most of them will never even look to see if the page is encrypted but if they get some funky warning odds are they will leave.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[mabu]

I agree with you.

This is why I pay the "mafia" their protection money for our main e-commerce web servers. Most consumers just see the dialogue box and conjure up images of their credit card numbers showing up on billboards.

But we all know why we pay this fee: not to really provide more security or privacy for transactions; to merely keep that paranoia-inducing dialog box from appearing. And it's necessary for e-commerce web sites because most users don't know any better.

But for non-public sites, like a web-based mail server, we use homebrewed certs and put a message on the web site explaining to users that the dialogue box that pops up doesn't mean the transaction isn't secure; it just means we prefer to sign our own 50-year certificate instead of paying a useless fee to Verisign and getting strip-searched every two years by a company that we feel is less trustworthy than any other.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[HeghmoH]

Unless I grossly misunderstand how SSL certs work, using a self-signed cert means that anybody in the position to do so can perform a man-in-the-middle attack by spoofing DNS replies and pretending to be your site. Since your cert is self-signed, there's no way for a random third party to tell the difference between your site and a spoof. Getting your cert signed by an authority doesn't just make the annoying dialog go away, it adds to your site's security.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[iso]

You should check out FreeSSL.com instead. It's cheaper than InstantSSL, and works on even more browsers. No, it's not "free" (despite the name), but it is cheap.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[justMichael]

It all depends on how you deal with it.

On my OS X install, I installed the cert so if someone tries a man-in-the-middle I'll know as the cert isn't going to match the one on my box.

I don't know how the browsers handle it but i can tell Mozilla (all variants I use) to allow the cert. The part I don't know is, do they cache a hash or the fingerprint or just ignore cert warnings for the domain.

I also provide the cert to anybody that needs it and wants to install it.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[justMichael]

Did I miss something?

InstantSSL 1 yr $49
FreeSSL 1 yr $99

They claim 96% compatibility, InstantSSL claims 99.3% (love those numbers, WTF)

They do mention the "hassles" of chained certs. I know it was a huge pain to drop one more file on my box, but I don't see it being worth $50 ;)

If I did miss something, I apologize. Let me know I'll be checking them out again in the morning.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[Devalia]

The correct link is here

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[schnarff]

Might want to update that potentially useful link to take the typo out of the URL: InstantSSL.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[grokster]

Who wants to pay the outrageous extortion fees Verisign/Thawte charge and jump through the goofy hoops?

Think of it like insurance. Who wants to pay insurance? Some people use insurance, others don't.

You analyze your risk, and proceed accordingly.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[Anonymous Coward]

All that's needed to do that is a trusted third party. Anything will do. The pay CAs work, but a keyserver or free CA will accomplish the same thing just as well. Another option is the typical SSH operation. Store the key on the first connect. If the site is already under a man-in-the-middle attack it won't help, but chances are it won't be under attack, plus you'll get a big warning as soon as the attack stops.

I don't really see any reason a keyserver wouldn't be a better option than certificates and certificate authorities. Anybody can add a key for their server. There must be some protocol that can authenticate the key really matches the server. You just need to make sure that keys can be revoked if the domain is transferred.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[ptbarnett]

I'm not sure where you got the $99 price from, but see here:

https://products.freessl.com/ssl/starterssl.do?ref =freessl

I'm using them for a personal domain. The "browser compatability" issue relates to which browsers are supported. The percentage is simply an estimate of the number of people using the supported browser.

Put into perspective, the FreeSSL (30-day trial) and StarterSSL ($39/year) are supported by:

1. Internet Explorer 5.01+
2. Netscape 7
3. Mozilla 1.0+

QuickSSL (starting at $179) adds the following browsers:

1. AOL 5+
2. Opera 7+
3. Safari (all versions)

Finally, a BusinessID certificate (starts at $299) adds PocketPC 2003.

I considered the browsers that I wanted to support, and chose StarterSSL.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[StormyMonday]

In theory, yes. Keep in mind, however, that a man- in- the- middle attack can work if and only if the MITM controls *all* communications between the endpoints. This includes things like phone calls and snail mail.

Something like a formal CA is needed if you want to communicate with absolutely anybody with no prior knowledge or communication. This is why e-commerce sites use them. If you are communicating with somebody you already know, it's not really necessary.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[justMichael]

Now that I look at it today, neither do I.

I swear when I looked last night the price was $99, but then again I did botch the InstantSSL link at the same time.

If I really cared I guess I could check the cache on my PowerBook when I get home, but I see no reason for that.

So lets call this one operator error ;)

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[rufey]

The issue here is trust. Sure I can roll my own SSL cert. I can roll a SSL cert for, say www.bankofamerica.com and claim that I'm from Bank of America.

The idea of a certificate authority is to provide a method for verifying that the person or entity who is requesting a certificate (be it SSL or S/MIME or whatever) is really who they say they are.

Imagine if I could roll my own drivers licence. I could claim I'm anyone I want to be. Remember a couple of years back when someone supposidly was able to get a cert from Verisign in Microsoft's name, claiming that they worked for Microsoft?

I used to work for one of Verisign's big competitors (and yes they are still in business). We asked for a lot of information so that we could verify that the requester was who they said they were.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[iabervon]

Your application is actually ideal for self-signed certs. What you should do is print the certificate fingerprint on business cards and physically hand them to your friends. That way, when the browser pops up the box asking them if they want to verify the certificate, they can actually verify it against information they personally trust directly. This is a much stronger level of trust than anything involving Verisign, because someone would have to successfully impersonate you to your friends, rather than simply convincing some CA somewhere.

Of course, they're vulnerable to spoofing when they accept the certificate if they aren't checking the fingerprint. They should at least accept the certificate permanently, so that they would get a message they aren't used to if it ever changes.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[Anonymous Coward]

godaddy.com now sells cheap cert along with their cheap domain names. instantssl.com is still way too expensive.

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[Anonymous Coward]

godaddy.com's cert is much cheaper

Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia

[CyberVenom]

Why not just combine the domain registration and certificate authority tasks? The registrar can issue an intermediate CA certificate which expires along with the domain to the registrant with authority for the domain. The registrant can then sign as many certificates as he likes for subdomains. If the domain is transfered away from the registrar or to a different registrant, the registrar simply revokes the old intermediate certificate.
The registrar, with minimal work, could even provide a multi-platform GUI tool based on the OpenSSL source to allow the registrants to easily generate certificates.
Without requiring any large amount of identity verification, this will allow the client to verify that the communication is arriving unaltered, directly from the owner of the domain, which is really all we want to know in the first place, isn't it? (I know Verisign is already both a registrar and CA, but they don't combine the services, and they charge far too much for each. Maybe a smaller registrar like GANDI (http://gandi.net))

Note to users (from their website)

[kai5263499]

Note: If you plan to use these certificates with Internet Explorer, Outlook, or Outlook Express then generate the certificate from within Internet Explorer. They can't be sucessfully imported into Internet Explorer. Believe us, we've tried...

Re:Note to users (from their website)

[Anonymous Coward]

blatant karmawhoring at work, mod parent down

Maybe.

[Saeger]

Could this be the begining of a true 'open' certificate authority?

Stumbling blocks would be that Verisign would still be the expensive 'gold standard' for quite a while because its always been compatible from the earlydays in the most number of browsers, and another would be getting enough funding to pay for the identity check and other redtape that it takes to really be a 'trusted' cert authority.

I wonder what the cheaper CA's like thawte and geotrust think...

--

Re:Maybe.

[mabu]

Stumbling blocks would be that Verisign would still be the expensive 'gold standard' for quite a while because its always been compatible from the earlydays in the most number of browsers,

Let's qualify this for people who may not understand.

This new certifying authority will be just as compatible as any other cert. It will still offer as much encryption protection as any cert provided by any authority.

The difference is that the browser may not be "pre programmed" to recognize the authority, and will therefore pop up a "warning dialogue box" that says something like "Certificate is signed by an unknown authority". In reality the encryption and transaction is just as strong. It's just that the browser company hasn't been paid a fee to keep the dialogue box from popping up and scaring users into thinking that their transactions are not encrypted.

So basically, those of us who have used CAs from Verisign are paying a fee to keep a dialogue box from popping up scaring our users, making them think their transaction isn't secure, when it is.

There is this notion that companies like Verisign/Thawte are charging their outrageous fees for an intangible piece of digital information because they "verify" that the name on the certificate matches name of the web site you're dealing with. Most users wouldn't be conducting e-commerce or secure transactions with a web site unless they were fairly confident who they were dealing with in the first place, so the notion that a cert offers additional security is pretty superfluous.

Re:Maybe.

[nachoboy]

Verisign acquired Thawte in late 1999. Though they acknowledge the fact on their corporate website, they don't exactly make it obvious they no longer compete with Verisign.

Re:Maybe.

[Anonymous Coward]

thawte is still cheaper even if they dont compete. even if thawte wasnt bought out it would still be the cheaper of the two.

Re:Maybe.

[mabu]

Yea, I'm aware of this. It's pretty insideous that the top two Certifying authories are basically the same company, pretending to be separate so that people think they have a choice among #1 and #2.

If you want to have fun, contact one and rant and rave about the other. For example, contact Thawte and tell them you're sick of Verisign and want to switch to them. They'll play along and never tell you they're owned by the same company!

Re:Maybe.

[petecarlson]

You miss an important point. I am running a NoCat authentication gateway which captures all inbound http trafic and directs it to a SSL login page. Lets say that I signed my own cert Snake Oil LTD so when a user tries to log on for the first time they have to accept my cert. They have the option of accepting it for this session only and so they do. The next time they try to log in, someone has set up a rouge AP and dirrects them to a login page just like mine. If they also signed their cert with Snake Oil LTD and say they are me, the user has no way of knowing that they are connecting to a different web server and enters their login/password which the rouge operator can then use to log into my network.

Re:Maybe.

[mabu]

You miss an important point. I am running a NoCat authentication gateway which captures all inbound http trafic and directs it to a SSL login page. Lets say that I signed my own cert Snake Oil LTD so when a user tries to log on for the first time they have to accept my cert. They have the option of accepting it for this session only and so they do. The next time they try to log in, someone has set up a rouge AP and dirrects them to a login page just like mine. If they also signed their cert with Snake Oil LTD and say they are me, the user has no way of knowing that they are connecting to a different web server and enters their login/password which the rouge operator can then use to log into my network.

I see what you're saying, but, if you have man-in-the-middle attacks, the legitimacy of your certifying authority is the least of your troubles.

Re:Maybe.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except he doesn't have the problem. It's the end user getting burned. Which is exactly why browsers scream about self-signed certs.

Re:Maybe.

[mabu]

Except he doesn't have the problem. It's the end user getting burned. Which is exactly why browsers scream about self-signed certs.

If someone is spoofing a web site, there are other more obvious signs.

IMO, anyone who is foolish enough to not pay attention to the URL they're connected to (or clicks on some goofy URL link in a spoofed e-mail) when they provide sensitive information, will not be likely to pay attention to whether or not their browser is in SSL mode either, so it's a lot more probable someone who wants to spoof a secure site will not use SSL in the first place.

I see what you're talking about. A CA will offer an additional layer of protection, but there are a half-dozen other layers that have to be ignored or penetrated before that becomes relevant. This to me is analogous to putting a "do not eat" warning label on a pack of silica gel. You have to wonder whether the person you're protecting is worth it.

Re:Maybe.

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah "cheaper" being relative. Maybe if there was more compitition there would be incentives to drop their prices even farther?

Re:Maybe.

[Paul Jakma]

If someone can conduct a man in the middle attack, they obviously also have control of DNS replies. So the URL will be the same.

Re:Maybe.

[petecarlson]

Except he doesn't have the problem. It's the end user getting burned. Which is exactly why browsers scream about self-signed certs.
My users problem is my problem. If someone is logged in with their username/password, they can't log in. I have a pissed off customer and a support call to deal with as well as a unknown user using my network without paying so I lose twice.

Re:Maybe.

[petecarlson]

As Paul Jakma (2677) points out, They can control the url that appears in your browser just as easily as I can. You try to go to google.com and I redirect you to my authentication server. I can call my auth server anything I want. As long as you don't have access to the internet till you go through me, I can say I am anybody. They can set up an access point and do the exact same thing.

That slashdotting didn't take long

[Bodhammer]

Somehow I don't feel all that secure when the site went down in 3 minutes...

Re:That slashdotting didn't take long

[damiangerous]

It's not down. They made a small change to protect themselves most likely. You'll have to manually alter links, but you can browse the site fine.

Re:That slashdotting didn't take long

[Cyph]

Working fine for me. Browsed the site at an acceptable speed; registering for a cert now. Not sure what you're complaining about.

Re:That slashdotting didn't take long

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure what you're complaining about.

That's simple--he was complaining about the state of the site at the time he wrote his message. I'm sure you realize the linear progression of time, and how the Universe does not stay constant. A brief history of time:

First, the site worked.

Then about the time the story moved out of from The Mysterioius Future, it stopped working.

Then, it returned a default Apache directory listing, as their index page was deleted, showing all kinds of "hidden" files and directories that we shouldn't have known about.

Then the site came back up again, you went and looked at it, forgot that things change with time, and posted your message. :-)

The more non IE browsers have the better

[dj42]

I think the key to disrupting IE is by creating things it doesn't or won't support. It can't be done quickly, I don't think, but slowly, as the browsers merge in their usefull and techs that disdain MS help ignorant users to install and use them, MS can be made an equal player. Instead of a dominate force that will eventually control the US Media by holding the power of the infrastructure.

Re:The more non IE browsers have the better

[solidox]

this is partly the reason IE got it's dominance in the first place, by supporting propriatry crap they added that nothing else supported.
there are still many high profile sites (banking sites are a big offender) that simply won't work on anything other than IE, mainly because they've used IE-only features that other browsers don't support.
If i visit a site with firefox (my primary browser) and it needs IE then i'll either switch to IE or leave the site never to return (depending on importance).
If IE-using-Lasmer visits a site and it tells him he requires [otherbrowser], they're unlikely to go and get [otherbrowser], install it, then visit the site. They'll just leave the site and not come back.

Re:The more non IE browsers have the better

[walt-sjc]

It would Never happen, but if Yahoo, Google, and a few other major sites directed IE users to a page saying something like: "The browser you are using is no longer supported on this site. Please upgrade to blah, or blah blah, or press 'I understand that my browser is an insecure pile of garbage and use may infect my system with malware' to continue with IE."

MS would sue, but we can dream can't we?

Hmm. Well I can start with this on my sites anyway... :-)

Finally! :-)

[hackel]

This is one of those things we all say to ourselves "they should do this," yet it never happens. I'm really glad to see this. I can't wait until I can start recommending clients to them and supporting them with large (yet still much cheaper than Verisign/Thawte!) donations. :)

Invalid XHTMl, Invalid CSS, Default Index

[NigritudeUltramarine]

Does anyone else find it somewhat offputting that they include links to both validate their XHTML and validate their CSS on the bottom of their homepage, yet both return a number of errors stating that their page is neither valid XHTML nor uses valid CSS?

Even more oddly, for a brief instant when I went to their homepage, I got a default Apache index listing, rather than their homepage. It included links to things such as their PHP MyAdmin directory, a number of PHP files, and three zipfiles named Bruce-someversionnumbers.zip.

Re:Invalid XHTMl, Invalid CSS, Default Index

[Anonymous Coward]

that php admin link is still accessible.

i can't believe any serious company can have access to a database management interface available to the world.

Re:Invalid XHTMl, Invalid CSS, Default Index

[Anonymous Coward]

When they say they're open... they really mean they're open.

Re:Invalid XHTMl, Invalid CSS, Default Index

[Calroth]

'...and three zipfiles named Bruce-someversionnumbers.zip.'

From their site (index.php?id=30):

'Bruce is a small time-stamping program that generates a SHA-512 hash of the content of any file you choose on your system. The hash is sent to CAcert to be digitally signed and time stamped. This enables you to prove, at a later date, that you created (or at least had in your possesion) that particular data. This is like a form of "electronic witnessing".'

Then they give download links.

slashdotted

[MntlChaos]

Well it appears that they've just left a single static page up and taken down their php, giving a 404

Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[t0qer]

I don't see what everyone is crying about certs costing money for. Seeing as how i've setup online shops for several people using certs, I think for what they do, the cost is justified.

Not just anyone can get a CA cert. You have to be a business, I know verisign wants a copy of your business license, ect before they even issue you a cert.

Now we got this "open CA". Who is going to check if these are legitimate businesses? Will there be any checks done at all, or will it just be "by the truckload" as the headline said?

I'm all for saving a buck as much as the next guy, but when I shop online, knowing that the cert came from a trusted source that actually checks if it's issuing a cert to a legitimate business like verisign or thawte puts my mind, as well as the minds of a lot of others.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[damiangerous]

You do understand that certs are for far more than online shopping, right? Verified email, for example.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[mabu]

Not just anyone can get a CA cert. You have to be a business, I know verisign wants a copy of your business license, ect before they even issue you a cert.

It's not a big deal. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't offer more security ultimately.

The majority of e-commerce sites on the Internet are NOT operating under their own certs. Many sites that offer hosted shopping carts use a central SSL server operating under an umbrella cert. Nobody really seems to have noticed, so what Verisign/Thawte are selling is not something consumers really seem to care about.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[mabu]

You do understand that certs are for far more than online shopping, right? Verified email, for example.

Long before Verisign, PGP was offering a superior service for identity authentication for e-mail. If that's what you need, you're better off using open source PGP.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[coene]

When you need to verify the absolute identity of someone you're dealing with, these companies, with their background checks (which aren't strong by any stretch of the imagination), certs by Verisign/etc may make sense.

However, the most common usage of SSL cert's is simply to enable encryption between two points. For this, there's nothing wrong with even a home-brew cert - validation of the cert via it matching the domain should be sufficient. A SSL cert generated by a 3rd party adds absolutely nothing to security, and it shouldn't do anything to reassure the customer/client that they're dealing with a legitimate operation.

Encryption between a website and their visitor shouldn't cost anything, and having companies issuing these certificates will (er, has) lent itself to corruption.

If we're going to have 3rd party CA's, it should be done by the government. These companies (i.e. Verisign) shouldn't have the right to monopolize this technology, which has become an absolute necessity for online commerce.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[Leebert]

However, the most common usage of SSL cert's is simply to enable encryption between two points. For this, there's nothing wrong with even a home-brew cert - validation of the cert via it matching the domain should be sufficient. A SSL cert generated by a 3rd party adds absolutely nothing to security, and it shouldn't do anything to reassure the customer/client that they're dealing with a legitimate operation.

It prevents man-in-the-middle attacks. That's the most important reason for me to use a trusted CA.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[next1]

hmmm depends. personally i usually wouldn't be handing my cc number to a company that won't pay for it's own cert and is using a shared hosting one, unless i already knew they were ok beforehand.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[damiangerous]

Not that kind of verification. Trusted Sender verification so your email is whitelisted by supporting anti-spam software.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[mabu]

hmmm depends. personally i usually wouldn't be handing my cc number to a company that won't pay for it's own cert and is using a shared hosting one, unless i already knew they were ok beforehand.

First and foremost, the Fair Credit Billing Act of 1976 protects consumers against most credit card fraud, so the whole notion of fraud being a major issue is essentially blown out of preportion. If someone charges something to your credit card, you charge it back and the burden is on the merchant to prove the legitimacy of the transaction or they lose, so there's never been much of a threat for consumers anyway.

Second, the way things have been going, customers are likely to get better products and services from smaller companies, many of whom may not be that technically inclined but instead tend to spend their energy on providing their core products and services and not running their own web servers.

Our ISP handles more than US$5M/month in online transactions for many companies much larger than ourselves, and we operate most sites under our umbrella SSL Cert. Never had any complaints.

The issue is not unlike Paypal. People accept Paypal on their web sites. When you go to complete the transaction, you're switched to Paypal's servers - there's no easy way around that. Consumers are used to this and companies like mine go out of our way to establish our reputation as a trusted provider of solid, secure e-commerce. Clients that use our services benefit from our reputation and performance. Everything works fine.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[next1]

yeah i see your point totally.

it would just be case by case for me: as long as the company/site all seemed to check out, i would be fine with it.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[admbws]

I willing to reckon these companies make very few checks, and they still pocket the money and still cough up a cert even if they fail. They're for-profit companies. It's not in their interest to turn applicants away, as it hits their bottom line.

As for Verisign, remember when they'd just hand over any domain with one simple fax?

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[Anonymous Coward]

And where do I find a trusted CA? As opposed to Verisign, the most untrusted company on this side of the persian gulf.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[khallow]

Now we got this "open CA". Who is going to check if these are legitimate businesses? Will there be any checks done at all, or will it just be "by the truckload" as the headline said?

I don't see how a business license makes you a legitimate business. It does raise the cost of running a scam slightly. Other people have mentioned the great value of using a CA. It has little to do with how legitimate the business is.

As far as I can tell, the only value (and it's considerable value) to a Verisign CA over other CAs is that you never have to worry about your customers seeing a big scary warning message about some new, "unknown", or perhaps "untrusted" certificate. If I recall correctly, there's still a lot of browsers out there hardwired to accept only Verisign CAs without complaint.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[swillden]

It does raise the cost of running a scam slightly.

And the risk, since the documentation and processes required to obtain a business license make you a little easier to find.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[FireFury03]

Not just anyone can get a CA cert. You have to be a business

And home users should be prevented from getting a cert because...?

I'm sorry, but the idea that only businesses need certificates is plain wrong.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[badzilla]

I'm a home user with cable and I have an SSL certificate on a server. As it happens I did pay a small amount but IPSCA do also hand out completely free certs.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[julesh]

It prevents man-in-the-middle attacks. That's the most important reason for me to use a trusted CA.

A self-signed cert can prevent man-in-the-middle attacks if you have a copy of the cert downloaded.

Most CAs these days only verify that an e-mail they send to the domain in question is received by the applicant, the same as this lot. I got one from Equifax on this basis, and they're trusted by default in both IE and Mozilla.

Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free.

[Anonymous Coward]

Preventing man-in-the-middle attacks just requires some kind of trusted third party. This free CA will work for that just as well as any pay CA.

At best, the value of a Verisign CA is that they'll filter out any obvious scams. At worse, they don't care and the value comes entirely from keeping that scary dialog box from popping up.

certificates and their use

[Anonymous Coward]

As an individual with a certificate and a private key provided to me by CACert, what exactly can I do with it? I can sign email, but anything else? I know I can be authenticated with it, but is anyone actually using this?

Also, the certificate extensions might limit what the certificate could be used for... article really didn't say if these had any limits on them.

Has anyone found a good, portable way to store a private key? This seems like the biggest barrier to using certificates. I either use it on my own machine exclusively, or I had to have a secure way to move it around with me.

Re:certificates and their use

[Anonymous Coward]

You can probably use it with AOL's encryption feature. As for the private key, maybe a USB drive attached to you via a chain/rope/magical connection?

Question

[mzkhadir]

So, you install the master cert from their website and visit an anonymous website, when the anonymous website pops up a cert. Will it display on my screen to install or will it be automatically installed because I have installed and trusted the master/root cert.

Re:Question

[stoborrobots]

There is no installation for the other certs... Once the master is trusted, then as long as there is a chain of trust down to the "anonymous website". The website provides the certificate to the browser, the browser checks the issuer, and as long as the issuer is trusted, the browser accepts the certificate. No display to screen, no installation, nothing...

Re:Question

[mzkhadir]

If IBIS or some website get one of these certs and it is trusted. We will see a lot more installations of spyware on pc's.

"interesting"... no.

[slimsam1]

That's not interesting, form letters like that are very much like a lot of common spam.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you can get a free cert. I can generate my own damned certs already. However, if I have a cert that I've paid for, then usually people will trust that, because the cert authority has taken steps to verify that I am who I say I am.

It's that last thing that makes certs valuable, not the cert itself. A free cert is free because not many people are going to trust it, and with good cause.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

However, if I have a cert that I've paid for, then usually people will trust that, because the cert authority has taken steps to verify that I am who I say I am.

You didn't read the article, so your comment is crap.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously didn't even bother to RTFA. Go and do that NOW, and then comment. 'A' does address your knee-jerk comments nicely.

Probably futile

[Seven001]

Like others have mentioned, this is probably useless. Microsoft more than likely won't put it in IE. So you'd be better off just using a self-issued cert. Even if every non-IE browser adds it, that still isn't enough for most anyone that needs to have secure webpages.

I use and love Firefox personally, but if a cert doesn't work without popping up "untrusted alerts", free or not, it is quite useless to me.

Re:Probably futile

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it might not work well, let's just forget about it?

How the hell do you suppose alternative certifiers are created? Would you rather wait for Verisign to get off their fat lazy butt and reduce prices? Why not wait 'till Hell freezes over while you are at it.

This is exactly the first step that has to be taken. There's no guarantee for its success, but not taking the step is guarantee for total failure.

Useless without IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Useless: the root certificate is not currently in IE

Re:Useless without IE

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares about IE?

when someone is using IE, they obvisouly dont care anything about security so... what difference is a CA gonna make>

What about the government?

[BrynM]

I think the government should sponsor a CA. Sure, their databases are screwy every so often and are the very model of bureaucracy. They are also one of the most "trusted" authorities to most of the neophite users a warning would scare. Besides, they couple probably keep up with Verisign's often weeks long turn around on certificates pretty well. There's some economy and small business stimulation! Unfortunately, maybe some fraud too, but it may also lead to hucksters getting stiffer punishments and/or penalties.

Re:What about the government?

[BeerMilkshake]

makes sense, because the government is already 'in the business' of making sure that each of us is uniquely identified (by a SSN or SIN) and our correct address is known (e.g. on our driver's license, voting list).

Now, I also liked the idea of yahoo's DomainKeys proposal, so if the govt could issue me a cert and I could tie it with my DNS info, that would put the existing CA's right out of business...

Re:Aussies in Boston...Hmmm

[RvLeshrac]

I neglected to add that when your taxes are lower than those in other states, you're stealing money from us. Our tax money has to go to pave your roads, pay for your schools, and keep your emergency services from completely collapsing.

Alternatively...

[temojen]

Here's a summary of a proposal I wrote for canadian provinces...

The Governor General's office acts as the root CA for Government Ministries & Crown Corporations and Professional Associations.

Any professional association (Bar Association, College of Physicians & Surgeons, Engineers, etc) acts as a CA for it's members and corporations working in their field (Law firms (lawyers, paralegals, legal secretaries), Medical Clinics (Doctors, Nurses, X-Ray Techs, Appointment Clerks), etc)

Certified Accountants act as a CA for Corporations, Societies, Partnerships, etc.

The Notaries public act as a CA for individuals.

Re:Alternatively...

[Devil's Avocado]

This is a bloody brilliant idea.

-DA

Re:Alternatively...

[temojen]

Except the part where I got the Governor General confused with the Leutenant Governor. The Governor General is federal, the Leutenant Governors are provincial.

The professional associations are under provincial jurisdiction for most matters.

The Governor General should act as a CA for Federal Ministies, Agencies, etc. Then for Canada there would be 14 root CAs (13 Provinces/Territories, 1 Federal).

Slashdot Ad

[Ruis]

This is great: slashdot advertisement

How?

[temojen]

How? Really... I need to know (for IE) & can't figure it out, short of having the sers install a binary of OpenSSL.

Re:How?

[persaud]

Certificate Enrollment Control.

Re:Australia sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

do you know what prompted the banning of swords? cause it was pretty shocking. there was a legitimate issue with swords there for a while and i didn't hear anyone complaining about the ban except people who shouldn't be owning swords.

Denmark has this...

[Jezral]

Denmark has free digital signatures for all citizen, for use in email, to sign in on sites, etc...

URLs:
- http://www.digitalsignatur.dk/
- http://privat.tdc.dk/digital/
(both in Danish, though...)

The technicalities are run by the largest phone company/ISP, TDC, but otherwise it's fully a government thing.

Re:Australia sucks

[mabu]

Lucky for you America hasn't banned stupidity and ignorance.

Re:Australia sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you expect immortals to battle the death if their swords are banned? There can be only one.

is it something different than wildid?

[econfuzed]

Just a question, how much this is different than www.wildid.com

Re:is it something different than wildid?

[julesh]

It seems wildid issues only S/MIME e-mail certificates. This company also offers SSL (https) secure server certificates, which is much more useful. They also seem to be significantly better at what they do. I wouldn't trust a certificate issuer who has an expired certificate on their own secure server. What's their excuse for having an expired self-signed cert???

Re:is it something different than wildid?

[Anonymous Coward]

WildID's documentation about their certs is limited and fairly poor, for one thing.

Less importantly (but this has kept me from getting one of their certs), the only part of their high-style but lowbrow operation that worked as planned, yesterday and today, when I hit the Submit button was their ad server. It quickly, eagerly served up a succession of grinning twenty-boppers pushing flashy hipster products while the key generation process repeatedly failed without a peep.

Nobody seems to be home at WildID. Where is the guy behind the curtain, to put up a "We are working to fix this" sign when the server is not functioning for long periods of time? My trust level in these people, whoever they are - and they seem to hide their identities pretty well, nary a Who We Are page in sight - has dropped already.

Re:is it something different than wildid?

[Anonymous Coward]

WildID expires your certificate every 30 days, so you need to revisit their Web site to see the shiny new ads there while you go through the monthly signup process. It's like a magazine subscription that you have to renew every month. What a cool new concept for gathering eyeballs.

MitM attacks

[Straker Skunk]

That's why you check the fingerprint on the certificate. A third party can spoof DNS and run a site that looks identical to your own, but unless they have an underground bunker full of Crays somewhere, their site cert's not gonna have the same fingerprint :-)

Re:MitM attacks

[HeghmoH]

But there is no way to get the fingerprint to the random third party that doesn't fall vulnerable to a MitM attack either, unless you give it to them over the phone or something. Yes, self-signed certs are useful in some situations, but in the general case of running a normal web site that just happens to be encrypted, they're not completely reliable.

Re:MitM attacks

[Straker Skunk]

Ah, yes. True. I was still thinking of the grandparent's scenario of providing Webmail to himself and a few friends, where transferring the fingerprint by Post-It note is feasible :-)

Re:Australia sucks

[dbIII]

It's what America would be without the bill of rights

In Australia, If we lock up an American no matter what we think they might have done we let them see a lawyer in less than two years. The USA is starting to become an America without the bill of rights. However, in Australia, 911 is being mentioned when talking about stricter control of wild parties (how's that for trivialising the dead - some people in power are just self serving idiots) - so maybe the sword ban thing is true in another part of the country as another mindless backlash.

Re:Australia sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

It's what America would be without the bill of rights, I think.

No, more like what America would be like without Guantanamo Bay, actually.

Re:Australia sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Have any countries? And if so, how is that working out for them?

Denmark has this...

[Jezral]

Denmark has this already, as I posted earlier: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=113196&cid=958 9656

Caveat: what does it cost to be "trusted?"

[humankind]

My question is, since (currently) IE is the dominant browser, the value of this service is going to depend upon whether or not this new CA can be designated as "trusted" by Microsoft.

We know this ultimately comes down to how much Microsoft would charge for this certification. Does anyone have any idea what the costs are? I imagine it would be some sort of subscription arrangement where you have to pay in perpetuity to Microsoft in order to not have your trusted status revoked. But how much? And would Microsoft let an open CA even exist in the first place?

Re:Caveat: what does it cost to be "trusted?"

[KjetilK]

$250,000. Just put that kind of money on the table and hire a few lawyers to do the paperwork, and you're "trusted".

But it isn't Microsoft that's doing this, it is the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. But I feel strongly it is just a rubberstamp, in spite of that there is a long spec you need to comply with.

The question one should ask yourself about the whole workings of the CA stuff is "what would it take for a cert to be revoked?" When you realize there is probably nothing Verisign can do that would revoke their certificates, becuase it would wreak havoc with pretty much everything, it is time to get scared....

The Mozilla bug for the inclusion of CACerts certificate is http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215243 Please vote for it, but please also understand that it is no point in posting more comments to the bug. Discussion is now going on in netscape.public.mozilla.crypto.

Also, have a look at this KDE bug.

Re:Caveat: what does it cost to be "trusted?"

[x509v3]

As someone who HAS gone through both of these processes (WebTrust, Microsoft), let me shed some truth on some of the speculations here.

1) Microsoft doesn't charge anything to be "trusted"; they've primarily let the AICPA manage that through their "WebTrust for Certification Authorities" do that. (Microsoft will also allow the requestor to use another audit, but it's up to the CA to determine equivalency to WebTrust's audit.

Microsoft posts their requirements to get included in their Trusted Root List here: microsoft.com

Once you get a WebTrust audit seal and can prove to Microsoft that your CA will issue certs to something OTHER than your enterprise, you should be fine.

The WebTrust CA criteria was designed to help CAs follow a set of standardized evaluation criteria. Like an RFC tries to enforce that protocols are standard. The WebTrust criteria is available for free at the AICPA website (AICPA). There are almost 400 criteria that a WebTrust auditor will use to evaluate your CA (not just the "host" but all your CA company's policies, practices, and processes).

To the person who said that you could just "hire a bunch of lawyers" for $250,000 and pass, I say "I highly doubt that". The WebTrust audit requires their auditors to actually see and verify the CA complies with the requirements. A box of lawyers can't create CA issuance log files, show how you maintain your HSM, or prove that you keep your /etc/password file clean of employees who have left your company since the last audit.

2) Once CAcert gets a WebTrust Seal, then they can fill out the application at Microsoft's site. If they're accepted, they get into the next quarterly Root List update issued by Microsoft (next update: this month).

After they're "in the list", WinXP machines will automatically download the new root cert whenever IE/Outlook performs a certificate path validation operation and sees the CACert root. It's automagic. Older Windows OSes will need to get the new root list from the WindowsUpdate site.

Re:Caveat: what does it cost to be "trusted?"

[KjetilK]

The WebTrust audit requires their auditors to actually see and verify the CA complies with the requirements. A box of lawyers can't create CA issuance log files, show how you maintain your HSM, or prove that you keep your /etc/password file clean of employees who have left your company since the last audit.

True. But you do like they do in concentration camps: Make sure everything is clean when the auditors are there, otherwise, you don't care.

Tell me: What kind of mistakes could Verisign do to get their certificates revoked?

With the kind of market dominance they have, I'm sure you agree that the answer to that question is "none".

If it had been PGP, I would have marked Verisign certificates "Do not trust" by now. I do not see that kind of option here....

After they're "in the list", WinXP machines will automatically download the new root cert whenever IE/Outlook performs a certificate path validation operation and sees the CACert root. It's automagic.

Interesting. To be able to insert a root certificate in a lot of browsers must be every criminal's dream. I hope this process is very secure...

You know us Aussies

[mister_tim]

This coming from an Australian company? Hardly suprising: us Aussies are always happy to get something for nothing. Getting away with it is always a boasting point and something akin to a national sport/pastime.

Re:Australia sucks

[mister_tim]

Yeah, but aside from the snakes, spiders, sharks, box jellyfish, blue ringed octopus, crocodiles (they're only up north so you don't need to worry about them too much - but snakes and spiders are everywhere), etc. Aside from all those things, or in spite of all those things, Australia is the best place on earth. Don't believe me? Check the guide:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A53650

And don't panic!

Most commercial certs are worthless

[Animats]

Most certificates certify nothing. The issuer guarantees nothing, and the "relying party agreement", if you can find it, promises very little, if anything.

For example, see the TrueSite Relying Party Agreement. "The Service is provided on an as-is basis without warranties of any kind".

Even Verisign's Relying Party Agreement, while it does offer some warranties, has a complicated scheme for weaseling out of Verisign's obligation to verify the certificate holder's identity. The relying party agreement refers you to the CPS Section 11, says "Issuing authorities (and VeriSign, to the extent specified in the referenced CPS sections) warrant and promise to ... perform the application validation procedures for the indicated class of certificate as set forth in CPS Section 5, Validation of Certificate Applications." There, Verisign says "The IA shall confirm that ... the information to be listed in the certificate is accurate, except for nonverified subscriber information (NSI)." The linked definition of "nonverified subscriber information" is "Information supplied to a certification authority as part of a certificate application". So Verisign doesn't actually stand behind any of the information in their certificates.

This is much weaker than a signature guarantee by a commercial bank, where the bank guarantees to other parties that the person was properly identified. But it costs more.

I'd like to see banks belonging to Visa International and MasterCard issue digital certificates, and require that their certificates had to be on a page that accepted their credit cards. Certificates from banks would actually be worth something.

ot: thunderbird master password/certs?

[gad_zuki!]

Speaking of email. Anyone know how to reset the master password in Thunderbird, current milestone (on win2k)? I dont remember ever setting it, but there's a value there and this wont let me import my cert.

Is it possible to wipe it off?

[tod_miller]

How did you wipe IE off your windows box? The best I came to it was place a dummy iexplore.exe (as it gets replaced if you remove it) however, typing a http address into an explorer window still brings changes it into an instance of IE.

I guess there must be some reg hacks to remove it completely...

What version did you remove it from?

Re:Is it possible to wipe it off?

[Joe U]

In the latest versions of windows:

Click Start.
Click Set Program Access and Defaults
Turn off IE.

You shouldn't see Internet Explorer after that. However, the HTML control that IE hosts will remain resident, since it is part of the OS and can not be easily removed.

(Actually, you can remove the control, but it breaks anything that uses HTML, like windows explorer)

Now why would the Aussies

[Lars T.]

(or anybody else) throw tea into cold salt water and call it a party?

Re:Now why would the Aussies

[onosendai]

History lesson for you .. the Boston "Tea Party" was a protest by the 'Sons of Liberty' against the Tea Act of 1773 where 342 crates of tea were thrown into Boston Harbour.

Re:Now why would the Aussies

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I think most people would know that, what with the majority of the western world being raised on American television, but why would the Aussies be doing it?....

CAcert vs. Self-Signed Cert

[JWSmythe]

I don't see the big difference between a self-signed cert and a CAcert. It's going to be virtually impossible for web sites to get their users to install their root certificate. Users are stupid. Generally, I don't expect they can click a link, much less add a cert.

I've been looking into using SSL on http://freeinternetpress.com . We're not a registerd company, nor do we turn a profit, so it would be an extra cost and hassle to get a real certificate. For us, the only reason to do it is to make some of our users happy by letting them browse by https.

A self-signed cert isn't any sort of magic, the instructions are in the OpenSSL documentation. I made it a step easier for people we worth with, I have a web page that they submit their information to, and it generates everything including the self-signed cert. There's no real magic to it, anyone (err, anyone with a clue) should be able to write the same thing in about 10 minutes. I spent an extra 10 minutes making it pretty.

People I deal with never use the self-signed cert. They just take the CSR and get the cert signed by a regular signing authority. What's the big difference if I sign it, or if I call myself "Joe's cert company" and start automatically signing certs? It's not much different than what CAcert is doing, other than the fact that they have a donation button on their page. At least with the people I make CSR's and self-signed certs for, I know who they are, and that I'm not accidently signing a fake microsoft.com cert.

Re:CAcert vs. Self-Signed Cert

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the big difference if I sign it, or if I call myself "Joe's cert company" and start automatically signing certs? It's not much different than what CAcert is doing, other than the fact that they have a donation button on their page. At least with the people I make CSR's and self-signed certs for, I know who they are, and that I'm not accidently signing a fake microsoft.com cert.

You are yet another asshole who comments at length without reading the article. So, naturally, your comment is crap.

Re:Australia sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard one country tried it, but they had to deport all the stupid people. The only person left didn't have anyone to procreate with, so the country died a natural death a while later.

RTF SITE

[panurge]

If anybody else actually bothers to investigate, CACERT relies on signups physically identifying themselves to more than one person already in the network of trusted persons. Without that, you get an anonymous certificate. Of course, there is some risk of criminals getting into the trusted network - but people who in much of the rest of the world would be criminals (e.g. US hard pornographers, who I guess are as likely to have links to the various mobs as they ever did) have no trouble getting certs from Verisign. The principle is sound.

I have written to my professional association suggesting they look into becoming a trusted body for CACERT, and I suggest that anyone else who thinks CACERT is a good idea should do the same. If bodies like universities, professional engineering and software associations, law societies, accountancy organisations and medical societies can be interested, this could (a) rapidly expand CACERT and (b) create a roll which would "encourage" Microsoft to add it to their default list. Of course, this means explaining to the various bodies the benefits of encrypted email.

I use self-signed site certificates where my interest is in a secure channel to a previously authorised user, but it would be convenient not to have to ask users to import certificates.

So please, remember this site is partly about FOSS activity, stop being negative, drop the stupid Australian jokes (no, I am not Australian) and encourage these guys in practical ways.

assurance

[Teknikill]

I need someone in the seattle area to assure me. Spare me the jokes... If you are in the seattle area, sign up, and lets get this going. I may do the 3rd party assurance soon.

Re:assurance

[UABHPstudent2069]

There just so happens to be an assurer in Seattle. While I can't/won't give out his info (for privacy reasons, obviously), I can tell you this. Once you sign up for an initial Cert, you can then access a list of assurers that span the globe.

I have been a CAcert user since last November and an Assurer since March. I actually found out about CAcert from a friend who was helping me learn about security. He happened to find it while surfing the web. Since then, we have both become assurers (via third-party assurance) and he is putting his MBA to good use as the Marketing/PR director for CAcert. I know that he has just had published an article about CAcert (once in an Aussie-Linux-type journal and, more recently, in ;Login: , the official magazine of USENIX, I believe). The article addresses several issues concerning the actual security, benefit, etc. of having a free certification authority. While I'm not sure when/where/if his article will be available in the states, I do know that the article has but to rest many fears about CAcert and (from what he tells me) has even converted some people over to the CAcert philosophy...Privacy is a Right!

We want to believe in CACert... but ...

[njdj]

When I saw this news, my reaction was that it's great and I want to support it. Verisign et al have been too greedy for too long.

But we have to be careful that we don't let our "wish to believe" blind us to the need for some caution here. Take at look at CACert's site. You'll find carelessness, spelling mistakes, pieces that have not been thought out. Running a CA properly requires meticulous attention to detail, and their site shows the opposite. On the very first page when you sign up, it asks for your name, date of birth, and "country". Is that country of citizenship, or country of residence?

Then there's the reliance on "government ID". If somebody presents Nigerian ID, or Dominican Republic ID, what exactly is that worth? It's not worth anything, you can bribe officials in those countries (and many others) to issue whatever official document you want. Does that mean that citizens of Nigeria can never be trusted? That's well over 100 million people in just that one country, most of whom are honest and trustworthy. It's ridiculous to exclude so many people from receiving certificates just because their bureaucrats are corrupt, and it's completely contrary to the transnational spirit of the Internet.

In conclusion, the idea behind CACert is a good one, but the people running it don't seem to be doing a good job. I hope that somebody else takes up the idea and does it better. There is no reason why there should not be more than one volunteer-based CA.

Re:We want to believe in CACert... but ...

[UABHPstudent2069]

I have to agree, the website was designed badly. However, I'm sure that with increased interest and support, the website can and will be improved.

I have been a CAcert user since last November and an Assurer since March. I know the Marketing/PR director for CAcert has just had published an article about CAcert (once in an Aussie-Linux-type journal and, more recently, in ;Login: , the official magazine of USENIX, I believe). The article addresses several issues concerning the actual security, benefit, etc. of having a free certification authority. While I'm not sure when/where/if his article will be available in the states, I do know that the article has but to rest many fears about CAcert and (from what he tells me) has even converted some people over to the CAcert philosophy... Privacy is a Right!

Re:We want to believe in CACert... but ...

[eraserewind]

People don't demand identity verification though, and anyway, that's not what Verisign et al guarentee.

Pretty much all you can be sure of is that Verisign issued the cert, and the level of encryption provided by the SSL connection.

Since that is such a poor offering, and internet users still accept those certs without question, there is no good reason to be paying money to Verisign for their non-service. That's what this seems designed to replace.

Re:We want to believe in CACert... but ...

[Vellmont]

Take at look at CACert's site. You'll find carelessness, spelling mistakes, pieces that have not been thought out.

Yah, it's not a very professional looking site. That's just how it works when you have a limited budget. I think your expectations and standards are a bit to high for an organization that just started. If they still have the same problems in 6 months, I'd be a little worried.

It's ridiculous to exclude so many people from receiving certificates just because their bureaucrats are corrupt, and it's completely contrary to the transnational spirit of the Internet.

Whoa.. hold on their chief. Who ever said there would be one policy for identify verification for EVERYONE? If you live in a kleptocracy, gov. issued ID could be considered a joke and there would be other means to verify yourself. I'm sure (or at least I hope) that Verisign and Thawte have tackled this problem, there's no reason that CAcert can't do the same thing.

Re:We want to believe in CACert... but ...

[wabewalker]

I poked around on their site looking for a CP/CPS (Certificate Policy and Certification Practices Statement) but didn't find one.

So why should I trust them? How is the root key protected? How is it backed up? How is the CA audited? Who audits it? What are auditor's qualifications? Which information is logged? How long are the logs kept? Under which legal framework do they run the CA, under Australian?

To evaluate the trust I need something structured according to RFC2527 (or RFC3647). (There is so much information they have to provide that it has to be structured or relying parties cannot find the bits they need).

People often forget that there is a lot more to running a CA than issuing certificates. Anyone can run a simple CA with OpenSSL, but such a CA is nothing without a trustworthy CP/CPS. And an audit trail that ensures they stick to their CPS.

Re:We want to believe in CACert... but ...

[SpacePunk]

There's evidently no checking for a valid government ID. I, for one, will not give out my ssn, drivers license, etc... to anybody unless they have a valid reason for those id's. Just enter a fake number, and keep track of it.

Re:We want to believe in CACert... but ...

[cmowire]

Actually, if you want to get your certificate authenticated by anybody, so as to have your own name on the cert, you need to provide a valid government ID number.

But you can get a server cert without needing to authenticate, as long as your info matches DNS.

Re:We want to believe in CACert... but ...

[sbjornda]

Yah, it's not a very professional looking site. That's just how it works when you have a limited budget. I think your expectations and standards are a bit to high for an organization that just started. If they still have the same problems in 6 months, I'd be a little worried.

I respectfully disagree. IMO that's no excuse for publishing anything with blatant mistakes. Quality is cheapest when it's built in at an early stage. Retrofitting is always more expensive. In this case, it's expensive at least in part because you'll never sell the idea to the PHBs of the world if the presentation has too many errors; it suffers a credibility gap right up front. You've lost part of your potential market right away, simply through haste and carelessness. Two rules for success (or, at least, to give you a better chance at avoiding failure): Always dress better than you need to, and always write better than you need to.

--

.nosig

Re:We want to believe in CACert... but ...

[Vellmont]

I don't exactly disagree with you, but I think you're being fatalistic. CACert hasn't made a great first impression, but that hardly means the whole thing is crap, and is going to fail. First impressions are important, but they aren't the be-all-end all of sucess or failure. I also don't think it's quite as bad as you make it out to be. There's a couple ambuguities, but the idea is solid enough.

If you really look at big errors made by big successful companies there's just a TON of them. In the field of CA's alone one of the big CA's issued a certificiate to someone claiming to be Microsoft that actually wasn't. Taken in context, a not-so-great website and a few ambiguities are really a minor issue.

Re:Aussies in Boston...Hmmm

[Gest]

Which US college kids are you talking about? Got a link?

It is Certification Authority

[Anonymous Coward]

not Certificate Authority

just so you know ;)

There are two kinds of certs...

[Kjella]

...those that produce a warning in browsers, and those that don't. Most everything else, is all the same to 99,99% of the people.

Kjella

Root certificate for Redhat, Opera, Mozilla

[stray]

In the June edition of ;login: (the Usenix Association's magazine), there is an article by Adam Butler (of CAcert) describing the project and shedding some light on the process of getting a CA root certificate included into various browsers:

Quote from the article:

"In true Microsoft style, Redmond adopted a new metric for determining whether a CA's root certificate is to be included with its browser/OS/kitchen-sink product: In order for a CA's root certificate to be accepted - I swear I'm not making this up - Redmond said CA must pay a WebTrust-licensed member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants up to $250,000 for an initial evaluation/inspection, plus additional tens of thousands of dollars in fees on a periodic "follow-up" basis.

The makers of the Opera Web browser did not respond to email queries regarding their inclusion policies/requirements; however, a Bermuda-based CA representative stated in the netscape.public.mozilla.crypto newsgroup that "as of [his] last contact in 2003, Opera wanted cash to add a CA [root certificate]. They did not appear to have a standards policy.".

He goes on to describe the process of getting the root cert, hopefully, included into the Mozilla project through a Bugzilla feature enhancement request. From what I read from the article, the discussion about this is still going on.

Re:Root certificate for Redhat, Opera, Mozilla

[KjetilK]

Redmond said CA must pay a WebTrust-licensed member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants

This has pretty much been Mozilla's policy too, allthough everybody realizes it's inadequate.

included into the Mozilla project through a Bugzilla feature enhancement request. From what I read from the article, the discussion about this is still going on.

See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215243

But please do not post any follow-ups to the bug. Go to the newsgroup discussion instead.

Security is hard

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the posters here think only about the technicalities. Running a trustworthy CA isn't evident. A good CA will do a careful check to see if you are indeed who you say you are before certifying you. Certification is the achilles heel of PKI and it's the procedures, not the technology that make the difference between a trustworthy and a useless PKI. Self signed certificates are useless.
There are other elements, such as how well does the CA protect its private key. Do they take responsibility (many CAs quickly dismiss all responsibility in the small print).
For a good document, google for "the 10 risks of PKI".

Security is hard to do right. The software is the easiest part.

Tom

Re:Australia sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

no money to spend on education? anyone who qualifies can go to university, and get a 3-4 year undergraduate degree for about USD$1200 per year, repayable when income reaches a pretty comfortable level, interest free (cpi adjusted).

never heard about the sword thing except on slashdot, so dunno where that came from. guns are very tightly regulated though. thankfully.

Root cert distribution

[persaud]

Bundle the credential chain for your private cert (i.e. root cert and optional 'intermediate roots') into a PKCS7 file. Distribute file on a Verisign/Thawte authenticated page. Single-click will install the root cert in most browsers.

Your primary root cert can keep a long (decades) lifetime while your server certs can have a short (months) lifetime. Safest is to use intermediate roots (years lifetime) which can be revoked at will (in case of private key compromise) via live CRL on the primary root.

Sample code for Multi-level CA.

X.509 is the wrong technology.

[Cerebus]

X.509 binds names to keys; it's the name that matters in an X.509 system. But because there aren't enough bits in the human-language name to uniquely identify every entity of interest in the network, X.509 is based on X.500 naming, which mates the human-language name (common name, or CN) with that name's position in the global directory. Together they form the distinguished name, or DN.

X.500 naming, however, presumes a single, global namespace. The X.500 directory was intended to be a single directory for the entire planet providing unique, inescapable names for everyone.

Yeah, right. Like that's going to happen.

As a result, X.509 is carved into literally hundreds of local namespaces. But since we're stuck with the *name* as the principal, we have to use that X.509 name *globally*. There are multiple ugly kludges to get around the name problems as a result.

This makes X.509 complex, fragile, and difficult to deploy correctly.

But everyone (potentially) has a globally unique identifier-- the public part of an RSA key. Randomly generated, 2^42 512-bit RSA keys have a probability of colliding on the order of 2^(-429); even the SHA-1 hashes have a collision chance of 2^(-77). Keep in mind that we use 1024-bits as the default nowadays.

So if you use the public key as a name, it solves a whole raft of problems.

This is what SPKI/SDSI does. SPKI is key-centric; names are a local convenience; keys are bound to names instead of the other way around, and all names are local to that key. Every participant has a key pair. The public part is the identifier for the keyholder, and the keyholder authenticates himself simply by proving that he has the private part.

Keep in mind that the whole issue of binding keys to actual people can't be addressed by a PKI, it has to be addressed by strong key storage and access controls and is the same across for X.509 and PGP/GPG as it is for SPKI.

This is similar to the web of trust, but I don't need introducers (well-connected keys) to make it work right.

SPKI goes on to recognize that since authentication is simple, what we really need from SPKI is authorization. The whole of SPKI is intended to define a flexible method of allowing authorization *and authorization delegation* in a simple, distributed fashion. SPKI defines an authorization *language* so that authorizations can be chained *without the SPKI library knowing what the tokens actually mean*. This means that a single library can handle the permission sets of all applications. In addition, the language rules prevent all entities in the chain of delegations from being able to exceed the permissions he was granted.

Achieving the same under X.509 (using attribute certificates, for example) is next to impossible. ACs don't delegate (well, the standard itself says technically you can but you *shouldn't*); aren't truly distributed (i.e., the AC acts as a single choke point in granting permissions, which SPKI avoids), and doesn't model the way trust naturally flows in an organization of people (whereas SPKI allows you to source and pass around trusts in more natural ways).

Very cool stuff. SPKI shows up in all kinds of places. Carl Ellison's homepage provides the best jumping-off point if you want to learn more:

http://world.std.com/~cme/html/spki.html

still in Boston?

[drwho]

Are the CAcert folks still handing tese out at usenix in Boston? when/where?

Re:still in Boston?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dr. Who, The CAcert Folks are still in Boston and would be more than happy to issue a cert. Stop by the table and meet the folks. They will be there until 2PM today at the Boston Copley Marriott.

Re:still in Boston?

[SonOfGates]

Yes. We'll be at USENIX running a booth on the 4th floor of the Copley Place Marriott until about 2-3pm (EST) this afternoon. ....at which point a few of us have to jet back to our "real" lives. ;)

However, Duane Groth (CAcert President) and Wren Hunt (CAcert Developer/Volunteer) will both be in Boston for quite a bit longer--not to mention, Duane is planning a "road trip" to NYC in a day or two to register folks there. (They're meeting in an Apple SOHO store--I forget the address, but you can email him at {support |at| cacert |d0t| org}.

After that, there's always the "Trusted Third Party" route, which is explained on our website. (Basically, a Bank Manager, Notary Public, or other government-trusted authority can help you become a fully trusted member of the community.)

Hope that helps!

Adam Butler
CAcert Public Relations

So ...(Re:We want to believe in CACert... but ...)

[cascadingstylesheet]

If somebody presents Nigerian ID, or Dominican Republic ID, what exactly is that worth? It's not worth anything, you can bribe officials in those countries (and many others) to issue whatever official document you want. Does that mean that citizens of Nigeria can never be trusted? That's well over 100 million people in just that one country, most of whom are honest and trustworthy. It's ridiculous to exclude so many people from receiving certificates just because their bureaucrats are corrupt, and it's completely contrary to the transnational spirit of the Internet.

Well, what do you propose, then? The problem doesn't solve itself just because you want it to.

Do those 100 million people have no responsibility for their bureaucrats being corrupt? If they aren't going to do anything about it, how can anybody else?

Joe user

[oliverthered]

To get joe user to install the CA certificate, just put a link on your page with something like.

"To stop the anoying messages you must install the following certifiacte.

I agree."

Joe User will happly click on 'I Agree' and your away.

(p.s. don't forget to put a trogan in the link too, Joe User will install that without any quarms)

Way to go, evilbunny!

[drewzhrodague]

Rock-on, dewd! You've been at this for a while now, that and NodeDB -- Good to see you slashdotted!

Logo

[mpitcavage]

Did anyone notice that the logo looks like a very serious thumb wrestling match?

Revocation support

[grokster]

I've never encountered a revoked cert in the wild.

However, many public CAs are now including CRL Distribution Point extensions in their certificates, and these contain a URI for the CRL on which the certificate in question will appear, if revoked.

It's not clear which versions of IE have CRL checking on by default for SSL certificates - certainly for Code Signing and Macro Signing certificates the default is to download and check the CRL.

Mozilla doesn't use the CRL Distribution Point extension at this stage, but manually downloading a CRL with Mozilla (incl Firebird) triggers an automatic redownload of the CRL every time it expires.

Microsoft and CAs

[grokster]

Microsoft now requires that CAs who want their roots included in IE / Windows, must pass a WebTrust for Certificate Authorities audit.

This audit would be performed by one of the big auditing companies, and is not free.

Hence, anybody providing certs trusted by Microsoft, must charge for them - if anything, to pay for the audit...

Re:Aussies in Boston...Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...Kerry was never the Governor. He is the Senator from the state and was a district attorney before that.

Why not Mozilla.org?

[Can]

I'e often wondered why mozilla.org doesn't start their own CA. Sell certs for a reasonable price like $50, and people would probably happily pay that price to know that they are also support browser development. Plus, mozilla.org can be sure that their CA will be included in at least one browser... :-)

Met them at USENIX

[Outland Traveller]

I spent some time talking to these guys at USENIX. I think they have a good idea and the drive to see it through. Each of the people I spoke with were technically knowledgable, enthusiastic, and yet quite serious about giving the validation process the weight it deserves. Sure they have some rough edges as many non-profits do when they are getting off the ground, but this seems like an effort worth supporting.

Certs should be available for a hell of a lot less than what Verisign charges. There's an artificial barrier to entry in this market and I welcome commmunity-oriented attempts to lower it. I hope their root cert gets into Mozilla ASAP! I fully support their efforts.

BTW- It was rather amusing watching people come over and ask for the "free" certificates expecting to be handed some physical piece of schwag, heh heh.

Re:Australia sucks

[deimtee]

never heard about the sword thing except on slashdot, so dunno where that came from. guns are very tightly regulated though. thankfully.

Victoria banned swords.

CAs along the same lines has been done before

[MelbarKasom]

The Brazilian FreeICP project issues free certificates for two years now -- both for test purposes and with Verified Identity through a collaborative score system. I didn't go through CACert's full process just yet, but at first glance it seems that FreeICPs' trust scoring system is far more sophisticated, even if user friendliness needs improvement. I was also under the impression that CACert's client cert generation stuff works only on IE. FreeICP.ORG's also works on Mozilla, Opera, etc.

http://ca.freeicp.org -- for the Web CA
http://www.freeicp.org -- for the (rather old) main project wiki
See also the paper they published at NIST's 2nd PKI Research Workshop.

This will be great for small time companies.

[Anonymous Coward]

This will be great for small time companies and individuals.
- Webmaster of Infoweb

Import ca.crt from logon.bat

[areguly]

Any soul here knows how to import the cacert.crt from the users logon script ?

That would at least solve the issue from within an organization.

Re:Import ca.crt from logon.bat

[PieEye]

Users don't need to do it, the machine needs to put it in its root store. Schedule a task to use CertMgr.exe.

See JSI Tip 4107.

Re:Aussies in Boston...Hmmm

[rRaminrodt]

Hopefully, no one will see this post anyway, but just in case, Kerry was never governor. http://www.masshome.com/governors.html

Re:Aussies in Boston...Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Kerry was never "govana" of the state of the MA.

And what facts do you have to support that MA taxes are some of the lowest in the entire country?

trust metrics

[danharan]

Well, their page doesn't even validate as strict XHTML even though they claim it does... sigh.

Anyhow, do we really need a root authority? Couldn't this be P2P? If I and 3 other people you know sign your certificate saying you are Jane/John/Buba, we should be able to establish a trust metric... and/or trust friends of friends.

Of course, I really don't understand this topic enough, so this could be completely off base... I'm just peeved at the high cost of certificates for my clients' e-commerce websites, and wonder why I have to get some bureaucracy to actually deem them trustworthy when trust in most communities is built by social networks.

Is this possible (or even desirable)?

What alternative do you suggest?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Certificate authorities solve^H^H^H^H^Haddress the central problem of public key authentication -- how can you know that the public key really belongs to the entity you think it does?

Anybody can create a self-signed cert with your name and your URL and then impersonate you over SSL.

Understood, you're also critical of the level of care the CA's put into identity checking, but your first point was "The whole notion that a Cert authority is needed is essentially bogus in my opinion". The known alternatives are to have every customer separately verify your certificate's thumbprints out-of-band (not worth thinking about) or to build decentralized verification like PGP's Web of Trust. The WoT doesn't answer the questions businesses ask (e.g. "who's liable for how much?", "can my auditors look at the written signing policy?" etc.), though it works great for groups of human rights activists.

The logical answer in my opinion would be if you got a cert along with your merchant Visa account, signed by your bank using their chained cert from Visa, with the Visa master cert trusted by browsers. That would let the companies who face the financial risk of indentity fraud manage the technical risk.

The real problem is that we're depending on a subtle and sophisticated technology (PKI) that no normal people and only a few geeks understand the operation and limits of.

But what do their certificate certify?

[mi]

That the presenter is a legitimate business? That it has a verified physical address?

The point of a Certificate Authority is not to simply prevent the user's browser from bringing up a warning. The CA is supposed to vouch for the presenter of the CA-issued certificate -- in some way, at least...

Thanks

[temojen]

That's a really big help.

Re:Australia sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to understand that Australians are not as immediately serious as Americans. We understand the principles of gun and weapon ownership but weighed it up against 1 crazy person being able to slaughter dozens of people at a time and decided againt it.

When we see someone who is poor we figure they had bad luck and give them food and shelter, not let them die on the street because they are lazy or deserve it. When we want political change we use ballots, not guns (compare federation vs American revolution, American civil war)

During my last visit to the states a girl-boy fight went on in another room at my motel. It was obviously loud enough and late enough at night for someone to freak and call the cops.

Now,Contrast what happened to what Australian cops would do. First they give a verbal warning to surrender. Then if force needs to be used they are to use batons or mace, and only in a situation where they feel in personal danger (crim has a weapon/rushes towards them) are they ever to pull out their gun. The US cops arrived, kicked in the door and went in with guns in hand. Then they dragged the half naked guy (he was hispanic) and pushed him down stairs and shoved him into a truck and drove away. How do they know he wouldn't have just come with them? Couldn't they have just asked him to keep it down? WTF? I have broken the law numerous times doing silly things (riding a motorbike down a back country road as a kid / smoking weed in public) and the cops have just come up to me and reasonably asked me not to be so blatant about it and they would get serious next time. Compare that to being thrown in jail for 1st time possession in the states. The laws may be stricter in some cases, but most cops aren't bastards about it (though I don't live in Victoria) which country is more free?

rogue, not rouge

[Merk]

Rouge is a French adjective for red. Rogue is an English adjective for "something which behaves in an unexpected and often destructive way".

MAJOR OBJECTION

[Skjellifetti]

From their website:

How does the Assurance Programme work?

There are two main steps. Firstly, when you join the ECCP, you will be asked for some identifying details, including the number of a nationally recognised piece of ID, such as a passport. We will protect your details according to our Privacy Statement.

CAcert has no direct way to check that (for example) passport number ABC123456 really belongs to you. So in the second step, you meet up with some members of the Assurance Programme, who have already convinced CAcert of their identity. These 'Assurers' check your identifying details, and confirm to CAcert that you are who you say you are. You will need at least two Assurers to confirm your details in this way - this strengthens the integrity of the Assurance Programme's 'web of trust'.

I do not want to give them a Nat'l ID number. In fact, there should be no reason to do so. There is already an infrastructure in place for validating my ID and paper signature. They folks who do this are called Notary Publics. And they have their own web of trust similar to a Certificate Authority's.

Two years ago, my wife and I adopted a little girl from India. Lots and lots of paperwork involved. Most of which had to be signed and verified by a notary. The notary looks at your ID and then adds their stamp on top of the signature. The notary does not keep any of your ID numbers on file.

Some of that paperwork had to go through a second level of verification. We had to take the signed and stamped papers to our local courthouse where the County Clerk then verified that the notary was legit. This was then taken to the State of Ohio where they verified the County's verification. Its been awhile, but we might, IIRC, have had to get another level of certification from the US State Dept since we were sending the documents overseas.

So why not just use the infrastructure already available for verifying the identity of a requestor for a certificate made to a cert authority? No need for a CA to keep my Nat'l ID on file.

Re:MAJOR OBJECTION

[ankhank]

Hmm, I'm a notary in California, and the standard notary journal here, at least, have a place in which your identification is recorded (and if it's a real estate transaction, your thumbprint is mandatory now). The notary organizations have manuals dedicated to helping notaries around the country recognize real and forged state driver's licenses and other official identification that contains both a picture, a physical description and a signature.

If a notary knows you personally, the notary can in most situations simply note that you were personally recognized in the journal.

I used my ham radio call sign for the 'national ID' -- seemed an ideal choice for this situation.

Re:MAJOR OBJECTION

[Skjellifetti]

Probably varies from state to state. In Ohio, I have never had a notary record anything which they kept. They only put a seal on the document which I was having notorized and looked at my driver's license or passport to make sure I was who I claimed I was.

Socialism!!! EVIL!

[Medievalist]

First "the Great Goddess Ayn Rand says your a dirty stinkin' COMMIE" post!

Seriously, the Post Office is one obvious choice for real identification - they can't tell any better than anyone else *who* you are, but they can probably validate *where* you are cheaper than anybody else.

PHP implementation of SPKI?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello folks.
I was thinking about implementing the SPKI system, at least the verifier, in PHP for webmasters and people convinence.

If any of you are intrested please reply to this post/comment.

If you are intrested in computer security chek out erights.org and Introduction To Capability Based Security

-Zarutian
ps. I hope this isnt modded down.
---
sha1 hash of message (excluding the line whith ---): f944e109ee67a9622d60d7e2611a85d021c8fbb8

Gate One of Seven

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, is that where the Billy Gate-tocus of Borg icon comes from that is so prevalent of the Microsoft collective here on Slashdot?

"Resistance is Futile?"

Be your own CA server

[Dark Coder]

I'm surprised that this isn't mentioned, but you can start up your very own CA server, complete with revokeable certs for your domain's webservers, mail servers, mail accounts and (yikes) signed software.

I know I did, and boy am I glad.

http://www.openca.org

Never mind the naysayers of having your own CA, I benefited greatly, and so should you.

Re:Be your own CA server

[Steven Reddie]

Yes, that supplies the technology. However the whole point of using certificates issued from a CA is to establish trust, eg. if I trust that the CA issues certificates only after establishing the identity of the entity then I can choose to trust any certificate that has been issued by that CA (what I mean by trust is up to me, but it might merely mean that if something goes wrong I can follow an audit trail back to the certified entity). Without any trust relationship the technology has very limited value.

Re:Australia sucks

[dbIII]

Victoria banned swords.

There is a gang war going on there at the moment - it's all very sordid.

Australia Post does Identity Checks for CA's

[Steven Reddie]

Australia Post has a service named KeyPost where they act as the RA (Registration Authority) and provide authenticity information to CA's. I'd trust certificates issued through this scheme a whole lot more than by a friend of a friend of someone I'll never meet. Why not outsource the RA work to Australia Post? The Australian Government program that supports this is Gatekeeper.