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Extended Validation SSL, More Secure or Just a Racket?
Nalfeshnee writes "The Register is reporting on the new 'Extended Validation SSL' cert currently being touted by Verisign. Vista and IE7 will be using this but not, apparently, Firefox anytime soon. For this the Verisign Product Marketing Director Tim Callan squarely blames the Firefox dev team for 'not keeping up' with their new technology. However, the whole thing just seems to be a way for Verisign to enjoy ridiculous markup on selling 'more secure' certs."
I'm colorblind. Would I ever notice the difference?
Hey Verisign, it's called "open source". If you'd like the feature added submit a patch and they'll consider it. Until then the people working on it will finish when they can. Thanks.
Developers: We can use your help.
Definitely sounds like a racket to me. If you get the green bar by paying Verisign 150%, how does that differ from today's security certificates? Other than having to pay more money, and only being able to be verified by Verisign, that is. (Doesn't sound racket-y at all. Or was that rickety?) While they make it sound like the Green Bar is an excellent method of knowing that Amazon is really Amazon, I think it's actually a reverse attempt. By getting Amazon to use this spiffy new green bar, Verisign is attempting to legitimize their new technology in the eyes of the consumer. Little will actually change for the consumer, as he already knows when he's surfing Amazon.
The only place it would supposedly help is with Phishing. But since Phishing sites can't get certificates anyway, what does this help? If the lock isn't good enough, just change the URL Bar green for every VERIFIED certificate received. That will have the EXACT same effect.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Err, excuse me.. isn't the verification of the identity of the applicant of the certificate exactly what the CAs are meant to be doing anyway?
I thought that that is why we had these 'trusted' third-parties, to vouch for the identity of the certificate owner - that is the fundamental basis of PKI and certificates. If they weren't doing that before (which they clearly weren't doing properly), what the hell were they doing?
So, we're paying them extra to get a 'fixed' version of something that they caused to be broken in the first place because they couldn't do their job properly. WHy should paying an extra 50% on top of their fees all of a sudden make us able to trust them now?
This is coming from the people who stole DNS, and sell certificates for hundreds of dollars which take milliseconds to make....
Now we're supposed to get a more "trustworthy" cert and make our address bar green?
Fuck you Verisign.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The plan was for all the browsers to implement the color bar scheme, based on IE's implementation. There were optimistic announcements by all involved, but no final standard has emerged. VeriSign and other SSL certificate authorities are preparing to start selling these in January. It's not clear to me if Firefox/Mozilla has actually opted out or is just moving more slowly than MSFT in incorporating the changes in the browser. Mozilla tends to be deliberate about SSL-related changes in the browser.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
#1. In order to issue the new certificates, the Certificate Authorities (CA's) will be "required" to follow "industry standard" practices in "verifying" whomever applies for a new certificate.
... the same as they are today.
#2. This additional "verification" is what will cost the additional money.
#3. Any business that does not pay the additional fees to be "verified" by "industry standard" practices will be
#4. Phishing depends upon a person making a single error in judgment, one time. This will not stop phishing.
This will not stop anything. This is stupid. You're paying EXTRA to have someone do the verification they were supposed to be doing already. Imagine trying to run a business like that.
Boss - "I paid you last week, but you barely did any work. I'm going to fire you."
Employee - "If you give me a 50% raise, I'll perform the work to industry standards."
Boss - "Okay, that sounds like a good deal to me."
Verison is involved.
Everything Verisign does is a racket.
Therefore, it's a racket.
Q.E.D.
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Has anyone actually been able to find the specification for "high assurance" certificates? Apparently this is being closely held. The spec comes from something called the "CA Browser Forum", which is invitation-only and doesn't seem to have a web site. A standard was supposed to be issued in August, but apparently agreement wasn't reached until a meeting in September. There are many press releases, but no hard data.
So that's why it's not in Mozilla.
It's actually a good idea. Early in the history of SSL, getting a certificate required presenting appropriate business identification info to the certificate issuer. The problem is that some issuers (GoDaddy comes to mind) started issuing "domain only" SSL certificates; the only verification is that the domain can get email. Then, instead of revoking GoDaddy's root certificate for this, the other cert issuers copied GoDaddy's approach. Now anybody can get a meaningless certificate with a meaningless Relying Party Agreement.
The way it's supposed to work is that the certificate issuer bears financial responsibility for misidentification of the certificate owner. Some certificates from Verisign have a Relying Party Agreement that does provide a financial guarantee to the party relying on the certificate - $100 for a class 1 cert, $5000 for a class 2 cert, and $100,000 for a class 3 cert. Most of the other issuers have relying party agreements which promise nothing and deliver less.
So what's happening is that, soon, you'll be able to tell the difference between the crap certificates and the good ones. Before you buy. The idea is that if you put your credit card into a site that showed a green toolbar in IE, and it wasn't really the company it should have been, you can collect from the certificate issuer. This puts certificate issuers on the hook for phishing losses.
Unfortunately, the rules and the Relying Party Agreements for the new certificates haven't yet appeared, so we can't tell if the rules are tough enough to make this work. Since they're being drafted by the certificate issuers, there will probably be some loophole that lets them off the hook.
No.
No.
No.
SSL (and TLS) aren't encryption algorithms, they're protocol standards. These protocols make use of existing encryption algorithms to secure data. Many of these algorithms have a variable level of complexity, depending on things like key size. Since security (including encyrption) is always a tradeoff of resources versus security, the goal is to tweak the configuration parameters (again, such as key length) to find a level of security such that an attack against the cipher is less profitable an option than the next best choice, such as kidnapping the document's author. Those who require greater security can use turn up the complexity at the expense of using more resources.
As computation capability increases, the complexity of encryption system is increased to compensate, usually by increasing key length. If a flaw is discovered in a given encryption algorithm making it too easy to break, or if the algorithm isn't capable of being expanded to account for better decryption technology (such as DES) then that algorithm is discarded in favor of some stronger replacement. SSL remains the same.
Verisign's "Extended Validation" program has nothing to do with cipher strength, key length, or encryption. Instead, it's indicative of the vetting process that the company had to undergo to get the certificate. To get a certificate for citibank.net, I have to verify that I own that domain. I don't, necessarily, have to verify that I represent Citibank [1]. Under this High Assurance program, Verisign will vouch, not only for the validity of the domain, but also for the validity of the organization owning that domain.
This is a Good Thing, since there currently is only one tier of validation. An SSL certificate is designed to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, which it does well. What it doesn't protect against (though we act as if it does) is forged identity attacks. Certificates used for financial transactions, for example, should go through a stronger vetting process than certificates used for securing a blog.
[1] In reality, almost all CAs do extended verification when the other party sounds like a high-profile company or financial institution. Nonetheless, Mistakes do happen.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Mozilla.org should get into the SSL certificate reselling business and set the location bar to green when one of the mozilla signed certs is present. Verisign could then have the option of paying a royalty to mozilla.org for each extended certificate if they want green URL bars too.
"Technology?" Give me a break. They're looking at what authority signed the cert, and if the web browser has been told to dogmatically trust that authority more than others, then it turns something green.
Actually, it's not a bad idea. There are degrees of trust, and showing it to the user is fine. But you bet your ass this is mostly just a cashgrab from Verisign.
Good news. There's a way to do this, that will absolutely embarrass MSIE, making its version of https look completely insecure by comparison, and screw Verisign over, in the process.
Support an OpenPGP-based cert model (perhaps using GNU TLS library, perhaps not). Suddenly, you can have certs that are signed by multiple authorities, including users themselves, and display a whole spectrum of trust metrics. Equifax can make mistakes and issue an incorrect cert to a bank, but can three CAs all make the same mistake, without a conspiracy? And what if you get the bank's fingerprint on your snailmail statements, or there's a sign showing the fingerprint when you walk into it, and thus you can cert it yourself? What if you haven't ever been to the bank (ok, I can't imagine that) but you have 3 friends who have, and you have certified them, and told your computer they are each marginally trusted, and they all certify the bank? Three friends are sure as hell a lot more trustworthy than some faceless corporation named Verisign, whose identification policies you don't even know, whose private key storage policy you don't even know, and in fact doesn't have a single employee you have even met, assuming they have any employees at all and aren't a robot in the basement of a building at the NSA.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
GoDaddy High Assurance SSL.
Comodo Trusted SSL.
GeoTrust True BusinessID.
Business identity validation SSL certificates have been around for a long time. The only thing different about VeriSign's offering is that they're partnering with Microsoft to have the bar turn green if their more expensive cert is detected, to the disadvantage of all other SSL providers. This is an attempt by VeriSign to make it effectively necessary for businesses to use their cert so customers won't think that their site is insecure.
There's so much wrong with this attempt to gain a monopoly without adding anything of value to the market... but par for the course for VeriSign.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs