Is It Time For an Open Source Certificate Authority?

cagnol writes "So far there are three free ways to get a free certificate to sign your email and receive encrypted communications: Thawte, Comodo and CAcert. Thawte's root certificate is in mainstream browsers. Thawte's interface is good and the web of trust allows for increased security by verifying people's identity. However Thawte is not open-source; worse: it is owned by VeriSign. Comodo's root certificate is in mainstream browsers too but there is no web of trust and their forms are not always working. CAcert is the closest to an open-source certificate authority but is not open-source and it seems that parts of the system are shaky. CAcert provides a web of trust. Unfortunately, CAcert's root certificate is not in mainstream browsers. Don't you think it is time for a true open-source certificate authority? Should this community be related to the Mozilla Foundation and comply, since day one, with the requirements to get a root certificate in Firefox?"

Comments

Zimmerman has it right .

[Ckwop]

I've fell out of love with public-key signature schemes as a means of proving authenticity. There are a few problems with the idea in general:

1. Nobody actually reads the certificates.
2. Even if they did, they don't really mean anything anyway. How difficult is it to get a real certificate with fake credentials?
3. Moreover, if the URL is similar enough to the target of your phish then your SSL certifcate may well be legitmate in every sense of the word but you trick people because the URL is close enough to a big brand's main domain.

I think Zimmerman, with his ZPhone program, has got it right. Really, all you're interested in for E-mail or VoIP is not whether the person really is Simon Johnson, of Widnes, based in the United Kingdom who is 23 years old with a pet dog called Thornton. You're actually interested in whether this Ckwop guy I'm speaking to now is the same guy as I spoke to last-time.

When you weaken your security requirement to this position, you can remove a staggering amount of complexity. You can cut out all the CAs, all the X.509 certificates and ASN.1 implementations etc. What you're left with is Diffie-Helman and AES in CCM mode. You can implement this in a couple of thousand lines of provably correct code and your done.

The real way to solve the "identification problem" with web-sites is to change the way credit-cards work. You have a secure token that outputs a different string every thirty seconds. RSA have made these but they're very expensive for no explicable reason, the banks would develop an open-standard in my model to drive down prices. When you pay for something, you submit your credit-card along with the token's value. The transaction will only be authorised if the token's value matches what the bank thinks that value should be.

That way, phishers only have one shot to take your money. Sure, they could make a mock payment page but the auth-code is only going to work once. I think this would destroy the cost effectiveness of phishing for credit-card numbers. That said, identity theft would still be an issue.

Simon

Root certificate inclusion is expensive

[wizman]

Having an open source CA is one thing. Having the root certificate included in major browsers is an expensive endeavor. The www.cacert.org site has an FAQ entry about this:

http://wiki.cacert.org/wiki/InclusionStatus

Summary: Lots of open source browsers already have the cert; Mozilla/Firefox will have it soon. Internet Explorer (and apparently Apple's Safari) won't have it unless they come up with a way to pay for the $75,000+ plus $10,000 a year for a AICPA WebTrust audit.

Awesome!

[222]

Sounds great, maybe one of the Ubuntu guys can help? How about that one guy?

Re:Advertise it for other than e-commerce.

[TheRaven64]

I use a CACert certificate on a couple of mail servers, for outbound SMTP and inbound POP/IMAP. If I need to re-create the certificate, none of the users has to know anything about it, as long as they added the CACert root to their client; the old and new ones are both signed by the same root, and so it just works.

I don't really understand what the original poster meant by saying CACert is not open source. Open source doesn't really apply to something like a certificate authority, because they are not providing software. Anyone can get a CACert certificate at no cost. All you have to do is show two forms of government-issued ID (one with a photo) to an existing member. The more people who assure you in this way, the better the certificate you can get, and eventually you are allowed to start assuring people yourself. The problems I see with CACert are:

1. There is not yet a good infrastructure for assuring organisations. Non-profits would benefit a lot from this kind of thing.
2. There is no good revocation mechanism, nor a good verification mechanism. The points A gets from being assured by B and C are the same, even if C was assured by B. It would be better if you had to be assured by people from divergent branches of the tree.
3. Due to the way IE handles root CAs (i.e. pay lots of money), it is not likely to get in there for a very long time.