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What Would It Take To Have Open CA Authorities?
trainman writes "With the release of Firefox 3, those who have been using self-signed certificates for SSL now face a huge issue — the big, scary warning FF3 issues which is very unintuitive for non-technical users. It seems Firefox is pushing more websites in to the monopolistic arms of companies such as Verisign. For smaller, especially non-profit groups, which will never have issues with domain typo scammers, this adds an extra and difficult-to-swallow cost. Does a service such as this need the same level of scrutiny and cost since all that is being done is verifying domain and certificate match? This extra hand holding adds a tremendous cost and allows monopolistic companies such as Verisign to thrive. Can organizations such as Mozilla not move towards a model that helps break this monopoly, helping establish a CA root authority that's cheap (free?) and only links the certificate to the domain, not actual verification of who owns the domain?"
try it....
When Google Checkout came along, I figured I'd accept that too - so I started doing scripts on my web site to take Google Checkout payments.
This came to a screeching halt when I realized that Google Checkout payments (or at least automated CGI processing of them) would only be done through web sites with SSL certificates signed by one of the "Major Authorities".
I wasn't willing to shell out $100 (about half my yearly profit!) for the stupid certificate.
This FF3 problem is even worse - if you use SSL, your web browser would be screaming to your end-users that you're probably dealing with some hokey-untrusted individual!
Let's just say that in any respect, I won't be having any little buttons on my site recommending that people use Firefox...
I run a small norwegian forum, and we use SSL. Since our income is around 100USD a year, which is donated by members, it would be very unfair to spend all of that on a SSL cert. However, how can one explain that there is no security risk involved in creating an exception when the browser so fiercly states that it is a huge security risk? It would be better if you just got a warning like "This site is probably not your bank"...
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
$27 a year? (GoDaddy) $50 a year? (InstantSSL) etc.
Sorry, but if an organisation can't swallow around $50 a year then they have more serious problems that wanting SSL.
Godaddy has a very simple SSL cert option that only validates that the certificate issued matches the domain registration info, which is super cheap.
One entire point of SSL is to ensure that the user can trust the site they're connecting to. If I register citicardbank.com, my inability to get an SSL certificate for it without being traced by my phishing victims severely undermines my ability to rip people off.
The only way to get what you're asking for is to get a secondary protocol, somewhere between HTTP and HTTPS, that would provide privacy for the communication link but wouldn't promote the notion that the end domain is what it says it is. Whether such a thing is a good idea is open to question, even if it is desirable.
If push comes to shove, the only problem with the present regime is that it's expensive. There's increasing amounts of competition in that space, so you should expect prices to come down over time. Wait. .com domain names once cost more than what many SSL certs do today.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Why is this being brought up now as something new? IE7 has been doing practically the same thing since it was released. I agree that there should be something "open source", but this is far from new...
The fact that there are "compan*ies* such as Verisign" means Verisign is not a monopoly. In Firefox, go to Tools, Options, Advanced, Encryption, View Certificates, Authorities. These are all valid CAs according to Firefox. As for being cheap, a quick check at GoDaddy's says you can get one from them for $30/year.
AFAIK, I believe it prevents man in the middle attacks from happening:
You go to mybank.com, but you actually access randommalwareip, which gives you a phony certificate from mybank.com.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
I think the optimum solution would be a cheap root CA who is also highly trusted.
I don't know who this would be - maybe someone like a traditional brick-and-morter "bank" which could vogue for an SSL certificate being validated in the same way that are able to link a bank account to a person, company, SSN, etc.
I was going to say also someone like Google.
The point is, if a CA-signed cert was $5, no one would be complaining, but if any 'ol shmucks signed certs were automatically accepted by your browser, the whole system wouldn't mean anything.
Can organizations such as Mozilla not move towards a model that helps break this monopoly, helping establish a CA root authority that's cheap (free?) and only links the certificate to the domain, not actual verification of who owns the domain?
How can anyone possibly establish that a given certificate is associated with a given domain without first proving that they do indeed have the (ownership) rights to establish said association?
What you are asking for can be accomplished via SecureDNS, you can enter the hash of the certificate in the DNS entry and Secure DNS ensures that only the authorized party can enter that association and verifies that it was not changed. SecureDNS facilitates a lot of these kinds of authentication issues by extending the rooted hierarchy of DNS names to securely dissiminate information, whether it be IP addresses of servers or public key commitments. See my paper "Layering Public Key Distribution Over Secure DNS using Authenticated Delegation" (ACSAC 2005).
The certification authorities really need to get together with the web browser vendors so the big scary warnings can be made trust-level-appropriate.
For example:
Domain confirmed: [green][yellow][red]
Responsible Party Identity Confirmed: [green with seal][green][yellow][red]
Where "yellow" meant unconfirmed or self-signed and not whitelisted SSL or an easy-to-fake or -steal ID such as a credit card, "red" meant revoked, expired, or invalid credential, and "green" meant a valid SSL or hard-to-fake or -steal personal ID such as a driver's license backed by a notary. "Green with seal" meant a financially-backed guarantee, something big banks would probably get.
Most small-time web sites would be either green/yellow or yellow/yellow, depending on if they had self-signed certificates.
The cost of a "no identity confirmed" green/red certificate shouldn't be much more than domain registration. A "yellow/red" self-signed certificate would remain free.
If people expect "green with seal" when dealing with major financial companies, "green" with most businesses, and "yellow" for personal web sites, they'll give the appropriate level of trust.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The problem with SSL certificate is that what you're supposed to be buying is trust. Your 400$ is supposed to be for VeriSign to validate that (a) an entity of that name/address pair exist; and (b) there's supporting evidence that the applicant represents that entity.
The reiterate strongly: Certificates are about authentication not encryption!
This isn't cheap, it requires a fair bit of effort.
Also, the CA needs to be trusted in the first place. That's very gray, but even old VeriSign is a lot more trustworthy then "Joe Q. Random Computer Service Associates" with a PO Box in RU.
Most proponent of "free" CAs really want the little padlock without any concern about trust because they implicitly trust themselves. Suppose you did have a shall-issue free-for-all CA on the web. What value would you place on its certificates? Would you trust that entity to not have a compromised private key?
They offer certs with domain validation for free. There are gentle attempts to upsell you to higher levels of validation, but their domain validated certificates work without errors. Look here.
If you want certs that are validated to your business' identity (instead of just your domain) and don't indicate in the DN that they were free, there is a small charge.
.sig: file not found
the foremost aim of an SSL cert is to encrypt the communication so 3rd parties cant eavesdrop.
it doesnt make a ZIT of difference if the site you are shopping from has a Verisign signed 256 bit certificate or a self signed certificate. almost all certs are encrypted with similar technologies encryption wise. if you are concerned with 'authenticity', you dont know a website or dont trust them or suspect them, you should NOT be shopping there in the first place.
yes, this move of firefox 3 is a VERY bad thing. it really pushes people to the arms of verisign, geotrust (which is verisign) and so on.
not only that, it will also force control panel companies like cpanel, which serve millions of website users through web hosts to have to force users of their services to pay for SSL certs for each server they use or let their users connect to their site control panels through unencrypted connections. that will eventually drive up prices in the high to mid end hosting market. which is BAD, since majority of people host their websites in such small business hosts with $3-4 bucks a month. the overall effect that will have is yet to be seen.
yes, this was a stupid move by mozilla team, unfortunately.
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Instead of relying on centralized CAs, and implicitly trusting these privileged monopolies, we could shift to trust webs.
It's like a social network. You trust who your "friends" trust, and distrust who they don't. With weightings, so some friends' and enemies' associations (and dissociations) count more than others Because some people you trust in their content, but not their judgement of who to trust (and vice versa, but probably more rarely).
Trust webs can perfectly simulate the current centralized trust model. You can just set your trust web to always trust whoever, say, VeriSign trusts, and ignore everyone else, which is what we get by default today. But you could tweak your trust web to say "If my grad student distrusts a site, then ignore whether VeriSign trusts it".
Such a trust web could therefore just ship set up with the current CAs the only trusted authorities, and work exactly the same as now. But we'd each have the freedom (or our sysadmins, who could lock the trust web changes away from normal users) to emphasize whoever we actually trust to influence our automated trust.
Independent authorities could "watch the watchers". So investigators with a reliable track record could become important "second guessers" to the "offical" CAs. People could make their reputation by proving a trusted authority has less than 100% good judgement. And the whole system can become more robust, instead of fracturing as soon as different CAs have different trust levels for different sites.
The technique and some SW is already available, for apps like PGP and others that rely on a Public Key Infrastructure. What's necessary for the critical mass that makes such a system work is for a browser like Firefox to upgrade to a trust web, with an easy and reliable UI with sensible defaults. Then we're as strong as the trust network in which we embed ourselves.
--
make install -not war
The O.P. mentions "...monopolistic arms of companies such as Verisign."
Okay, look. The word "monopoly" has as its prefix the stem "mono-," from the Greek, meaning "one." That means there can only be ONE "monopoly."
A phrase such as "monopolistic company LIKE Versign..." is absurd on the face of it. If there are other companies LIKE Verisign, then there is no monopoly.
Is it REALLY that hard to understand?
This is an example of how the rising generation is so used to "buzz words" chosen for shock value, etc., and has gone completely away from clarity of speech and writing. What the O.P. means to say, really, is "I don't want to pay the going rate for this service, so I'll call Verisign 'a monopolistic company' because everyone knows 'monopolies' are bad, and that will communicate the 'badness' of 'companies like Verisign.'"
Oddly, the word "rhetoric," also from the Greek (rheteros, "a speech") used to be a positive appellation for the study of good, clear communication of thoughts and ideas. But it has also succumbed to the buzz-word dementia, and now usually means "empty words."
How sad.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
This needs to be transparent for it to work. You've already lost the vast majority at "root cert". They have absolutely no fucking idea what you're talking about. That isn't going to change.
If it's not in the default install, it doesn't exist.
Certificates don't do that, they guarantee you're talking to the domain you expect to be talking to. CA signed certs prevent man in the middle attacks.
That's it all certs do. If the box you're talking to was hacked, tough. That's outside the scope of SSL certs.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
The idea of certificates is to authenticate the connection, make it impossible to someone in the middle to pretend to be the server to the client, and the client to the server. Actually, it would be better to require users to have certificates as well, in many cases, as passwords tend to be too trivial.
Now, the price of certificates is horrendous. The passport office provides a document as good, or better, than many certificates, but it doesn't cost many hundreds of dollars to obtain a passport. In fact, as digital certificates are essentially the same as a passport with electronic information, it might be better if the passport office issued digital certificates along with physical passports as a combined package. The added cost to them would be practically nil, and the certificates would have a much greater credibility level than those by most corporations, at least for personal certs.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoDaddy#Controversies
This is to say nothing of a number of lower profile controversies and the fact that their entire site is a usability nightmare that seems largely designed to trick marginally informed customers into buying (and cause more savvy customers to explode in frustration).
Tweet, tweet.
You think Verisign et al reliably do that? How?
There was a /. story maybe a year ago about all sorts of obviously fake ones... what the major cert providers verify is that your payment cleared. Which is _something_ because there's SOME kind of traceability. But it's not much.
I don't really blame them, though, because the problem is fundamental. There's just no real way for them to verify someone is who they say they are, because we don't really have a definition of who that "we" is. It's not like the gov't issues you a social security private key at birth and each corporation too (not to mention going international)
So the thing keeping them secure IS the payment and the record of the payment, and the fact that so many people fall prey to phishing without a valid cert that no one cares.
*****
In my opinion, the best we can do is issue physically linked certs. Cryptographically identical to existing certs, this changes the people part - The certificate authority a) must require a payment, but there's no minimum they can charge b) mails a physical letter with a code c) makes an automated, repeating voice call with a code d) if both codes are entered and they own the domain, issues a cert for that contact info, which can optionally be used to generate certificates for multiple servers.
Now, the hard part is that you haven't verified IDENTITY at all, you've only verified contact information. So the browser would have to literally display this information, if it was one of these contact-certs (perhaps in a bar just below the URL bar) I say in 'these certs' because for these certs you're not even implying that you can trust anything except the
You COULD set this authority up with a relatively small expense. You might be able to write a FF extension to display the addresses. If you have reasonable internal security, you probably could get FF to add you as a trusted authority, at least FOR contact-certs.
That's not GREAT, but it's the best we can do for simply automation for general-purpose merchants/certs... beyond that it's trying to do credit and background checks the old fashioned way.
My only OTHER idea is that the FDIC/NCUA/etc ought to get together and create a CA for US banks. Then you could even make the bank-trusted bar a DIFFERENT color. And presumably the regulators have a secure way to talk to the banks. (I'm not suggesting that this be legally mandatory for the banks to sign up for or use, but I think there's no one who is more likely to be able to authentically verify the authenticity of a US financial institution than the US regulators...)
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So I'm sorry but I don't agree with that. First the warning from IE is much more accurate and non alarmist. It is different from the failed page message, while the FF3 ssl and fail to load page are very similar. This is rather annoying and the first time I saw it, I thought the URL was invalid. Also FF3 lets you visit the site as well.
Charles Wyble System Engineer
I think FF3's cert thing is lamer and lamer
I've been thinking about this... and I'm happy to have FF3 mark the unsecure, secure, and EV-secure sites differently. But it's really, really lame to say that any self-SSL site is WORSE than a random non-SSL site. It's only the same. If they're going to go through the trouble of getting people used to trust markings, they should just mark the self-SSL sites like they mark the unsecure sites. Changing the URL bar to say:
(unverified) https:///
Would be enough, if they were changing the color/style of the secure sites. (Sure, don't give the self-SSL a lock icon. Fine.)
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This is a contender for dumbest statement in the history of security.
That's pure nonsense. No CA ever paid a dime to the Mozilla Foundation or Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the days of Netscape). Poke around http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.crypto/topics to get a clue about how Mozilla handles inclusion of CAs.
... is to drop the fundamentally broken X.509 PKI infrastructure, where any CA can sign certs for any subject, and switch to a DNSSEC-based PKI where signing authority is limited to subdomains of the authority. In the process, we end up with the ability to sign all the certs you want, for every host, if you like, and have SSL anywhere.
Even if you have nothing to hide now, one day you may, and then you probably don't want to advertise the fact by sudden conspicuous switch to encryption.
You might want to encrypt everything possible simply to make life harder for those who listen everything in the hope of catching something valuable.