Do the SSL Watchmen Watch Themselves?

StrongestLink writes "In an intriguing twist on the recent Comodo CA vulnerability discussed here last week, security researcher Mike Zusman today revealed that three days prior to StartCom's disclosure of a flaw in a Comodo reseller's registration process, he discovered and disclosed an authentication bypass flaw to StartCom in their own registration process that allowed an attacker to submit an authorized request for any domain. During a month which was marked by the continuing paradigm shift to SSL-verified holiday shopping, the Chain of Trust continues to run off the gears, and Bruce Schneier is even commenting publicly that SSL's site validation mission isn't even relevant. What lies ahead for the billion-dollar CA industry?"

Comments

Let governments handle SSL

[coryking]

SSL certificates are one area best served by government. Bear with me here,

SSL certificates are the online version of your driver's license or your passport. We entrust our governments to provide us with reliable, trustworthy forms of identification. We know that if we see a driver's license or a passport, we can be reasonably certain the person holding said identification is who they claim.

It is becoming increasingly clear that SSL certificates issued by private industry cannot be trusted. Since private industry issues them, there are real standards for how one qualifies for a certificate. A $20 SSL cert from Godaddy is just as valid of identification as a $500 one from Verisign. Worse, the private industry has a conflict of interest. Their business makes money by issuing certificates to paying customers, not rejecting customers for bad information. The more stringent their policy, the more applicants they reject, and the less money they make. It is simple math, they have to make it as easy to get an SSL certificate as possible or go under. (The bond rating industry suffers from a different, but somewhat similar conflict of interest, actually)

Who then should issue certificates? The only entity that doesn't have to make money--your governments. Ideally you should be able to walk into whatever agency issues photo identification in your country and somehow get an SSL certificate issued. Businesses and non-profits could get them issued by checking a box on the form they use to set up a corporation or LLC.

Letting the government deal with this has many extra benefits. For starters, we could make SSL certificates fall under the same kinds of laws that govern passports or drivers licenses. If you forge one, or enter fake information, you could be charged under the same laws that faking a drivers license fall under. For second, if done right, good governments would issue these for virtually nothing and maybe protocols like S/MIME would finally get widespread adoption.

What about open source projects who currently cannot afford SSL certs? Well, if the government does it, they could file as a non-profit and get one for free (or reduced cost).

How would this work from a technical standpoint? How would browsers deal with a long list that has every countries certificate authority? Dunno, but it seems it wouldn't be a big problem. It is a technical problem though, so we can solve it somehow.

What international agency would regulate this? Who regulates passports? Dunno, but seems to me we already have a long history of internationally recognized identification--both for business and personal use. Why not task those guys with SSL certificates? This is more of a political problem, and isn't as easy to solve as the technical bits.

Bottom line, I know we all seem to hate more government, but SSL certificates are one thing governments should be doing, not private industries. It might create a new class of problems, but I suspect the new problems will be much less severe than the ones we have now.

Re:Let governments handle SSL

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait to see the phishing websites validated by the Nigerian government's CA.

Re:Let governments handle SSL

[Lumenary7204]

The United States under the Clinton/Gore administration already tried something similar to this; five words spring to mind: "Clipper, Skipjack, and Key Escrow". (If you need a refresher, I suggest the book "Crypto" by Steven Levy.)

The **last** thing I want is for my government to be the entity that issues the requisite public/private key pairs to the private institutions and companies with whom I do business. My business is **my** business - and not the government's business - until a **legitimate** search warrant or indictment says otherwise. And even then, it's still **my** business.

As the article posting indicates, SSL is built around a Chain of Trust. People buy SSL certificates from the likes of VeriSign, Thawte, Equifax, etc., because they are well-known and (ostensibly) trustworthy organizations.

I, for one, do not entirely trust my government. I don't trust VeriSign and crew all that much, either, but their reputations are a strong motivation for them to do their jobs reasonably well, and provide products that perform as advertised. To do otherwise would damage their reputations, resulting in lost customers and weaker profit margins.

Most governments, on the other hand, don't care much about their reputations, and have little regard for profit margins (just look at the US Government's annual budget deficit). They therefore have no compunction against using excuses such as "national security" and "protect the children" to provide (at best) or mandate (at worst) inferior solutions to technological problems.

Admittedly, some companies - like AT&T, for instance - are so large and well-entrenched that they sometimes bow to the mandates of government, and little heed the damage done to their reputations because of it.

But most companies are not that large, and can ill afford to lose face in the marketplace. Reputation is their bread-and-butter, so they do what's in their own best interests, which may even coincide with their customers' best interests.

Nope. Government AND private companies

[Cyberax]

It's better to use private companies with government oversight.

I now live in Ukraine and we have such a system. Government licenses private companies to work as certification centers and mandates that only certain (strong) crypto algorithms must be used.

As a result, I can use my private key to sign my tax report for IRS (or tax report for my company). IRS in turn uses its own key to sign their letters.

That's pretty cool, if you think about it.

Re:Nope. Government AND private companies

[witherstaff]

OH boy, the 'but the US is huge' argument that comes up every time broadband in the US is discussed. I'd buy that if our metro areas were chocked full of fiber speeds and just the rural areas were slow. The fact is that even in our largest metro areas the US broadband is horrid.

A recent study shows that even our smalled state, Rhode Island, with population density of over 1000 per square mile, has an average speed of only 6.7 Mbps. If you can't make that dense of an area high speed there is something seriously wrong with our system. Namely the Telco lobby arm is so strong that their gov't sanctioned monopoly remains and speeds don't improve.

Re:Sorry to go off-topic

[chill]

quis custodiet ipsos custodes

Latin for "who will watch the watchers".

It was vaporware anyways

[Gothmolly]

The "industry" provided no value - it merely allowed you to pretend you were somehow secure, above and beyond the actual SSL part. Smoke and mirrors. If this "industry" dies, it will be a market correction, nothing more.

Bruce is wrong

[dachshund]

"SSL protects data in transit but the problem isn't eavesdropping on the transmission. Someone can steal the credit card on some server somewhere. The real risk is data in storage. SSL protects against the wrong problem," [Schneier] said.

I respect Bruce, but I think if you say something true enough times, you lose sight of the fact that in this case it may not actually be a valid point. While credit card theft is a major problem, Phishers frequently target bank account login credentials--- which are not stored all over the place. In this case, SSL is one of the primary protections keeping you from all kind of hell (losing your credit card is a pain in the butt, but usually it's insured... losing your banking credentials can be a huge disaster). Now imagine that instead of a few rubes being conned by Phishing emails, you had millions of relatively savvy customers at a large ISP diverted to a fake Bank of America site (perhaps with help from insiders at the ISP). The losses could be substantial.

Again, Bruce is right about one problem but not necessarily about every problem (and I can't help but notice that he works for a storage company...)

Taking a harder line on certs.

[Animats]

There are really three tiers of SSL certs being sold:

1. "Domain control only validated" certs. This means the cert issuer got an answer from an e-mail sent to the domain. This is the "QuickSSL" tier.
2. "Location and business identiti validated" certs. What SSL certs were supposed to mean. The cert issuer actually checked out the business for existence. At this tier, there's often a "relying party" guarantee.
3. "Extended validation" certs. The cert issuer had to meet some audited standards to issue the cert. Mostly used by banks.

Current browsers don't distinguish between #1 and #2. They should. "Domain control only validated" certs are enough to secure some social networking site or blog, but not good enough to send someone a credit card number. If they're taking your money, the cert should contain enough info to allow you to find and sue them.

Our SiteTruth system distinguishes between #1 and #2, because we're looking for business identity. It's a useful way to filter out the "bottom feeders".

The problems with bogus SSL cert issuance seem to be, so far, confined to the "Domain control only validated" certs. This is an additional good reason to distinguish between them and the better tiers.