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Do the SSL Watchmen Watch Themselves?

Posted by Soulskill on from the barbers-with-a-good-haircut dept.

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?"

4 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Let governments handle SSL by coryking · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Let governments handle SSL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Nope. Government AND private companies by Cyberax · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Nope. Government AND private companies by witherstaff · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.