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Government Could Forge SSL Certificates
FutureDomain writes "Is SSL becoming pointless? Researchers are poking holes in the chain of trust for SSL certificates which protect sensitive data. According to these hypothesized attacks, governments could compel certificate authorities to give them phony certificates that are signed by the CA, which are then used to perform man in the middle attacks. They point out that Verisign already makes large sums of money by facilitating the disclosure of US consumers' private data to US government law enforcement. The researchers are developing a Firefox plugin (PDF) that checks past certificates and warns of anomalies in the issuing country, but not much can help if government starts spying on the secure connections of its own citizens."
SSL is, and always has been, and ugly hack. End-to-end encryption should be done at the IP layer, not the TCP layer. Now that we have IPSEC, we have a standard way of doing it properly. The only remaining part of the problem is key distribution, but with DNSSec we can put IPSEC public keys in DNS entries and get end-to-end encryption.
A government able to insert something into the chain of trust is still able to fake a connection, but distributing the chain of trust makes this a bit harder. The US government won't be able to insert something into a .cn domain, for example, although the Chinese government can. For the ultra-paranoid, you can publish the same IPSec public key on both and make clients compare the two. Unlike an SSL certificate, the IPSec key is visible to anyone, even people who don't try to make a connection, so it's much easier to spot if someone has tampered with the connection, and will be cached in ISP's DNS caches, making an unnoticed attack much harder.
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And it took you how long to figure this out? Anyone with real security in mind would create their own certificates and sign them. What's always been missing is a convenient way to verify the identify of the person you're communicating with. CAs only help in certain situations. SSL has always been more about encrypted content than identification no matter what people try to tell you.