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."

Comments

If security is really important to you

[DarkOx]

If you really want to be secure and you are using certificates you should be self signing and exchanging the self signed certs with your partners out of band.

Re:If security is really important to you

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the way OpenSSH does it -- Trust On First Use (TOFU). First time you visit a server you're warned of possible MITM and given a fingerprint (which you could have, say, confirmed in person). After that you never see a warning again unless the server's key unexpectedly changes. No forcing you to automatically trust CAs, and no overstated warnings about self-signed certs.

what no one wants you to know

[yup2000]

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.

Paranoia is all well and good...

[DrgnDancer]

Essentially if you really want secure end to end communication with someone that is more or less fool proof and not subject to outside interference you have to manually exchange keys. It's always been this way. Any time you do less you are trusting *someone* other than yourself and person at the remote end. The simple point is that we *have* to trust someone to exist in society. We trust that the government will not suddenly decide to print "Braquats" and declare Dollars (or Pounds, or Euros, or whatever) useless. We trust that the bank won't wander off with all our money. We trust that our ISP isn't just putting up servers that pretend to be the Internet and are slowly stealing everything we type into our browsers. We trust that the grocery store hasn't poisoned all the produce. Virtually every social action we take involves some modicum of trust that the "other guy" is acting in reasonably good faith.

Thus far the certificate authorities have been trustworthy. Could they be compromised? Of course. Could the clerk at the grocery store be bribed to poison all the produce? Of course. Do we have any reason to think the CAs *have* been compromised? Not that I'm aware of. It's pretty straightforward. Are you doing something that needs to be *completely* secret? Exchange keys with the remote end manually. Are you doing something that needs to be as secret as one can reasonably expect while still dealing public entities? Use the CAs. They have an extremely good track record and seem to be about as trustworthy as anyone can reasonably expect.