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EFF Asks Verizon Whether Etisalat Deserves CA Trust
Peter Eckersley writes "Today EFF published an open letter to Verizon, calling for investigation of a trusted SSL Certificate Authority. Etisalat is a majority state-owned telecom of the United Arab Emirates with operations throughout the Middle East. You may remember that last year Etisalat installed malware on its subscribers' BlackBerry phones, and was recently pivotal in the UAE's threat to disconnect BlackBerry devices altogether if Research In Motion did not provide a backdoor for BES servers' crypto. This company, which appears to be institutionally hostile to the existence and use of secure cryptosystems, is in possession of a master certificate for HTTPS, encrypted POP and IMAP, and other SSL-based security systems. Etisalat's CA certificate is not trusted directly by Mozilla and Microsoft, but was instead delegated as an Intermediate CA by Verizon. As a result, we are asking Verizon to investigate whether it is appropriate for Etisalat to continue holding this certificate, and to consider revoking it."
It's not a question of whether Verizon should identify who Etisalat is. The question is this: should Etisalat be allowed to verify who other people are?
The risk here is that Etisalat could, for example, generate an SSL certificate for www.google.com, or www.amazon.com, and then put up a site pretending to be Amazon or Google, and your web browser would show all of the nice pretty icons and colors indicating that the site was legitimate and had a proper SSL certificate.
This is because Verizon has identified Etisalat as an intermediary CA, which allows Etisalat to generate SSL certificates for other domains that your browser will then trust.
The problem isn't that Etisalat isn't who they claim to be. The problem is that their CA certificate was delegated as an intermediate CA by Verisign.
With an intermediate CA, they could issue certificates to anyone they want to, for any domain. This would allow them to snoop on (and interfere with) any SSL communications between absolutely anyway.
Neither Microsoft, nor Mozilla "trust" Eltisalat. They don't have Eltisalat's CA certificate installed. They. All major browsers include Verisign's root CA certificates. Since Verisign trusts Eltisalat, that means any software that trusts Verisign also trusts Eltisalat.
Eltisalat is basically owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates. This same government have, as the article (and summary) mentions, tried to snoop on users of Blackberries before, and have threatened RIM to have a back-door installed. Should these people be trusted with the ability to issue any SSL certificates, for any domain they want to?
The article references Verizon, not Verisign. Not trying to be pedantic here - just figured it was a worthwhile correction.
The Verizon certificates are included in Mozilla under GTE Cybertrust. In Debian, dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates, select ask, and select the certificates you don't trust.