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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."
If I understand correctly, in this case, Verizon is delegating authority to Etisalat to grant certificates through a subCA. That means that if you trust Verizon, you trust Etisalat.
As an intermediate CA hostile to privacy, they can produce certs which browsers trust without prompting. This means that they can trivially evesdrop on all communications.
Is it possible for me to reject the Etisalat subCA cert without ever seeing it?
Can I trust Verizon anymore, knowing that they grant such certs?
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/life-without-ca
Palm trees and 8
Browsers need to clearly show WHO is authenticating and some measure of "reputation" of each authenticator in the chain.
Let's use https://www.google.com/ as an example.
Its certificate is issued by "Thawte SGC CA" which in turn is issued by "Verizon, Inc."
If the "reputation" of Thawte and Verizon were both high, then the lock-symbol in my browser would be green. If either one were "medium" then it would be "orange." If either one had a bad "reputation" then it would be red. Of course if any link in the chain were revoked then there should be no lock-symbol at all and possibly some big nasty warning messages to boot.
Browsers also need to allow users to remember signatures alert users if they change, to identify poisoning attacks where FakeBank gets a valid, seemingly-reputable certificate for yourbank.com due to a clerical error or fraud AND uses it along with DNS poisoning or other means to fool your bank into visiting FakeBank.IP.Address and getting a "valid" certificate when it wants to go to yourbank.com.
Whether it's the browser vendor that determines who the reputation vendor is or whether it's the user will largely be a market decision, at least in most countries. In some countries of course the government will try to control reputation, labeling any certificate authority that doesn't follow its rules as "untrusted."
In the case of Etisalat, reputation vendors in the West may mark Verizon as "green" and Etisalat as "orange" or even "red." The UAE may try to force people in its country to use a reputation authority that marks Etisalat as "green" and COMODO CA Limited, the authority the EFF uses, as "red" in retaliation for bringing this up in the first place. Memo to the UAE if they try this: "Good luck with that."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you use firefox: Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Encryption > View Certificates > Authorities
Personally, I've deleted all of the authorities and only add certificates as I need them.
This is because a CA can be compelled by the country they are in to sign a certificate for any domain.
For example: If your browser trusts the Etisalat CA then Etisalat can can create a SSL certificate for Google.com even though Google.com didn't ask for one.
If your DNS then points to a Etisalat server it can serve pages as Google.com (pretty green "I'm secure" bar and all).
You'd have to view the cert info to make sure Google's real CA signed the current cert...
Thawte, Verisign and Verison can be compelled by the US to create fake certs too, but in this case only the IP address would tip you off.
If my browser was sent a fake cert and fake DNS results I will be presented with an "Untrusted Certificate" screen.
Since this normally only happens when Google's cert is about to expire I would be alerted.
tl;dr: CA system is broke because any CA can make a cert for your domain without your consent.
Most (all?) browsers are broken too.
If say you go to https://www.yourbank.com/ at home and the cert is signed by Thawte.
Then one day you go to UAE and visit https://www.yourbank.com/ and the cert is signed by Etisalat whose cert is signed by Cybertrust whose cert is installed in your browser.
By default your browser won't warn you at all!
In fact for this scenario you would be safer if you actually deleted all the CA certs, and accepted certs on a site by site basis, because you would then get a warning since the cert has changed.
Currently I'm using the Certificate Patrol plugin and I hope it works properly and doesn't automatically "bless" some CAs as trustworthy, since as far as I'm concerned it's better to assume that they all aren't.