Phony Web Certs Issued For Google, Yahoo, Skype
Gunkerty Jeb writes "A major issuer of secure socket layer (SSL) certificates acknowledged on Wednesday that it had issued 9 fraudulent SSL certificates to seven Web domains, including those for Google.com, Yahoo.com and Skype.com following a security compromise at an affiliate firm. The attack originated from an IP address in Iran, according to a statement from Comodo Inc."
Comodo’s advisory:
http://www.comodo.com/Comodo-Fraud-Incident-2011-03-23.html
Firefox released 3.6.16 yesterday:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6.16/releasenotes/
Microsoft released an advisory and patch yesterday:
Advisory: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2524375.mspx
Patch: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2524375
Time for major browsers to add that issuer to the blacklist, I guess. Or the individual certs, but that's less fun.
What, they don't support revocation lists already? This should be a non-issue, once someone realized it happened.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Just because one of the IP addresses involved in the attack was from Iran doesn't mean the attack came from Iran. Anybody sophisticated enough to do this could also hide their true IP address via open proxies, compromised hosts, or Tor, such as explained here:
http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2011/03/no-evidence-comodo-compromise-was-from.html
Yeah! We should ban such third world hellholes as the United States, Japan, Canada, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom! They are all in the top 10 for spamming, according to Spamhaus. The others are China, Russia, Brazil, and Argentina.
SSC
The article says that browser makers rushed to put out patches to blacklist the fraudulent certs. Isn't this what certificate revocation lists are for? Are CRLs completely broken and unused?
Your browser already trusts a certificate authority run by the Chinese government, along with one that delegated authority to them.
Your browser also trusts certificate authorities in Africa, *stan countries, and the non-EU portion of Eastern Europe. How many of these could be bribed or coerced if you knew the right people or worked for a random 3rd-world government?
Really, the lock/key icon and colored URL box are totally misleading. You have almost no security. Given the rotten certificate authority situation, failing to accept self-signed and expired certificates is actually a loss for security. You might as well get encryption against a passive attacker. Pretending to be secure against active attackers is just providing a false sense of security.
Firefox has a CRL management feature. (Option/Advanced/Revocation List) What is the CRL link for import ?
Yeah, why should they be given tools like twitter that helped trigger and coordinate a revolution. Damn them using the internet to get better.
Firefox released 3.6.16 yesterday:
But did they already release 4.0.1?
They released 4.0 RC2 (which probably became 4.0) a few days ago, and its changelog said that it blacklisted certain SSL certs. Bet that was these.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Neither of these are perfect, but here are two different firefox add-ons that can significantly reduce the chance of you falling victim to a compromised certificate authority:
Network Notary - sort of crowd-sourcing approach
Certificate Patrol - remembers the certs of sites you've visited in the past and tells you when they change
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Current releases of 3.6, 4.0 and 3.5 have the fix for this problem
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-11.html
http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2011/03/22/firefox-blocking-fraudulent-certificates/
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
Wow, broken clocks are right twice a day it seems.
from Monday: Why Doesn't Every Website Use HTTPS? "HTTPS is more secure, so why isn't the Web using it?"
Oh Irony!
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
If I'm paying the CA to certify that public key X really is mine, and yet someone who's not me can get the same certification from the CA for being me ... what was I paying for again?
RSA =/= rubber stamp authority
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I ask myself what would happen if the websites were small ones, do the issuer move that fast and browsers fix that fast too?
I am not that sure. It is time that all CA must provide Certificate Revocation List and not be optional. Anye advantage of using a CA that provide it is nullified by the existence of CAs without CRL?
How dare they hack our computers!!! This isn't right! Someone should do something!! (I'm intentionally not going to reveal which country I'm from)
Yeah! We should ban such third world hellholes as the United States, Japan, Canada, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom! They are all in the top 10 for spamming, according to Spamhaus. The others are China, Russia, Brazil, and Argentina.
Troll troll is troll troll.
Spam is sent out by botnets. Botnet operators almost all reside China, Russia, South America, etc.
Citation, please?
If someone is trying to intercept your communications using a phony certificate, they already have access to your traffic, just blocking connections to those update sites and they will have those machines unpatched for a lot of time
Don't they mean "The last proxy they were able to tracert to was in Iran"?
That I hear a whoosh there. Maybe its that big group of birds up above? I think that they're seagulls ;)
Citation, please?
Citation provided per request.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The article says that browser makers rushed to put out patches to blacklist the fraudulent certs. Isn't this what certificate revocation lists are for? Are CRLs completely broken and unused?
As a matter of fact, yes. SSL revocation mehcanisms are broken and nobody knew until a few days ago. Jacob Appelbaum wrote a nice write-up yesterday about how he noticed the emergency patches in Firefox and Chrome regarding blacklisted SSL certificates.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso
I expect the Firefox update process would use SSL to download the update. Since mozilla.org is one of the sites with a bogus key, can this attack be used to sabotage the browser update process (assuming you are doing the update from the country that sponsored the attack).
If so, how do you detect it?
Why should we be trusting some dis-interested third party to give us that assurance? It's a loser's game! Certificate vendors are in a price war. They don't get paid extra for "going the mile" to confirm your identity, they get paid extra for processing more applications faster and charging 10% less than the other guy. The actual cost of the certificate is too cheap to measure - a couple of used PCs bought on Ebay and a free copy of Linux could probably satisfy most of the global need for certificates. They don't need to be "super certain" they only need to be "reasonably certain", enough to not get sued, and still pass a SAS-70 audit by yet another, disinterested accountancy firm.
Are you feeling confident yet?
In a very real sense, the thing that asserts the IP address of your domain is your DNS server. It's what declares, to the world, where your server is. Since it's the declarative source, why shouldn't it be the confirmational one, as well?
DNSSEC comes close. With DNSSEC you can confirm with certificates and the "chain of trust" that the answer you have came from the DNS server you thought you were asking for the answer from. Now, just one more step: the certificate for the web server should be generated by the trusted DNS server.
It's no assurance that www.screwmebadly.com is a friendly site, but it is a very effective assurance that you are properly connected to www.screwmebadly.com!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
A great article but the author does himself in with the final paragraph:
A much better solution would be for certificates to only be valid for a few days and to forget about revocation altogether.
As someone who spends a lot of time mixing with the 'enemies of the internet' - incl some dodgy states not listed, like India - I've learned to treat my browser downloading a new certificate as an *exceptional* circumstance - something to be looked into. Certificates should be worth something and they should be worth keeping a while. What's with the arbitrary validity anyway. Let the issuers choose the validity on a per-certificate basis. After a while some researcher is going to suggest that 'a few days' is far too long and expose this proposal for the cludge it is.
Then there's the mechanism for reissuing frequently. Tag with 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong'.
If the above proposal gained traction all those MiM government-level adversaries would be delighted.
The removal of the 'weaker' certs and authorities needs to be scriptable. Connecting to Mozilla updates is bad at the best of times - much much more so in countries where this incident might be more of an issue.
From TFA:
The Comodo breach will force organizations that might replace one or two certificates in a year to swap out nine certificates in a matter of hours - a painstaking and multi-step process that is often handled manually.
Is there *anything* I can download - just a few Kb in size - to patch up my browser when cert issues arrive, rather than waiting for browsers to hard code the strings in 1-20Mb download?
If you split the Net like that, I suspect it's the "dirty" Asia/Africa/SA part that'll end up with TPB. Whereas the "clean" one will have Disney, NewsCorp, and other paywalled gardens.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/23/0046258
Personally I wouldn't trust this CA which delegates the critical verification process to resellers...
Comodo knew about this on the 15th.
Chromium was patched on the 16th/17th.
Firefox was patched on the 17th,
https://blog.torproject.org/category/tags/ssl-tls-ca-tor-certificates-torbrowser
Executive summary - SSL is broken as designed.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Does anyone have any idea how to update the CRL on a mobile phone, specifically, IOS?
Google, yahoo, skype, they all have been compromised,
I am glad I shut down my computer, and writing this with my pen and paper...
Wait, what happens if when you go to mozilla.com to download an update, the cert for mozilla.com itself has been compromised?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog