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SSL Cert Weaknesses Exposed By Comodo Breach
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard delves deeper into the Comodo SSL scandal and finds the breach calls into question the integrity of the SSL certification process itself. 'While the press has focused on the sensational fact that Comodo's site was hacked from an Iranian IP address, we really should be asking three questions: How did somebody working with an Iranian IP address get a username and password from Comodo with enough clearance to create SSL certificates? Why did Comodo issue SSL certificates for google.com, live.com, yahoo.com, mozilla.org, and skype.com? Why are browser updates used to revoke SSL certificates?'"
If you went to a site with a cert signed by those big companies, those sites are trusted with no questions. If a site don't want to pay and use a self-signed cert instead? Wow, the end-user are warned as if it is more dangerous than plain HTTP site!
A more rational mechanism should be telling users the truth honestly, i.e. "this site's traffic is encrypted and the authority is promised by xxx.com, or if self-signed, self-proclaimed". Those big companies aren't that trustful, they are just lucky enough to gain an early seat into the root cert trust list in the dawn of internet.
He makes some interesting points on EFF's SSL Observatory mailinglist: https://mail1.eff.org/pipermail/observatory/2011-March/000138.html
They didn't buy it. They created it through the reseller process. OpenSRS, for example, requires that all IPs that have access to the domain registration process are registered beforehand. That would have stopped this attack cold. Comodo didn't even have so much as a "wow, that's funny, this /24 has never logged in before, and is registered to a country I don't have any resellers in." Also, a lot of people seem to believe that automated systems should blacklist high profile targets from being automatically granted certificates.
The beauty of it is that even if you do not buy your certificate from Comodo, you are still just as vulnerable to false certificates in your name from Comodo (Or any other of the ~650 CAs).
1. Why was a key-gen server connected to the Internet? Shouldn't certificates be delivered out-of-band, such as on a CD delivered to the indicated registered address?
2. Why exactly do we still trust Comodo as a CA, when the like of cacert.org cannot meet the "requirements" to be added as a CA in Mozilla products?
But it's still better than http, because it's not trying to solve the vulnerability you're complaining about. Plain HTTP is vulnerable to MITM and ANY SORT OF EAVESDROPPING. Self signed certs are vulnerable to MITM, and eavesdropping (I believe) if the 3rd party catches all of the key exchange. CA signed certs are vulnerable to neither.
Claiming that self-signed certs are the same as plain-old-http is as ridiculous as claiming that self-signed certs are secure. They won't protect you against an even mildly determined attacker, but they will stop e.g. the Google van from picking up your email. (Yes, that would have been a problem users could have fixed easily, but do you trust them? More layers of security, when easily implemented, are better.)