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Mozilla Says It Erred On SSL Attack Disclosure
Trailrunner7 writes "Just days after news emerged of the attack on a registration authority in Europe tied to Comodo that caused the revocation of a number of fraudulent certificates from the major browsers, Mozilla officials have admitted they made a mistake by not disclosing the details of the incident to its users earlier. 'In hindsight, while it was made in good faith, this was the wrong decision. We should have informed web users more quickly about the threat and the potential mitigations as well as their side-effects.'"
when there is no other widely accepted way to verify a website's identity.
I don't see what the big deal is. Everybody knew about this vulnerability as soon as Microsoft told them about it anyhow.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
"some European registration authority tied to Comodo." I won't go as far as to say you should RTFA, but I don't think the first line of the summary is too much to read.
Mostly harmless.
Have your browser monitor for when certs are updated. And use public notaries to tell you whether others are seeing the same certs for the site.
Certificate Patrol
Perspectives
An example of who else is seeing the addons.mozilla.org cert you're seeing.
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Do you really imply that an OS made by a Corporation is more trustworthy than an .org like Mozilla? Are you perhaps living behind The Walled Garden?
Admitting it was a mistake rather than coming up with some bogus excuse gives them points in my book. Whether the decision was by marketing or just company policy it at least suggests they have one or two competent people over there.
I'm not a security expert and my crypto knowledge is limited. But from what I can understand, the general principle here is that trusting somebody unknown is considered more dangerous than not trusting somebody you know. In addition, the meaning of "trust" in the SSL context is that "you can trust me that anything that happens between me and you is encrypted, will stay between you and me, and nobody else can hear us". It's not "trust me, visiting my website won't harm your computer or your person". There has to be a way to ensure that your are using your Bank and not a fraudster or zombie system. SSL may not be perfect (considering it's several decades old) but it's a first step.
By the way, accepting a certificate by clicking OK is the equivalent of putting your signature on that site's terms of usage, not the other way around. So we'd better all read and learn more about it, it's not Mozilla's or the operating system's responsibility to teach us about it.
Why is everyone so afraid of being open? Maybe it's just part of the human condition.
We have little hope if even Mozilla leans towards nondisclosure.
Mozilla was the first browser vendor to patch. SURE they could have told us exactly what they were patching, but they erred on the side of caution. The fact that they want to be OPEN about everything is just a bonus and it's what differentiates Mozilla from every other browser vendor.
SSL seems fundamentally broken because it is.
Say a site devoted to dissidents, purchases a cert signing from some CA like Verisign.
Now, say your government, someone else's gov't, or some random corp has its own CA that is trusted by your browser. This government/corp wants to spy on your activity, so they gen a cert for dissidentsRus.org, and setup a transparent proxy to intercept your traffic. While they are at it, they setup the same for your bank.
Now, you visit dissidentsRus.org, and nothing looks odd on your browser, but your "encrypted and secure" traffic is being intercepted and unecrypted, in real time by some random gov't or corp. While they are at it, they decide to drain your bank account, since they were able to sniff your credentials the same way.
Yes, gov'ts and random corps run CAs that are trusted by the major browsers, so every time you use SSL, you are trusting _ALL_ these random corps and gov'ts that they are not trying to intercept your traffic.
As recent events demonstrated, the attacker doesn't even need to control the CA. Just rely on good 'ol social engineering and start siphoning bank accounts. Combined with DNS poisoning, and you can attack random folks anywhere you please.
requestpolicy extension for firefox helps to mitigate, but we really need something better than the trust model of SSL for asserting identity and encrypting traffic, that the mainstream can use.
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Most of this has been the work of Jacob Appelbaum, core member of the Tor project. He is the one who investigated the fraudulent certificates and it's a fascinating detective story.
Sig
SSL is fundamentally broken. It only allows one signature of a certificate. If it allowed multiple signatures, anyone could sign the certificate, and you could do stuff like check if your friends trust this certificate, or whether your bank does, and so on. Just like PGP/GPG.
Sensible sites would get their certificates signed by multiple authorities, and this would make it possible for browser users to disable e.g. Comodo certificates without losing access to a significant part of the WWW.
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