Hackers May Have Nabbed Over 200 SSL Certificates

CWmike writes "Hackers may have obtained more than 200 digital certificates from a Dutch company after breaking into its network, including ones for Mozilla, Yahoo and the Tor project — a considerably higher number than DigiNotar has acknowledged earlier this week when it said 'several dozen' certificates had been acquired by attackers. Among the certificates acquired by the attackers in a mid-July hack of DigiNotar, Van de Looy's source said, were ones valid for mozilla.com, yahoo.com and torproject.org, a system that lets people connect to the Web anonymously. Mozilla confirmed that a certificate for its add-on site had been obtained by the DigiNotar attackers. 'DigiNotar informed us that they issued fraudulent certs for addons.mozilla.org in July, and revoked them within a few days of issue,' Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox development, said Wednesday. Looy's number is similar to the tally of certificates that Google has blacklisted in Chrome."

Comments

Boring

[Mensa Babe]

All of the news about the SSL security flaws are starting to get boring. We had a related scandal just yesterday. The problem with SSL (or TLS, actually) is that it uses X.509 with all of its problems, like the mixed scope of certification authorities. It's like using global variables in your program - it is never a good idea. I can only agree with Bruce Schneier, Dan Kaminsky and virtually all of the competent security experts that we have to completely abandon the inherently flawed security model of X.509 certificates and finally fully embrace the DNSSEC as specified by the IETF. It is both stupid and irresponsible to have a trust system used to verify domain names in 2011 that is completely DNS-agnostic - and in fact designed in the 1980s when people were still manually sending the etc/hosts files around! There could be a lot of better solutions than the good old X.509 but in reality the only reasonable direction that we can choose today is to use the Domain Name System Security Extensions. Use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 exclusively as your recursive resolvers. Configure your servers and clients. Define and use the RRSIG, DNSKEY, DS, NSEC, NSEC3 and NSEC3PARAM records in all of your zones. Use and verify them on every resolution. Educate people to do the same. This problem will not solve itself. We have to start acting.

Re:Boring

[Gerald]

"If you think it's nice that you can remove the DigiNotar CA, imagine a world where you couldn't, and they knew you couldn't. That's DNSSEC." -- Moxie Marlinspike

Re:Boring

[the_enigma_1983]

In response to DigiNotar incidences, some people are removing the root CA for DigiNotar from their computers. This way your computer will not trust _anything_ signed by DigiNotar.

With DNSSEC, if the people in charge of your DNS have an incident (hackers, malpractice or otherwise) which changes the "certificate" (for lack of a better word) for your website, you are stuck. There is no "root" certificate that you can remove.

Re:Boring

[Zeinfeld]

Oh I know what he is trying but he has no clue what the threat model is.

The threat model in this case is a well funded state actor that might well be facing a full on revolution within the next 12 months. It does not matter how convergence might perform, there is not going to be time to deploy it before we need to reinforce the CA system. [Yes I work for a CA]

I think it most likely we will be seeing the Arab Spring spreading to Syria with the fall of Gaddafi. We are certainly going to be seeing a major ratcheting up of repressive measures in Syria and Iran. Iran knows that if Syria falls their regime will be the next to come under pressure. In many ways the Iranian regime is less stable than some that have already fallen. There are multiple power centers in the system. One of the ways the system can collapse is the Polish model, the people of Poland didn't have a revolution, they just voted the Communist party out of existence. If the Iranian regime ever allows a fair vote the same wil happen there.

Anyone think that we will have DNSSEC deployed on a widespread scale in the next 12 months? I don't and I am one of the biggest supporters of DNSSEC in the industry. DNSSEC is going to be the biggest new commercial opportunity for CAs since EV. Running DNSSEC is not trivial, running it badly has bad consequences, the cost of outsourced management of DNSSEC is going to be much less than a DNS training course ($1000/day plus travel) but rather more than a DV SSL certificate ($6 for the cheapest).

The other issue I see with Convergence is that it falls into the category of 'security schemes that works if we can trust everyone in a peer to peer network'.

Wikipedia manages a fair degree of accuracy, but does anyone think that they really get up to 99% accurate? Until this year the CA system had had three major breaches, all of which were trapped and closed really quickly plus about the same number of probes by security researchers kicking the tires. Until the Diginotar incident anyone who had revocation checking in place was 100% safe as far as we are aware, not a bad record really.

There is a population of about 1 million certs out there, even 200 would mean 99.95% accuracy.

Running a CA is really boring work. Not something I would actually do personally. To check someone's business credentials etc takes some time and effort. It is definitely the sort of thing that you want a completer-finisher type to be doing. Definitely not someone like me and for 95% of slashdot readers, probably not someone like you either.

The weak point in the SSL system is not the validation of certs by CAs, they are (in order) (1) the fact that SSL is optional (2) the fact that the user is left to check for use of SSL (3) the fact that low assurance certificates that have a minimal degree of validation result in the padlock display.

The weak point being exploited by Iran is the braindead fact that the Web requires users to provide their passwords to the Web site every time they log in. I proposed a mechanism in 1993 that does not require a CA at all and avoids that. Had RSA been unencumbered I would have adopted an approach similar to EKE that was stronger than DIGEST but again did not require a cert.

Certs are designed to allow users to decide who they can share their credit card numbers with. That is a LOW degree of risk because the transaction is insured. Certs are not intended to tell people it is safe to share their password with a site because it is NEVER safe to do that.

Re:Boring

[Zeinfeld]

Unfortunately the registrar system is rather less trustworthy than you imagine. We have not to date encountered an outright criminal CA. We do however know of several ICANN registrars that are run by criminal gangs.

The back end security model of the DNS system is not at all good. While in theory a domain can be 'locked' there is no document that explains how locking is achieved at the various registry back ends. A domain that is not locked or one that is fraudulently unlocked is easily compromised.

The part of the CA system that has been the target of recent attacks is the reseller networks and smaller CAs. These are exactly the same sort of company that runs a registrar. In fact many registrars are turning to CAs to run their DNSSEC infrastructure since the smaller ones do not have the technical ability to do it in house. In fact a typical registrar is a pure marketing organization with all technical functions outsourced.

There are today about 20 active CAs and another 100 or so affiliates with separate brands. In contrast there are over a thousand ICANN registrars.

Sure there are some advantages to incorporating DNSSEC into the security model. But to improve security it should be an additional check, not a replacement. Today DNSSEC is an untried infrastructure, it is grafted on to a legacy infrastructure that is very old and complex and security is an afterthought.

The current breach is not even an SSL validation failure. The attacker obtained the certificate by bypassing the SSL validation system entirely and applying for an S/MIME certificate that did not have an EKU (which it should). That makes it a technical exploit rather than a validation issue. DNSSEC is a new code base and a very complicated one. Anyone who tells you that it is not going to have similar technical issues is a snake oilsman.

That's it, fuck CAs

[GameboyRMH]

CAs are done, stick a fork in 'em. Just generate your own certs. A CA cert only increases your chance of getting MITM'ed (since you don't have sole control over distribution), and without a big store of certs in one place, they'll be harder to steal.

Fuck CAs, install Convergence / Perspectives, call it a day.

Re:That's it, fuck CAs

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Couldn't agree more. Links for the lazy: Convergence and Perspectives.

Enjoy.

Interesting thought

[93 Escort Wagon]

Let's say you were hoping to insinuate yourself unnoticed into traffic destined for a particular site - for the sake of argument, let's use the Tor project. What would be the best way to do this without someone suspecting you had a specific target in mind? Stealing a couple hundred certs all at once, only one of which is related to your project, comes immediately to mind.

It's not like similar approaches haven't been taken before, even in the non-digital world. I seem to recall that was one explanation John Muhammad gave for the DC Sniper attacks - he really wanted to kill his ex-wife, and hoped killing a bunch of other people would keep suspicion from him.

Re:Wait a second...

[bill_mcgonigle]

...wouldn't the certs be useless without the associated private keys?

No, the government of Iran generated a key and a CSR for *.google.com, had Diginotard sign them (not sure if this was social or technical hack) and then deployed them inline for a MitM attack on the residents of the area their organization controls.

They have the key and the cert. They didn't get Google's key or cert, they have their own.

I wonder how many dissidents have died because of this sloppy CA and the reliance on the CA system.

Re:It's not "boring". It's an important lesson.

[sjames]

If you keep a spare house key on your front porch in a metal box marked spare house key you'll be robbed sooner or later. This is not a flaw of the lock and key security.

The public key system is working fine. What is not working so well is the trust model. The current system is fatally flawed in that security depends on none of the many many CAs failing. It doesn't matter if you choose a high quality CA to sign a cert for your site, your users can still be fooled by a backwater CA you've never heard of before and wouldn't trust to guard a dime.

maybe this will help you make sense of it

[Onymous Coward]

SSL And The Future Of Authenticity, Moxie Marlinspike:

Worse, far from providing increased trust agility, DNSSEC-based systems actually provide reduced trust agility. As unrealistic as it might be, I or a browser vendor do at least have the option of removing VeriSign from the trusted CA database, even if it would break authenticity with some large percentage of sites. With DNSSEC, there is no action that I or a browser vendor could take which would change the fact that VeriSign controls the .com TLD.

If we sign up to trust these people, we're expecting them to willfully behave forever, without any incentives at all to keep them from misbehaving. The closer you look at this process, the more reminiscent it becomes. Sites create certificates, those certificates are signed by some marginal third party, and then clients have to accept those signatures without ever having the option to choose or revise who we trust. Sound familiar?

The browser CA model is screwed up. DNSSEC is screwed up. What's the answer?

I think Marlinspike was smart to start with defining the problem. And now, with Convergence, he's also trying to address it. Check it out. (And check out Perspectives. Perspectives is the project he based Convergence on.)