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Rogue SSL Certs Issued For CIA, MI6, Mossad
Orome1 writes with this excerpt from Help Net Security: "The number of rogue SSL certificates issued by Dutch CA DigiNotar has ballooned from one to a couple dozen to over 250 to 531 in just a few days. As Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor project shared the full list of the rogue certificates, it became clear that fraudulent certificates for domains of a number of intelligence agencies from around the world were also issued during the CA's compromise — including the CIA, MI6 and Mossad. Additional targeted domains include Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Skype, Twitter, Tor, Wordpress and many others."
"*.*.com". I could really use a wildcard cert that wild...
I wonder. Would it be possible to create a system that used PGP instead of SSL/trust-hierarchy? I would think it'd be a lot more secure, not to mention easier to use.
It pisses me off how I have to jump through so many damn hoops only to get a false sense of security. We might as well go to using self signed certs as the norm for all the added security CAs give us.
We've now had proof positive that no centralized trust system is workable against a sustained attack. Can we start to get some distributed trust systems in place, instead? The idea of a single proof of identity has failed. It's time to move on to a system that allows multiple checks and balances.
Monocultures are great for creating massive failures, which is why nature wipes them out over time.
At least you know how many and which certs were issued from an authority that you run yourself.
The chain of trust is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Who really trusts any of the "free" sites like Google and Yahoo mail with anything secure? There's an entire separate network, of loosely coupled sites, often IP only, running on cable modems, etc where people can communicate - IRC, MUDs, private hosted sites, all with self-signed certs and the trustworthiness of the operators is all you have to go on. Thing IP version of the original BBS days. It's all a cycle.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Time to drop DigiNotar from trusted cert list?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
There is no reason for this company to keep operating after such gross negligence. Any criminal liability here?
It may not be complete, but, F-secure has a list of the ones created, including *.*.com, *.*.org, www.cia.gov, addons.mozilla.org, *.torproject.org, etc...
Test your net with Netalyzr
I would like to think the CIA, MI6, Mossad certificates being rogue isn't that big of a deal. *Surely* such organizations don't rely on 3rd party certificate creation for anything other than their public facing data (web sites only).
The commercial certificate issue is quite worrisome however.
The root of the problem (pun intended) is NOT that the SSL/TLS certificate hierarchy is a centralized trust, but that there are hundreds of roots of trust, any one of which may be compromised, and all of which are considered equally valid by the browser.
Who outside of the Netherlands even heard about DigiNotar before this happened?
This is why some people like the idea of using DNSSEC for distributing key material: there exists only a single valid path of trust to a single root for a key associated with any given name: its actually more centralized than SSL/TLS, which is what is desired.
Test your net with Netalyzr
You can't trust the root CAs. The whole infrastructure is broken and needs to be replaced with something else.
For a start, webbrowsers should notify users if a certificate was replaced, even if the replacement is signed. And browsers shouldn't go into full panic mode over self-signed certs. They're still safer than using an unencrypted connection.
the SSL industry is a nasty piece of work - typical extort-what-the-market-will-bear flavor of non-equilibrium capitalism.
all DNS should be PK-signed and encrypted, and SSL should just use pubkeys found in DNS. a domain owner should be able to establish their own keys, signed by the domain key (which is in turn signed by their registrar as part of registration.)
Extended validation certificates were definitely a step in the right direction, with a pretty green favicon background.
But that wasn't enough. So we went to Ultra-yotta-analprobed-extented-validated-certificates with a plaid favicon background, thus fixing the problem forever.
Joke's on them since Facebook still doesn't support SSL!
Why is Mossad listed together with CIA, and MI6?!
What is the cultural connection, today?!
For CIA, I can see the NYC connection... ;)
There is NO apparent connection between The United Kingdom and today's Israel, beyond courtesy.
Why does this undercover crap even exist?!
It surely cannot be in the interest of Britains, can it, seriously? The Murdochs? Well, the daughter is still in charge of her businees, the old man, and the son... Oh, nothing happened! So, there is an apparent connection between The United Kingdom and today's Israel, beyond courtesy. Sad day, again.
..that the Mossad has a website on the public Internet.
Couldn't find Ziva's picture, though; I'm SO dissappointed!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
This is capitalism. Digitnotar screws up so they won't be able to charge money anymore.
What you've described is exactly what we have right now except for the pubkeys in DNS part.
A domain owner does establish their own keys, you generate a key pair and send it to the registrar to be signed.
The problem right now isn't lack of capitalism. It isn't that you can't establish your own key.
The problem is that there 150 registrars you might trust to certify a site. One of them is valid and the other 149 are just opportunities to get fooled by bogus certs. And the system doesn't even try to make it easier to figure out which is which.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You cannot trust a single point of failure to handle security. Trust cannot be assigned it must be earned. If we are to move forward, we must admit past mistakes. self signed certificates + distributed verification system Who can be against more security but those who stand to lose if more security is implemented?
MY OTHER COMMENTS
My guess is this is not a hacker out to steal credit cards, but rather a foreign government like North Korea, China, or even Israel if they are targeting such sites.
North Korea in particular is known to steal money too with World of Warcraft gold scams to give money back to Kim Jong Ill. Facebook and Twitter targeting also indicate spying. China would have a keen interest in this.
Either way this is dangerous and could have been going on for awhile. I agree we need some sort of key pair trusted relationship that is more secure. A CA wont work and my fear is the government (American) would love to be this new authority for a secure DNS like system.
http://saveie6.com/
Umm... because they are all clandestine entities that Iran has togetherness problems with?
I have written many times about it (here and here in just the last week) and usually my messages get ignored for some reason but the point is that it shouldn't be surprising at all that intelligence agencies are using false certificates just like I am not surprised that they are using false passports. This is the way such agencies work. They have been doing this since the Gutenberg and there is no reason they should stop now. If you don't like it then just use hard-coded certificates for the most important sites that you use and get over it.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
See this statement:
http://www.4-traders.com/VASCO-DATA-SEC-USD-11275/news/VASCO-DATA-SEC-USD-VASCO-DigiNotar-Statement-13782237/
Security, in any shape or form, never has been and never will be about user convenience. Simple logic and some reading is all it takes. You don't need a computer science degree to figure that one out.
We're finally living in the future : "Iranian cyber-agents have compromised the secure communications link of Western Powers, partly as an effort to monitor activities of their own cyber-citizens and also as retaliation for an earlier Trojan horse computer virus attack which destroyed Iranian nuclear processing equipment".
Flying cars and Linux on the desktop anytime now !
Presumably the Three Letter Agencies generate their own cert chains themselves, and employees manually confirm the fingerprints and tell their browsers to trust those custom certs? In other words, their internal sensitive data shouldn't be at risk of exposure due to the DigiNotar problems, because they'd be crazy to depend on a cert root that they didn't generate anyway. I can see how this whole fiasco might make a difference for some non-employee accessing a CIA (or whichever) web site, but other than that, it shouldn't be significant for the TLAs... right?
-Karl Fogel
http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel
It's just a front end for their recruiting staff. They post wanted ads there - and then advertise the same ads in Israeli newspapers.
How centralized/decentralized the system is, isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of verification. Every one of the issuers is trusted to operate independently, with no overside or validation. What boggles my mind is that they are even able to issue certificates for domains that have already had certificates issued by someone else.
I'm not surprised that that an issuer got hacked. The only unhackable computer is one that is shut off and physically disconnected from the electrical outlet (you can't trust PDUs either, after all...). What does surprise me is that there is no peer review mechanism in place.
Joke's on you. Not only have you missed a slashdot article or two on the subject, but you also failed to discover it through simpler means.
Published on Dutch government website: http://www.rijksoverheid.nl/bestanden/documenten-en-publicaties/rapporten/2011/09/05/fox-it-operation-black-tulip/rapport-fox-it-operation-black-tulip-v1-0.pdf
The Three Letter Agencies generate their own cert chains themselves (except those outsourced by the Shiva program), and employees used to manually confirm the fingerprints and tell their browsers to trust those custom certs plus those of their Sri Lankan support agency; Chinese contractors and another 5375 certificates from old contracts that nobody can remember which ones matter any more? In other words, their internal sensitive data shouldn't be at greater than commercially acceptable risk of exposure due to the DigiNotar problems, because they'd have been be crazy to depend on a cert root that they didn't generate in the days when they could afford to spend time defending the USA and not just chasing down evil anti-globalisation and other protesters anyway whilst having to spend hours a day listening to whining from prisoners they're torturing. I can see how this whole fiasco might make a difference for some non-employee accessing a CIA (or whichever) web site, but other than that, it shouldn't be significant for the TLAs senior management... right?
-Karl Fogel
FTFY. Sorry about the loss of conciseness.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
... im trying to google around a little bit to write one, but im frankly exhausted.
There has been a lot of push at the recent DEFCON conferences, and associated conversation since, to look at alternatives to the current CA system. Moxie Marlinspike has been pushing a remote-view notary system called which is currently a Firefox plug, and Dan Kaminsky has been pushing for DNSSEC.
There has been an awful lot of discussion about the technical details of SSL certificates on the Security StackExchange (Stack Overflow cousin) website, including the related blog post I penned: A Risk-Based Look at Fixing the Certificate Authority Problem.
SIG: HUP
On Diginotar's site you can barely tell anything happened, except for a small "security incident" press release.
They are still trying to minimise it when it seems likely the whole company will be shut down for complete failure.
Cowards.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Certificates serve two purposes:
1. 2 Way Encription. (Security)
2. Verifying the Site's (Identity).
Microsoft and Mozilla's Brain dead Idea of putting HUGE warnings up for "Self Signed Certificates" means that people cannot just choose security. IMHO a certificates primary use.
By using "Authority" signed Certificates people are "Trusting" someone else to secure their data. - and paying a large(ish) sum of money for this service.
I would Prefer if every site had a self signed certificate. and a Separate name verification. - which did not require my stupid browser to click on BIG WARNING MESSAGES. before getting to the site.
Type unto others as you would have them type unto you.
ROTFL. That was beautiful; thank you.
Yes, the DoD (and other parts of the government) run their own CA's, and appropriate people have added those root keys to their system.
However, that doesn't help here. A big part of this problem is that ANY CA trusted by your system can issue a cert for any domain.