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Apple Criticized For Not Blocking Stolen Certs

Posted by samzenpus on from the I-am-disappoint dept.

CWmike writes "A security researcher is criticizing Apple for lagging with its response to the DigiNotar certificate fiasco. He is urging the company to quickly update Mac OS X to protect users. 'We're looking at some very serious issues [about trust on the Web] and it doesn't help matters when Apple is dragging its feet,' said Paul Henry, a security and forensics analyst with Lumension. Unlike Microsoft, which updated Windows on Tuesday to block all SSL certificates issued by DigiNotar, Apple has not updated Mac OS X to do the same. Meanwhile, even Mac OS X users who want to go DIY are stymied, reports Bob McMillan, because the OS can't properly revoke dodgy digital certificates."

13 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Not just Apple... by Amarantine · · Score: 3, Interesting

    At the request of the Dutch government, Microsoft is delaying the update in the Netherlands (home of DigiNotar) until next week, to avoid confusion (and to buy the government more time to roll out new certs).

    I feel much safer now, knowing our government has the power to stop Microsoft from rolling out security updates in a country.

    1. Re:Not just Apple... by Golthar · · Score: 4, Informative

      At the request of the Dutch government, Microsoft is delaying the update in the Netherlands (home of DigiNotar) until next week, to avoid confusion (and to buy the government more time to roll out new certs).

      I feel much safer now, knowing our government has the power to stop Microsoft from rolling out security updates in a country.

      I'm in the Netherlands and I got the patch just fine.
      Must be because I use the English version of Windows

    2. Re:Not just Apple... by Tomato42 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The only thing that might prevent this, is hoping the revocation list of diginotar is complete

      > implying browsers actually check CRL or OCSP responses

      HA HA, good one. Only Opera checks OCSP and won't show you that the site is "secure" when it can't contact the OCSP server. Firefox can be defeated by putting "3" in the OCSP response (come on, we're talking about full scale MITM, adding OCSP to atack, which also uses HTTP is trivial). IE even when gets a OCSP failure or can't connect to OCSP at all will still show green bar...
      If you're using regular certificates Firefox and IE don't even check for OCSP...

    3. Re:Not just Apple... by dingen · · Score: 3, Informative

      The Fox-IT audit did not find any evidence of fraudulent certificates under this root, so there no clear and present danger for these certificates.

      That is old information. The Dutch government only asked Mozilla to not block their root while the Fox-IT audit was still in progress. But by the time it was finished, it could not be proven the Staat Der Nederlanden CA was clean, so they then gave up on DigiNotar entirely and gave Mozilla the OK to block everything.

      --
      Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
  2. FUD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    These certs are blocked on all Apple equipment and always have been. Anyone getting the certificate accepted is obviously holding it wrong.

  3. Reality by mcrbids · · Score: 5, Funny

    Somewhere deep in Silicon Valley, a programmer is looking at a comment something like this:

    /*******
    FIXME: WTF Hack here. CRLs require authentication of being revoked, but we never bothered to check the callback of the revoke. Maybe if we bothered to have a revoke infrastructure? For now, we'll just not bother fixing this until 10.1 or 10.2.
    ******/
    return true;

    --
    I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  4. Certificate revocation by wvmarle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The biggest issue that has come to light here imho is that it's nigh impossible to revoke an issued certificate. When a certificate is out, and it's signed by a trusted CA, there is basically no way to revoke it. Revoking involves updating browsers, or even complete operating systems (like Windows or OS-X). Just because one CA made a small mistake, got hacked for whatever reason, and the whole world has to update their software.

    Errors will be made. Certificates will be issued erroneously by a CA, or through hacking. Certificates will be lost/stolen. But for some reason there is no proper way in the whole system to fix that kind of errors. If we let it be, it's just a matter of time before the whole system crumbles and nothing can be trusted any more.

    Any thoughts on this? Any ideas on how this could be fixed?

    1. Re:Certificate revocation by slimjim8094 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Certificates can be revoked by putting them on the certificate revocation list. The OCSP protocol is analogous. Here, try it yourself: http://validation.diginotar.nl/ - get an OCSP client (IE7+, FF3+, Chrome, etc do it automatically) and try to authenticate any of the fraudulent certificates.

      Somebody getting a hold of the private keys for the CA itself is a bigger problem - keys can be signed by the attacker faster than they can be revoked. I haven't heard that that's the case - just that fraudulent certs were made, presumably through the same semi-automated process that everybody else uses.

      I don't know if there's a way to revoke a CA cert (that is, *all* certificates signed by a certificate). But that doesn't seem to be required here, so the standard revocation procedure works.

      --
      I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
  5. Always the same from Apple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They lack in security and fixing exploits, and yet, they like to brag about somehow being "more secure" than Windows.

    Oh, and Microsoft I believe already released a patch... yesterday? Tuesday?

  6. Re:Double standards? by sjames · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Because Comodo proactively detected the problem, put a stop to it, and had an appropriate audit log showing how large the problem was and what certs were wrongly issued.

    Evin DigiNotar acknowledges that removal of their root key is the only way to contain their leak.

    OTOH, I chose to disable Comodo's keys in my browser.

  7. Hard Info and Tools by plsuh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Folks,

    I have detailed info and tools on my website at

    http://ps-enable.com/articles/diginotar-revoke-trust

    The short story is that it is possible to protect yourself, but it requires deleting the DigiNotar root cert(s), then revoking trust on the two roots plus four intermediates.

    --Paul

  8. Re:Idiots, certs are easy to disable in OSX by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    FTFA:

    Ryan Sleevi, a software developer who has contributed to Google's Chrome project, noticed the issue too. After poking around the Mac OS X source code, though, he uncovered the cause.

    Users can revoke a certificate using Keychain, but if they happen to visit a site that uses the more-secure Extended Validation Certificates, the Mac will accept the EV certificate even if it's been issued by a certificate authority marked as untrusted in Keychain.

  9. Re:Idiots, certs are easy to disable in OSX by forand · · Score: 3, Informative

    This works fine as long as you don't visit an EV site. You must delete the cert, and make changes to your system on OS X. This is not an easy fix for most people. Please find more info here