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Father of SSL Talks Serious Security Turkey
coondoggie writes with an excerpt from a Network World article: "SSL/TLS, the protocol that protects security of e-commerce, has taken a beating lately, with news items ranging from the violation of certificate authorities to the discovery of an exploit that beats the protocol itself. But despite the exploit ... and the failures of certificate authorities such as Comodo and DigiNotar that are supposed to authenticate users, the protocol has a lot of life left in it if properly upgraded as it becomes necessary, says Taher Elgamal, CTO of Axway and one of the creators of SSL."
I don't have anything to hide!
I am more worried about my ISP packet sniffing my traffic than a black hat.
As long as the SSL is good enough to keep my ISP ignorant, it's good enough for me.
Are there no upgrades to TLS 1.0 available? I thought the issue was browsers and websites that hadn't upgraded.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Patches fix security flaw. News at 11
He hears rumors in Calif. of a new trust system to complement PKI. That's all he will say when the interviewer questions him repeatedly about a solution to the problem he goes on at length about: that browsers have PKI roots built in. I agree it's a terrible system, but asking the clueless user to select trusted roots would have its own problems, in, say, Iran. Or more precisely, clueless users in the US make it hard to deploy a system for careful users in Iran. The UI has to be both easy & difficult.
Why do none support TLS 1.1, firefox is releasing new versions of its browser on an insane schedule, IE is on version 9, chrome is moving along, yet no tls 1.1? Is there something I'm missing here?
Of all the useless features they've implemented in the past year, why not secure the browser? I remember when firefox was proud of it's security.
Then again good luck replacing ssl, what are viable alternatives? Pointless discussion if there aren't any...
Also read carefully about BEAST, it's not a remote exploit, so you can't just click and choose the stream you want to sniff, it's a ways more complicated and requires a high level of trust on the compromised machine.
Actually, newer windows versions (Vista and later) use Microsoft's online Certificate Trusts Lists which allows exactly this. Microsoft revoked the DigiNotar certificate without issuing a real Windows update:
(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/advisory/2607712)
I used to be in favor of patching things with DNSSEC, until I thought about it. I didn't really think about it until I saw moxie's blackhat talk. I happened to see it live, but not at blackhat. It's great. I think it's also a bulletproof argument against the CAs and DNSSEC. The protocol itself can be fixed (the security attack), but the current CA system pretty much can't be in a way that would satisfy me after seeing the talk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA
http://convergence.io/ (this is only a prototype, it could be rolled into openssl or whatever, with caveats, some day)
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Talks Serious Security Turkey... I had to read that four times before it actually made sense. Talks securitious security... turkey security.. Sorry for the randomness, but I wouldn't have even clicked this article had it not been for the title being so weird.
Wasn't Canadian Thanksgiving yesterday?
Summarizing...
BEAST, TLS 1.0 v. 1.1
The BEAST attack is somewhat a concern for TLS 1.0, just how practical the attack is has yet to be seen. Requires malware on your the system, so he says, which means you've already lost the game. Moving to TLS 1.1 would protect against BEAST, but is problematic because of lack of support.
CA System, upgrades
Dreaming Up Alternatives
He posits a system with some "trust agility" (as Marlinspike calls it), wherein CAs have reputations and can be updated, rather than are baked into the browser.
Exact model for how and from whom we source reputation ratings not explained: "And I'm not saying I know how to implement this, but it's a better model. ... It will just be done in the ecosystem."
Then the interview at first seems to veer back to the protocol implementation. He talks about updating the protocol's software automatically, I assume like Firefox or its plugins, or Windows Update. But I think he's seeing the CA authorizations and protocol implementation as a unit, so they both get updated.
Sound like he's leaving the decision on the roots still with your software provider. I think it should be more "agile" than that, more individually-configurable if so desired.
Existing Alternatives
The Perspectives/Convergence model has us looking at what others, from a variety of network locations, see as the certificate for the site we're visiting. (And maybe also how long those other locations have been seeing what they see. (Perspectives does this.)) This is a very basic "reputation score"; notaries just tell us their perspective, which we then analyze to determine whether we think the cert we see is good.
Hybridizing
How we choose notaries is a concern. I envision sysadmins sharing notary installations between themselves, but what happens for nontechnical people? It may make sense to have third parties rating notaries, and providing "subscriptions" to their ratings. So you could subscribe to the "EasyList Trustable Notaries" or the "EFF Notaries" lists. As notaries come and go, or as notaries prove themselves untrustworthy, these organizations would update their lists and your subscription would automatically update the notaries your browser uses.
Alternatively, have the list be not of notaries, but CAs themselves. It could replace your browser's baked-in CA list. This, however, doesn't allow people to use self-signed certs, it still rests on the precarious infrastructure of race-to-the-bottom CAs, and it doesn't solve the problem of how a quarter of the SSL web becomes untrustable as soon as Verisign fucks up. This is why I prefer the notary route.
The argument that most websites haven't been upgraded is insane. The website admins won't upgrade their servers until the browser community can support it.
If Opera is already doing it, they've shown it can be done. Failure to do the same with Firefox, Chrome, et. al. is a sign of either laziness, incompetence, or extremely bad planning.
Stop farting around with 3D support and take care of the security fundamentals first!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I don't trust him, and neither should you.
Of course you should. He got a certificate from DigiNotar...