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Google Researchers Propose Plan To Fix CA System
Trailrunner7 writes "The security industry has no shortage of hard problems to solve, but the one getting the most attention right now is finding a way to improve, or ideally, replace, the CA infrastructure. The latest in what has become a series of recent proposals to help shore up the certificate authority system comes from a pair of Google security researchers who have laid out a plan for providing auditable public logs of certificates as well as proofs for each certificate issued. The system proposed by Google's Adam Langley and Ben Laurie (PDF) comprises three separate ideas, but relies on the creation of a publicly viewable log of every public certificate that's issued by a CA. There could be any number of public logs of these certificates, but the logs will be structured so that they are append-only. The entries in the logs will be the end certificates in the issuance chain. In addition to the logs, the proposal includes the use of proofs that are sent with each certificate to the user's browser. Laurie and Langley haven't defined exactly what the proof would look like, but suggest that it could be an extra certificate or a TLS extension."
Does SSH use a CA system?
Did anyone else read this as "Google plans to fix California"?
No? Oh well.
There are enough issues that Google has to deal with that are monopoly-related. By getting into hosting, Google would essentially be committing business-suicide.
I live in California and it's a mess.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
What are you talking about re: Google censoring the Internet? Also, what convinces you that the UN would do a better job? What large nation isn't putting corp interests first that would influence a UN body to behave differently?
"Bob has a problem requiring secure communication. He decides to use certificates. Now Bob has two problems."
Among other things, requiring you to log in to view youtube videos someone has flagged as "offensive". They also remove search results that the US government doesn't like for whatever reason, being an American company. The UN can do better because it theoretically represents the interests of more than just the US, and since the internet is international they should be the authority on it.
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The new certificate system will be invitation-only, and then will be shut down.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Because the UN handles so many highly controversial* issues so well as it is.
* Humanitarian aid is not really a controversial issue. Nuclear power is.
Let's all just give up and use self signed certs. Sure it's not secure but at least you don't have to pay for them then go through all the security theatre to pretend they are. You could change your web page to "Welcome. All our base are belong to YOU. We give up."
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The UN is not some world government for some happy hippie peace dream. It is a machine to legitimize the ends and means of select superpowers. You certainly do not want any of them to have power over the internet.
FCKGW 09F9 42
The CA system is set up so that you can be reasonably sure that the host you're connected to is who they say they are.
You "trust" that a certificate they present is legitimate because it is cryptographically signed by a CA.
You trust the CA because you have a root list of CAs to trust, typically fed to you by MS.
The problem with the CA system is the fact that the CAs themselves are untrustworthy.
They don't do their due diligence in verifying hosts they issue certificates to, safeguarding their private keys, or revoking certificates when keys get stolen.
The entire idea is insecure because users want shit to work transparently, and CAs want to do shit as cheaply as possible.
You can have all the logs and auditing that you want, but when some soccer mom can't buy something on Amazon, your system has failed.
And when some CA fucks up and nobody knows because no one is actually monitoring those logs, your system has failed.
And if you DO have dedicated groups that monitor logs and do audits, it becomes the same fucking game of knowing which monitoring group to trust, how far to trust them, etc. 99.9999% of users will just be confused, and will think their next computer crash has something to do with the internet hacks Wolf Blitzer told them about.
The only way to trust a host is to verify their identity yourself. And if you're going to go and fucking verify the trustworthiness of CAs via analyzing their logs yourself, you may as well just verify the trustworthiness of individual sites yourself. Call up Amazon and ask them about their certificate. Maybe they should print it on the back of all their packing slips.
Movies flagged 'offensive' have to be blocked unless you are logged in to verify age... and you apparently never surf youtube for videos of US dissent.
Age verification is censorship.
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The UN can do better because it theoretically represents the interests of more than just the US, and since the internet is international they should be the authority on it.
In principle, your argument has some merit. In practice, it is probably enormously flawed. The general concern is that under UN regulation global internet censorship would encompass the union of all local censorship wishes (biases of all religious viewpoints, every tinpot dictator or wannabe, DRM morons, etc.), rather than just their intersection (probably just kiddie porn, snuff videos, and suchlike).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The proposed solution makes it easier to identify invalid certificates after a compromise is known. It doesn't do anything to stop the compromise, because the compromised certificates were issued correctly by the CA just like every valid certificate.
The problem is that the CAs aren't completely trustworthy and aren't completely impervious to attack, and never will be. Any solution needs to permit a compromised CA's root certificates to be revoked without instantly invalidating huge swathes of issued certificates that weren't part of the compromise. I don't see any way of doing that that doesn't involve changing the basic approach from one of "a single CA issues a specific certificate" to "one or more CAs certify the authenticity and validity of a certificate'. In short, CAs cease being the sole issuers of documents and become the equivalent of notaries public certifying that the person who created the certificate is really who the certificate says they are.
No, I'm quite sure it is a requirement in some countries (I'd even guess that every country has a law requirement for certain themes).
I guess you'd prefer to have Google censor the whole website because they were blocked from running it instead of trying to verify your age..
Where's my cheap energy? You promised to fix that too!
So eventually it will be certificates all the way down.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
This is probably the most nonsensical thing I've heard all year.
Okay. One, you obviously don't have kids. Age of majority isn't arbitrary, and it's worth at least putting up a few bumps between children and some of the more out-there stuff. Two, if you can access the material, it's not censorship -- and if you can't access content protected by age verification, then you are not part of the voting body, and are therefore a non-entity vis-a-vis the government, and therefore cannot be a target of censorship. Three, read one and two again.
I figure Canada does not need much fixing -- not that I know of these things. I'm glad to see that Google is working on fixing California. Oh, wait. What?
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
Age of majority IS arbitrary.
It's whatever the law of the nation that is sovereign over the citizen in question SAYS it is.
The government telling you what you can or cannot do is pretty much the definition of what a law is.
I read the summary multiple times. What exactly is Google trying to fix with California?
If it's not arbitrary, then why are some things 16 and others 21, and why does it vary by country?
Yes, much better they just blocked their entire site in countries which have laws requiring them to make some sort of token effort at it.
Because that wouldn't be censorship.
Perhaps we disagree on what arbitrary means. Are laws against murder arbitrary? If you think so, then we simply will not agree on this issue.
If it is arbitrary, why doesn't it vary across country in a completely random distribution from 1 to (say) 70?
Another extension of a corrupt system to corrupt further.
But that would admittedly be a pretty boring episode. And not the sort of thing he usually worries about.
I find your faith in authority disturbing
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
This sounds an awful lot like a bitcoin-style blockchain. There is of course no double-spending problem to solve but mining can go to pay for the cert-certifying nodes.
People are stupid and trust everything anyway, just put a picture of a padlock on it.
companies operating ecommerce websites think nothing of asking for our credit card details... perhaps we should only trust ecommerce websites that would be willing to provide bank details to us customers. if you are concerned, you can always get on the dog n bone and ask the bank if the details are legit. i don't like banks, but like most people i trust them more than i trust any ecommerce website.
... patent pending
The real problem with the CA system is that if even just ONE CA is untrustworthy the entire system is broken.
The root of the problem is that Any CA can create a certificate for ANY domain at ANY time, whether the domain owner wanted them to or not.
So, CNNIC (a Chineese root authority) can simply create certs for ANY site, even public facing US military sites, or "$YourBank.com".
Thus, the CA system is FUNDAMENTALLY flawed at its core, an no amount of dilligence on the 99.99% of all CA's part will rectify the issue of just a SINGLE CA bringing down the whole system's trust. I'm not picking on China. Google has a CA, they can create certs for anyone too...
DigiNotar was a CA, they DID create certs for EVERYONE. Ask yourself if you think ANY system that lets ANY CA even have the POSSIBILITY of creating a *.* cert is going to be a good system... Who's bright idea WAS that?!
TL;DR: It has never ever worked as intended, and will never do so.
My proposed solution is "The US has jurisdiction in the US, the UN covers the rest of the world!"
We the people don't like your US government or its policies, and even if we did, they are not OURS.
Or in the words of the 20th century - "we dont like your imperialist behaviour very much",
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Censorship is a requirement in some countries. That does not make it not censorship.
The UN is not set up that way to be the pawn of superpowers. Granted, countries like the US can throw a lot of their weight around (e.g. see how they lobbied other countries to vote No or Abstain on recognizing a Palestinian state), but the majority of the members are democracies.
Or we could just use a solution that was already thought out pretty well, doesn't require massive infrastructure change, actually addresses the problem (i.e. as end users we have to trust the entire certificate chain, and ultimately the CA).
http://www.convergence.io/
And go listen to Moxi's defcon talk about this.
-- Humans, because the hardware IS the software.
I think I would prefer Moxie Marlinspike's Convergence. That way you can at least trust the CA:s a little less. The talk from BlackHat is quite enlightening.
He is a paladin, after all.
What's wrong with Web of Trust? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
Proposing BitCA then?
Wikified certificates, anyone?
Building on top of DNSSEC leaves you maximally as secure as DNSSEC itself. The IETF document you reference in your paper, "Threat Analysis of the Domain Name System", lists among several weaknesses:
In any SSL+DNSSEC paradigm you are trusting:
Which is very concerning, is it not?
What about ICANN's not-legally-authorized seizure of domains? What about Verisign's domain slamming or DNS hijacking (breaking NXDOMAIN) or their own domain seizures? What about how registrars are often as sketchy as CAs and not as vetted?
Please can we move away from DNSSEC or any other overly centralized and rigid (i.e. choiceless) system as a foundation for our security?
Have any of you edited your CA list to remove bad CAs?
With DNSSEC, you won't be able to remove any authorities.
This is not an improvement.