Slashdot Mirror
New Standard For Issuance of SSL/TLS Certificates
wiredmikey writes "In light of the many security breaches and incidents that have undermined the faith the IT industry has in Certificate Authorities (CAs) and their wares, the CA/Browser Forum, an organization of leading CAs and other software vendors, has released the 'Baseline Requirements for the Issuance and Management of Publicly-Trusted Certificates,' an industry-wide baseline standard for the operation of CAs issuing SSL/TLS digital certificates natively trusted by the browser. The CA/Browser Forum is requesting Web browser and operating system vendors adopt the requirements (PDF) as part of their conditions to distribute CA root certificates in their software. According to the forum, the Baseline Requirements are based on best practices from across the SSL/TLS sector and touch on a number of subjects, such as the verification of identity, certificate content and profiles, CA security and revocation mechanisms. The requirements become effective July 1, 2012, and will continue to evolve to address new risks and threats."
In other news: Certificate Authorities who were already half-assing their verification processes, hiding their security breaches and not bothering to secure their internet-facing phpmyadmin installs will continue to do exactly that under the new regime right up to the point that they get caught, just like now.
It's great the CA/Browser Forum, made up of the most prominent Certificate Authorities, is taking steps to standardize their rules for certificates. Many rules in the PDF are technical and exact, which will help with software enforcement.
However, even this necessary step of not issuing public certs for non-FQDN hostnames and reserved IP addresses won't take effect until late 2016!
As of the Effective Date of these Requirements, prior to the issuance of a Certificate with a subjectAlternativeName
extension or Subject commonName field containing a Reserved IP Address or Internal Server Name, the CA
SHALL notify the Applicant that the use of such Certificates has been deprecated by the CA / Browser Forum and
that the practice will be eliminated by October 2016. Also as of the Effective Date, the CA SHALL NOT issue a
certificate with an Expiry Date later than 1 November 2015 with a subjectAlternativeName extension or Subject
commonName field containing a Reserved IP Address or Internal Server Name. Effective 1 October 2016, CAs
SHALL revoke all unexpired Certificates whose subjectAlternativeName extension or Subject commonName field
contains a Reserved IP Address or Internal Server Name.
If we're going to spend time and resources updating our browsers and operating systems to enforce some of these requirements and properly query certificate revocation lists, we may as well throw out the entrenched CA model and try something else.
These are companies in which we should place our full trust. There shouldn't be standards, codes of practices, or anything else which could let an idiot with a computer become a root CA.
Instead the requirements should open them up to vigorous external audits. The auditors should be security experts and should be able to look at every part of the internal and external infrastructure owned by the CA. Any CA that fails should be kicked off the list.
Maybe then we'd weed out the incompetents from the companies with which we trust our security.