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No More SSL Revocation Checking For Chrome
New submitter mwehle writes with this bit from Ars Technica: "Google's Chrome browser will stop relying on a decades-old method for ensuring secure sockets layer certificates are valid after one of the company's top engineers compared it to seat belts that break when they are needed most. The browser will stop querying CRL, or certificate revocation lists, and databases that rely on OCSP, or online certificate status protocol, Google researcher Adam Langley said in a blog post published on Sunday. He said the services, which browsers are supposed to query before trusting a credential for an SSL-protected address, don't make end users safer because Chrome and most other browsers establish the connection even when the services aren't able to ensure a certificate hasn't been tampered with."
Yes. Because if you are in a MITM position to inject your own compromised cert for site Y, then you are also in the perfect position to deny access to the cert validation servers to stop the validation happening.
The solution is more resilient servers and services, not eliminating the checking.
Hint: should every site with an SSL cert from X not work because X is unreachable for whatever reason right this second?
Yes. Anyone conducting a MITM attack is practically necessarily in control of the users network, and will just block access to the CRL, which means they will never stop MITM attacks unless you do exactly that. And yes, I know that is the point of the change. My point is: they choose the wrong fix. Sites should only be listed as trusted if the browser really knows they can be (so far as possible, of course). Being "Secure" should meet a minimum standard, and failing that standard means the site should not be listed as "secure", but most browsers do. Choosing to simply ignore part of the established SSL standard is not the solution.
Opera does precisely this. It still used HTTPS (I think), but it doesn't list the page as being secure, since the page really has exactly the same security as any non-https site (for trust purposes).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
"CRL/OCSP server fails for whatever reason".
No it fails because the server administrators for the CRL are incompetent morons. A CRL server is a mission critical server that should stay up 24-7.
If Chrome and other browsers would simply display an error page with text explaining the problem and point to the offending server, I am sure the problems would be fixed very quick.
If a CA cannot keep their uptime, they shouldn't be in the business. Part of the fairly high cost of certificate purchases is the fact the CA is going to run multiple, geographically distributed data centers with adequate server coverage. That, or hire a provider that has is ready/willing/able to do this.
It is just like banks -- if a bank's server failed causing a loss of transaction info for a period of time, nobody would care how hard it is to have 99.999% uptime -- the bank failed in its duties regardless of the reason (hardware failure, Internet issues, security issues, etc.) This is just the same with CAs and revocation.
The real problem with false positives isn't that they are "inconvenient" but that they breed complacency. If 99% of the alerts you get are false, what are the odds you'll actually give enough due diligence to catch the remaining 1%?
They could load the site and simultaneously display a small warning, thus letting the users decide whether they want to trust it or not. Loading an untrusted is not a tragedy by itself.
I harp on this constantly. At work, we fairly routinely issue people new certificates and revoke the old ones, even when there's no belief that the certs were compromised. As a result, you can send somebody an email and later that day get new certs. This is a problem because all the digitally signed emails you sent earlier now register as revoked and Outlook proceeds to tell you this, that the email can't be trusted, etc...
This happens frequently enough that I encounter this 2-3 times a week. The email has always been valid, they just got new certs between their sending the messages and my opening the email(possibly for historical reasons).
Same deal as with the california cancer warning - stick it on EVERYTHING, and it gets ignored. If you put cancer warnings on apples, they may not pay attention to the cancer warning on that bottle of test chemical.
I don't read AC A human right