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Mozilla 1024-Bit Cert Deprecation Leaves 107,000 Sites Untrusted
msm1267 writes: Mozilla has deprecated 1024-bit RSA certificate authority certificates in Firefox 32 and Thunderbird. While there are pluses to the move such as a requirement for longer, stronger keys, at least 107,000 websites will no longer be trusted by Mozilla. Data from HD Moore's Project Sonar, which indexes more than 20 million websites, found 107,535 sites using a cert signed by what will soon be an untrusted CA certificate. Grouping those 107,000-plus sites by certificate expiration date, the results show that 76,185 certificates had expired as of Aug. 25; of the 65 million certificates in the total scan, 845,599 had expired but were still in use as of Aug. 25, Moore said.
that slashdot wasn't affected by this.
It sounds from the writeup like most of the sites in question are defunct and that's why they're using out of date crypto. Few sites that people actually visit would appear to be affected.
I read the internet for the articles.
“All major browsers will alert users of a site using an expired certificate, and of the 107k affected, only 30k were not expired, and so would no longer be trusted by Mozilla as a result of their recent change,”
So not 107K, only 30k. And that's not a real issue. The browsers are correct, the connection isn't secure at 1024. People can complain as much as they want, trust is not something that is eternally granted without condition.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
A browser not trusting something that's not to be trusted is a positive thing. Yes, some old sites will suffer. That's how it's supposed to work. They'd better up their game. People expect security to be take more seriously these days, as there is more at stake and more muppets with a lot of time on their hands trying to attack you.
Firefox doesn't support the OS's built in certificate stores, which makes it a really big pain in the ass to manage certs yourself (like if your managing certs for firefox users at your company) - you basically have to compile certutil and write all kinds of fun scripts for client devices.
If firefox let me co-manage certs I could just re-add the deprecated cert :).
"Grouping those 107,000-plus sites by certificate expiration date, the results show that 76,185 certificates had expired as of Aug. 25"
So, the headline should really say 31,000, since 76,000 shouldn't be trusted regardless of what Mozilla does.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
hackers, start your engines...
No ones every managing them. These things are like domain names... they cost pennies and last for years... so despite their importance they fall to the bottom of businesses radar. A place I worked at a few years ago let their multi-million dollar domain expire. The registrar had been sending emails to an employee that had no longer worked there for quite a while...
The end result? It went down on a Sunday, and one of our hourly tech support guys (Making about $10/hr at the time) figured out what happened and registered the domain on his personal credit card and redirected it because he didn't know who to call. He got dinner out with the president of the company who shook his hand, asked him politely if he'd mind transferring the domain back to the company, which he did.
That guy, years later, ended up being my boss and making six figures. It pays to be clever on occasion. He always joked that the company could have sued him for what he did to get the domain back anyway but he was impressed the president thanked him and asked for it back personally.
Symmetric and asymmetric keys are different things and have different key lengths. One cannot directly compare key sizes between two wholly different classes of ciphers. There are numerous reasons, mostly involving arcane mathematics, why asymmetric ciphers require longer key lengths than symmetric ciphers to offer similar levels of protection.
For example, a 1024-bit RSA key (RSA is an asymmetric cipher) is essentially equivalent to an 80-bit symmetric key (AES, 3DES, etc. are symmetric ciphers). SHA1, a hashing algorithm, provides less than 80 bits of security; those wishing stronger signatures are switching to SHA-256 (which offers 128 bits of security) and SHA-512 (which offers 256 bits).
A 2048-bit RSA key, such as those used by most CAs and web servers these days, has the same strength as a 112-bit symmetric key. NIST says they should be good enough until around 2030.
3072-bit RSA keys offer the same strength as a 128-bit symmetric key. A whopping 15,360-bit RSA key would be needed for 256-bit security; the same level of security could be achieved with a 512-bit elliptic curve key, which would be much, much faster than such a large RSA key.
Was the domain being used? Or just squatting on it?
If you were actively using it, and it expired, you have a grace period of anywhere from 30 days to 90 days depending on the TLD, when this happened and who the registrar was/is.
With that said, your point is completely valid. Domain names, SSL certificates, and hosting accounts tend to be forgotten. I own a web design/development/hosting company. We actively maintain records of who we need to be dealing with, as well as their managers in the event our contact stops responding. As well, we introduced a fully managed service in which we manage everything for our clients, and we send them a single monthly invoice. Because it is billed every month, their services continue to Just Workâ, and in turn we are keeping consistent contact with them.
We have had the most problems with non-profit organizations. They are typically volunteer run, with a high turn over rate.
Who cares how many "high end-PC years" it took? Nobody's going to try to factor a 1024-bit modulus using a single high-end PC. It took 4 actual years to factor 10 numbers. And why do you think someone who wants to factor the RSA modulus for a 1024-bit CA cert would have waited until today to start the process? Those certs have been around for over 10 years; if someone with enough computing power wanted to factor one, they could be done by now.