Launching 2015: a New Certificate Authority To Encrypt the Entire Web

Peter Eckersley writes: Today EFF, Mozilla, Cisco, and Akamai announced a forthcoming project called Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt will be a certificate authority that issues free certificates to any website, using automated protocols (demo video here). Launching in summer 2015, we believe this will be the missing piece that deprecates the woefully insecure HTTP protocol in favor of HTTPS.

Comments

quick question

[Anonymous Coward]

how can one verify that this future "certificate authority that issues free certificates to any website" hasn't issued a cert to the NSA for your domain? is it possible?

Re:quick question

[tignet]

How can one verify that a different CA doesn't issue a certificate for your domain name to the NSA? It's happened before (including sub CAs getting compromised so new certificates could be created at will).

In order for traditional PKI to work, there needs to be a point of trust -- the certificate authorities. That also means trusting anyone that controls the certificate authorities (who may have the power of secret laws, subpoenas, and gag orders). If you don't trust the authorities, then you cannot trust PKI.

There can be public/private encryption without a centralized authority (SSH keys, PGP, etc). However, then it's up to each person to individually verify the authenticity of every other key. The certificate authority performs that role, so long as you're willing to trust them.

Re:quick question

[ememisya]

I don't believe any "burried deep within your cables" type organization would require this sort of access. It's a lot easier to exploit some kind of a firmware vulnerability and download the private key to the CA, or simply VNC into the target user's machine to see the requested data before it was encrypted. This is to keep out private hackers, organized hackers, wealthy hackers etc. The government will always have access to your data, well since they tend to have tanks the persuation tends to be unmatchable. The turn of the tide for our century is to see if the governments who do have such access will show equal attention to everyone rather than be in favor of economics, lets be honest having access to all of someone's data immediately tends to reduce respect to that person, objectifying them. This is the culture which is really the root of all the privacy issues. I think ultimately we need to rebrand the NSA err I mean shut down the NSA. Because truly, nobody is watching your computer... O_O ... That's the point, when you KNOW someone is watching, it screws up the whole experience.

When something's strange, in your computer, who you gonna call? Momentarily the answer is, "Tough luck" We've been talking about a "government layer" within the network stack (jokingly at first) for decades. As it is however, the world has a major respect issue between authority and economically disadvantaged. It's really a very complex issue. But I'd say the only good way out is read-only access, which doesn't exist, by highly trained (and hopefully paid) employees who just don't exist.

If you're asking, isn't that the case today anyways? The answer is no, there are 0 checks and balances, apparently. In that, a family was raided (agents boxed in their cars), and interrogated because they Googled, "pressure cooker". Heads of such agencies lied to the Congress, in public, and nobody cared. There is this feeling that there are no consequences to invading people's privacy, whereas it should be jail time for the officials. You see? That's the issue with respect, the person who is watching isn't intimidated at all into peering over a person's private life.

Re:quick question

[userw014]

...

What might have been better is early on, have Web browsers accept self-signed SSL certs, and show some grey icon for that....

Web Browsers DID used to accept self-signed certificates (and certificates signed without a known CA - or cert-chain.) People just clicked through and accepted them willy-nilly. That was a poor security model. Although the existing security model of having a swamp of independent Root Certificate Authorities (per browser) is not too great either, but at some point you have to establish whom to trust - and for most of us, it's the browser vendor. (Some of us prune the Certificate Authority list and distribute the new list with software imaging technologies....)

Re:quick question

[Anonymous Coward]

The fundamental problem is the whole concept of a "Web of Trust." How or why should I trust that a collision detection mechanism is in place, functioning properly, and has not been manually overridden? We've come full-circle to "I just have to blindly trust."

Re:CAcert

[ememisya]

It really has much to do with the people involved in the security groups for the popular browsers. I have a feeling EFF, Cisco, Mozilla and Akamai are big enough names to push this through to production.

No thanks...

[snarfies]

Its based out of the US and A.

As such, I have to assume it is pre-backdoored.

Re:No thanks...

[digsbo]

Where do you think there's an honest government?

Re:This is a huge first step!

[gstoddart]

Also, even if these are back doored by the NSA, the government would have to prove how they got the information without a warrant.

Horseshit.

Some things they just keep secret.

Other things, they commit perjury and perform parallel construction to hide how they got it in the first place.

In other words, they don't need no steenking warrants, they don't need to care about the law, and will do anything they see fit.

They can take care of the pretense of following the law much later.

I'm long past believing they give a damn about needing to prove they obtained stuff legally.

Fantastic.

[KermodeBear]

This is a fantastic effort that will help people such as myself. I run sites across a dozen or so hosts, but they don't generate income and I really don't want to drop all that money into certificates. If I can get free certificates from a good CA then I'll gladly bump all my sites over to HTTPS.

Thank you!

Re:CAcert

[Fnord666]

A lack of sufficient auditing capability is what has kept CACert out of most browser CA bundles.

Which is laughable considering some of the other CAs that are included.

What about the browsers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have Apple, Microsoft, Google and Opera all pledged to add certificates for Let's Encrypt - and not just for future browser releases? Otherwise, we lose all of our IE12, Safari, Mobile Safari, Android, Chrome, and Opera users with these certificates.

strawman?

[JustNiz]

Why should we believe that HTTPS (or i suppose more accurately TLS / SSL) hasn't already been compromised (i.e. by the NSA)?

Re:Shared hosting...

[BradleyUffner]

SNI solved this problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Re:CAcert

[fustakrakich]

Depending on 'big names' can reduce the trust factor to near zero, and rightfully so. How do 'big names' benefit from our privacy? Where is the incentive to secure it? This is a monolithic industry. Supply and demand are silly illusions. 'Big names' are subject to big laws from big people and the whims of big money, obviously, that's what made their names so big. And now we expect them to bite the hand? I don't think so...

Re:CAcert

[jbolden]

How do 'big names' benefit from our privacy?

Akamai wants you consuming lots and lots of video. Cisco wants you chewing up bandwidth like crazy. They benefit. But yes if push comes to shove between you and Homeland Security, you lose.

Re:Replace Cisco, and Akamai and then maybe..

[dnavid]

Replace Cisco, and Akamai and then maybe I'll be convinced it's better than the current situation. But it's still oxymoronic service: A central authority that *REQUIRES* trust for people who don't trust anybody.

First, if you don't trust Cisco and Akamai to that extent, how do you intend to avoid transporting any of your data on networks that use any of their hardware or software?

Second, I think a lot of people really have no idea how SSL/TLS actually work. There's two forms of trust involved with SSL certificate authorities. The first involves the server operators. Server ops have to trust that CAs behave reasonably when it comes to protecting the process of acquiring certs in a domain name. But that trust has nothing to do with actually using the service. Whether you use a CA or not, you have to trust that *all* trusted CAs behave accordingly. If Let's Encrypt, or Godaddy, or Network Solutions, is compromised or acts maliciously they can generate domain certs that masquerade as you whether you use them or not. As a web server operator if you don't trust Let's Encrypt, not using their service does nothing to improve the situation, because they can issue certs on your behalf whether you use them or not - so can Mozilla, so can Microsoft, so can Godaddy.

The real trust is actually on the end user side: they, or rather their browsers, trust CAs based on which signing certs they have in their repositories. Its really end users that have to decide if they trust a server and server identity or not, and the SSL cert system is designed to assist them, not server operators, to make a reasonable decision. If you, as an end user decide not to trust Let's Encrypt, you can revoke their cert from your browser. Then your browser will no longer trust Let's Encrypt certs and generate browser warnings when communicating with any site using them, and you as the end user can then decide what to do next, including deciding not to connect to them.

Seeing as how the point of the service is to improve the adoption of TLS for sites that don't currently use it, refusing to trust a Let's Encrypt protected website that was going pure cleartext last week seems totally nonsensical to me, unless you also don't trust HTTP sites as well and refuse to connect to anything that doesn't support HTTPS.

Lastly, if you literally don't trust anybody, I don't know how you could even use the internet in any form in the first place. You have to place a certain level of trust in the equipment manufacturers, the software writers, the transport networks. If all of them acted maliciously, you can't trust anything you send or do.

I don't necessarily trust the Let's Encrypt people enough to believe they will operate the system perfectly, and I don't believe they are absolutely immune from compromise. But I do think the motives of people adding encryption to things currently not encrypted at all is likely to be reasonable, because no malicious actor would be trying to make it easier to encrypt sites that have lagged and would otherwise continue to lag behind adopting any protection at all. Even if they are capable of compromising the system, that is quixotic at best. Even in the best case scenario they would be making things a lot harder for themselves, and in the long run getting people accustomed to using encryption with a system like this can only accelerate the adoption of even stronger encryption down the road.