Chinese CA Issues Certificates To Impersonate Google

Trailrunner7 writes: Google security engineers, investigating fraudulent certificates issued for several of the company's domains, discovered that a Chinese certificate authority was using an intermediate CA, MCS Holdings, that issued the unauthorized Google certificates, and could have issued certificates for virtually any domain. Google's engineers were able to block the fraudulent certificates in the company's Chrome browser by pushing an update to the CRLset, which tracks revoked certificates. The company also alerted other browser vendors to the problem, which was discovered on March 20. Google contacted officials at CNNIC, the Chinese registrar who authorized the intermediate CA, and the officials said that they were working with MCS to issue certificates for domains that it registered. But, instead of simply doing that, and storing the private key for the registrar in a hardware security module, MCS put the key in a proxy device designed to intercept secure traffic.

Comments

Are the CAs that do this revoked?

[QuietLagoon]

Or at least their certs removed from valid CA Root lists that, for example, Mozilla uses. If not, why not? A trust has been breached.

Re:Are the CAs that do this revoked?

[gnasher719]

It seems that you are right. It very much looks like there was a genuine Certificate Authority behind this, and that means an Internet death sentence needs to be issued - removing that Certificate Authority from the root certificates of Windows, MacOS X, iOS, Android, Linux etc.

Re:Are the CAs that do this revoked?

[sexconker]

We should. We won't.

A system built around certificate authorities is broken by design. Self-signed certs are much more secure than anything stamped by a CA.
And can we start using client certs, please? I should be able to walk into my bank and hand them a unique cert that they attach to my account and use for verification. Additionally, I should be able to request a unique cert on their end that they use only for my account so I can do my own verification.
Since this is all self-signed shit, it can be easily automated.

For revocation, all either party has to do is stop using/trusting the cert. No one can regenerate the bank's unique cert that I trust because there is no authority with that power. No one can regenerate mine. If the bank wants to issue a new cert, I have to go in and get the new cert and trust it. You can dumb down your trust if you want - the bank could mail you the cert, mail you a letter saying it's going to be changed, post the thumbprint of the cert on their site, to their support phone line, whatever. If I want to issue a new cert, I have to get them to trust me in a similar fashion.

Doing it this way is more work, but you have ACTUAL trust, negotiated equally by both parties. You can choose convenience over security if you want, but you're not subject to some government/CA MITMing everything on a whim.

Re:Are the CAs that do this revoked?

[Ted Stoner]

I am annoyed that Firefox does not respect my choices for trusted certs when it does an update. Every time FF updates I go in an un-trust certs from CAs from foreign countries (China, Turkey, etc.). But after the next update, they are back. This is not a secure way to operate.

Re:Are the CAs that do this revoked?

[arth1]

The irony here is that Google wants https with chain-of-trust certificates, and advocate https, and without self-signed certs harder than anyone. Now it comes back to bite Google's own derriere.

The reason they want https (or SPDY or HTTP/2.0) everywhere isn't our best interest, but because you can't easily hide behind caching proxy servers, giving them better fingerprinting as well as a higher hit count on ads.

When I have to go to Google, I go to the non-redirecting http page they have hidden.
My personal privacy is worth more to me than the risk of a 3rd party listening in on my searches (other than the three letter agencies who already listen in).

One-sided relationship

[Tablizer]

Please explain why we offer nearly tariff-free trade with such a prick country? They bleep with US entertainment companies, networking companies, search companies, etc. etc.

Re:One-sided relationship

[gstoddart]

Oh, well, if it's commerce it's magically exempt and everybody will know it's divine and protected by god, right?

Sorry, but do you expect us to use the US wouldn't use spying for commercial advantage if they had a chance? Or that they don't? Or that they restrict how they spy on everybody else int he world?

The difference between the US government saying "We can break into any system we want" and the Chinese government saying "We can break into system we want" is the self entitled nature of the person who says they're different.

These two are exactly the same. Claiming otherwise is just exceptionalism. It's just one government hacking security for their own ends.

To everyone who is neither American nor Chinese, you're both convinced magical unicorns give you the right to do as you please.

At what point do we stop playing?

[tekrat]

Sooner or later, greed trumps useability. Companies are going to screw one another over in attempts to dominate. We, the users of the internet, lose when these entities play their games on one another, and sooner or later we are going to take to take our marbles and go home -- it's not worth it to play.

I feel we have already reached this state; between the NSA essentially hacking every router as it leaves the factory to China issuing false certs to Google putting their own interests at the top of every search, it seems that the time has come to either consider some international organization to regulate the internet, or abandon TCP/IP and start again with a whole new internet based on something else. Clean sheet.

The way we are currently headed will breed a cesspool of an internet you can't trust for anything -- so why would you use it for shopping, news, banking, or any other activity if you KNOW that every single time you do, you will regret using this medium for anything?

If Amazon, Google, CNN, and heck even Facebook want to stay in business, they need to learn to stop fucking around with their users, because I've essentially had it, and I'm guessing that I cannot be alone in my disdain and distrust of what has become of an internet I used to like.

US Authorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Legally, could the US authority be forced to give over a certificate to the US government?

Re:The Web of trust only works

[blippo]

It's a bit of a scam from the beginning. I remember almost 20 years ago I asked where the safety was in that we had to shell up a relatively large sum of money to some unknown company on the other side of the world, so that they could "verify" our identity (how exactly?) - just because they had bought (?) a place in Netscape's or Internet Explorer's root CA list.

Since there are so many certificate authorities it's safe to assume that too many are compromised by- or under the influence of- criminal organisations or non-democratic and/or corrupt governments. (Ignoring the just-for-lulz hackers, I'm not that worried about them.)

I really wished PGP/GPG-style trust chain model worked in real life, but it's a hassle even for techies.

One idea would be to utilize the existing social networks + phones for something, but I doubt it would be possible to build something that is idiot-proof enough.
(Especially since a lot of people seems to have no idea who some of their contacts actually are...)

It could potentially solve email too though.