Symantec Subsidiary Thawte Issues Rogue Google Certificates

New submitter jack_babylon writes: On September 14th, Symantec's subsidiary certificate authority Thawte accidentally released a "small number" of " "inappropriately issued" security certificates, apparently intended for internal testing only. However, the fact that these were logged in the wild by Google (and, apparently, DigiCert) seems to indicate that they escaped the lab, at least far enough for a false google.com cert to raise the appropriate red flags. This sounds similar to the recent acts of poor judgement that got CNNIC's certs removed entirely from Firefox and Chrome, if more limited in scope and more quickly addressed (through, among other things, termination of some Symantec employees). (And like all reports one hopes go away quietly, these were released in the dead of a Friday night — h/t BoingBoing for noting this news.)

Comments

Re:How is this possible?

[whoever57]

Not the GP poster, but here goes:

The ideal situation is that the Certificate owner generates a signing request and has that signed, so the original key does not go outside the certificate owner.

However, there is nothing in the current setup to prevent a certificate authority from generating a request in the name of any domain and signing it. That's what appears to have happened here.

The real question is 'why?'. The explanation ("testing") doesn't pass muster. Someone would have to deploy these certificates on a service that was either a Google property or was masquerading for a Google property. Does Google outsource the deployment of certificates? I would doubt this very much, which suggests that this wasn't so much an accident as the influence of a TLA.

Re: SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[Zocalo]

Why?

Let's see. Based on what information we have so far, which almost certainly isn't the whole story, the incident happened on Friday night. It's now early Sunday morning in the US and some employees have already been terminated, presumably for gross misconduct since mistakes can (and do) happen, so that alone implies this was probably a willful act and the perpetrators were somehow either caught in the act or there was a clear audit trail when the fake "google.com" certificate came to light. There have already been allegations that the US' TLA agencies have been planting employees in US tech companies for such purposes so OP's conclusion isn't completely out of the field, although it could just as easily have been a large criminal organization or foreign government. Due to the requirements of making effective use of fraudulent certificate it's highly unlikely to have been a get rich quick scheme dreamed up by those involved without some form of government/organized crime support.

I expect this will blow over very quickly for Thawte. They appear to have procedures in place to tie specific certs to specific individuals, will no doubt already have revoked the certificates concerned, and we can probably expect some explanatory notice to be published in the next few days to explain their version of events; there really isn't much more they could have do in the face of rogue employee. They should also be handing what evidence they have over to law enforcement for potential prosecutions, which could get interesting if the individuals involved were indeed working at the behest of a US security agency...