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

SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[lesincompetent]

That's some very suspicious "testing", kids.
What are you up to?
Perhaps in bed with some three-lettered thugs?

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...

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:How is this possible?

[xous]

Any trusted certificate authority can issue certificates for ANY domain. This is the trust aspect that is required in a PKI.

Your browser gets a list of trusted root certificates and will accept any valid certificate issued by these CAs. On my windows 8 box there are 53. Any of these providers could issue certificates for any number of domains.

The failure here is that Thawte allowed those certificates to be issued for ANY reason.

Google is their own certificate authority and likely has no need for a relationship with Thawte.

the price of negligence

[swell]

From the summary: "...termination of some Symantec employees..."

Is this the first time that individuals were held responsible for online negligence? What happens to a CEO or CIO when data on millions of people slips out due to negligence? Has anyone ever been fired before (not just a flunky, but a responsible executive)?

The penalties for corporate irresponsibility are so small that there is no incentive to do the right thing. Actually, this case may be an exception because both Thawte and Symantec have a reputation to protect- they might actually fire an executive. The question remains (and you can ask the same of Wall Street criminals)- when has any executive ever paid for this kind of negligence?

You had "one job"

[YrWrstNtmr]

Security company dicking up the one thing they are supposed to be good at.

Re:How is this possible?

[petermgreen]

Your browser gets a list of trusted root certificates and will accept any valid certificate issued by these CAs. On my windows 8 box there are 53. Any of these providers could issue certificates for any number of domains.

Worse those providers can issue "intermediate certificates" which also have the power to issue certificates for any number of domains. They can and do issue those intermediate certificates to third parties. So the list of root certs in your browser is not a complete list of entities who can issue certs your browser will trust.

There was recently an extension added to allow intermediate certs to be limited to certain ranges of names but that only helps in clients new enough to recognise the extension.

There was also recently an extension added for "key pinning" which makes bogus certs less useful.

Google is their own certificate authority.

At least when I go to google and check the cert I get a cert that has a google intermediate and a geotrust root. I don't see any evidence of name constraints on said intermediate cert though :(

CAs are the problem

[jonwil]

The problem is that any of the many entities your browser trusts can create a valid certificate for any domain and the browser will just accept it.

What we need is to move away from CAs and adopt a new system for storing the information needed to make a web connection secure. Storing keys in DNS and using DNSSEC to secure that is one option. And there are others (although I can't actually remember any of them off the top of my head).

If you have a situation where its impossible for anyone other than the actual owner of the domain to store a key, its not possible for a rogue CA (or a hacked CA ala DigiNotar or one that has been co-oped by a government or intelligence agency) to issue a bogus certificate or a bogus public key.

What I dont get is why there is no real interest from the people who came up with these alternatives to push them particularly hard and why there is basically zero interest from the people and entities who write the software that the web runs on (browsers, servers etc) to make any moves towards using these new systems.

Re:Instantly executed

[behrooz0az]

I live in Iran, most probably they were issued for my government, this is the most practical solution here.

Re:Operation Flying Pig

[khellendros1984]

As for browsers, I should be able to remove Thawte from the trusted chain

Go ahead. In Firefox, hamburger->options->advanced->certificates->view certificates. Find the two headings for Thawte and set all of their entries to "distrust". I've no idea exactly how much of the web will stop working correctly after that, but it's not hard to do.

I should be able to configure a warning if a domain has changed its certificate authority chain since the last time we saw it.

You should, and I'm sure there's some kind of add-on or setting for that, but I don't know what it would be off the top of my head.