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Thousands of Email Addresses Accidentally Disclosed By Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt.org)
An anonymous reader writes "Let's Encrypt, the certificate authority best known for offering free SSL/TLS certificates, has reported that it accidentally disclosed thousands of user email addresses due to a bug with an automated emailing system." Executive Director Josh Aas posted this announcement:
On June 11 2016 (UTC), we started sending an email to all active subscribers who provided an email address, informing them of an update to our subscriber agreement. This was done via an automated system which contained a bug that mistakenly prepended between 0 and 7,618 other email addresses to the body of the email... The problem was noticed and the system was stopped after 7,618 out of approximately 383,000 emails (1.9%) were sent. Each email mistakenly contained the email addresses from the emails sent prior to it, so earlier emails contained fewer addresses than later ones.
We take our relationship with our users very seriously and apologize for the error... If you received one of these emails we ask that you not post lists of email addresses publicly.
We take our relationship with our users very seriously and apologize for the error... If you received one of these emails we ask that you not post lists of email addresses publicly.
I first learned about this awful incident at Hacker News.
What scares me the most is some of the responses there which just brush it off as no big deal! There are comments there like:
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The responses are just about as bad over at reddit:
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To make matters worse I'm seeing comments from people pointing out that this is not acceptable getting downvoted!
It scares the living hell out me that people can think that somehow this incident was acceptable or excusable, especially when it was an organization that has to put security, privacy and trust paramount that was responsible.
This incident was not acceptable. It should be considered a total disaster.
The process of dealing with certificates was shitty to begin with, but at least I figured it out already and it's relatively simple, now I'm forced to deal with another layer of crap on top of that?
In fact they've tried to make it easier. Most people just want to get the job done, nothing more. The "layer" of crap removes one big problem with SSL certificates: manual renewal. Usually you have to renew certificates manually, but with the program from Let's Encrypt, this happens automatically.
Maybe in the future this is even built into the HTTP servers, so that you don't have to install third party software. Its all just checking whether the cert is expired, and running the ACME protocol to get a new one automatically.
Modern web servers support hot swapping certificates so downtime is not usually an issue. The most important reason for short expirations is that certificates with short expiration times are more secure against attackers that might be able to steal your certificate. A cert that is valid for a year will be much more valuable than one which expires in 90 days. The same holds true even for the Let's Encrypt credentials themselves. If Let's Encrypt refuses to grant any certificates longer than 90 days then your credentials are actually NOT as valuable as they would be otherwise. They also participate in public certificate transparency logs so it is easy to detect a situation where someone gets another certificate issued for your site.
Additionally, Let's Encrypt WANTS to make certificate renewal an automated process, and short expirations force users to do that like you said. There should be no reason to "think about the cert creation process" because CAs should never issue you a certificate with a cipher or key length that is not secure. The idea that web site administrators should all be up on the cutting edge of cryptographic attacks is pretty crazy actually. Standards should be enforced at the bottlenecks (in this case CAs) so that as few fuck ups as possible can happen.
AC, you are spectacularly bad at composing analogies.
This is where I realize you don't know what you're talking about because SSLv3 has been disabled in modern browsers for 2 years now. Have a good day with your uninformed, knee-jerk opinions.