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Let's Encrypt Criticized Over Speedy HTTPS Certifications (threatpost.com)
100 million HTTPS certificates were issued in the last year by Let's Encrypt -- a free certificate authority founded by Mozilla, Cisco and the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- and they're now issuing more than 100,000 HTTPS certificates every day. Should they be performing more vetting? msm1267 shared this article from Kaspersky Lab's ThreatPost blog:
[S]ome critics are sounding alarm bells and warning that Let's Encrypt might be guilty of going too far, too fast, and delivering too much of a good thing without the right checks and balances in place. The primary concern has been that while the growth of SSL/TLS encryption is a positive trend, it also offers criminals an easy way to facilitate website spoofing, server impersonation, man-in-the-middle attacks, and a way to sneak malware through company firewalls... Critics do not contend Let's Encrypt is responsible for these types of abuses. Rather, because it is the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to issuing basic domain validation certificates, critics believe Let's Encrypt could do a better job vetting applicants to weed out bad actors... "I think there should be some type of vetting process. That would make it more difficult for malicious actors to get them," said Justin Jett, director of audit and compliance at Plixer, a network traffic analytics firm...
Josh Aas, executive director of the Internet Security Research Group, the organization that oversees Let's Encrypt, points out that its role is not to police the internet, rather its mission is to make communications secure. He added that, unlike commercial certificate authorities, it keeps a searchable public database of every single domain it issues. "When people get surprised at the number of PayPal phishing sites and get worked up about it, the reason they know about it is because we allow anyone to search our records," he said. Many other certificate authorities keep their databases of issued certificates private, citing competitive reasons and that customers don't want to broadcast the names of their servers... The reason people treat us like a punching bag is that we are big and we are transparent. "
The criticism intensified after Let's Encrypt announced they'd soon offer wildcard certificates for subdomains. But the article also cites security researcher Scott Helme, who "argued if encryption is to be available to all then that includes the small percent of bad actors. 'I don't think it's for Signal, or Let's Encrypt, to decide who should have access to encryption."
Josh Aas, executive director of the Internet Security Research Group, the organization that oversees Let's Encrypt, points out that its role is not to police the internet, rather its mission is to make communications secure. He added that, unlike commercial certificate authorities, it keeps a searchable public database of every single domain it issues. "When people get surprised at the number of PayPal phishing sites and get worked up about it, the reason they know about it is because we allow anyone to search our records," he said. Many other certificate authorities keep their databases of issued certificates private, citing competitive reasons and that customers don't want to broadcast the names of their servers... The reason people treat us like a punching bag is that we are big and we are transparent. "
The criticism intensified after Let's Encrypt announced they'd soon offer wildcard certificates for subdomains. But the article also cites security researcher Scott Helme, who "argued if encryption is to be available to all then that includes the small percent of bad actors. 'I don't think it's for Signal, or Let's Encrypt, to decide who should have access to encryption."
Kaspersky Labs needs to get some good press, so they create a strawman reason to criticize Let's Encrypt and then start blogging. As Let's Encrypt says, "its role is not to police the internet, rather its mission is to make communications secure." One has to wonder why Kapersky Labs has a problem with that.
"I don't think it's for Signal, or Let's Encrypt, to decide who should have access to encryption."
Similarly, I don't think it makes a lick of sense that Google is a "super-authority" in deprecating entire CAs. That's rather close to a mechanism for monopoly.
My boss recently got an ESL certificate from a reputable tier-1 vendor. The validation was a complete joke: A guy with bad English asked him some questions over the phone that anybody could have found the answers to with a bit of work. The only security in place for ESL certs is that they are not that cheap, but that does not help against a targeted attack, because they are not really expensive either.
The bottom line is that certificates weakly ensure one thing: You are still talking to the same site on the next visit. They also ensure that small-time criminals will find it somewhat difficult to eavesdrop. And that is about it. In many cases, self-signed certificates will be more secure than that. The whole certificate-system is a bad joke, created by the utterly incompetent with too much trust and then corrupted by state-sponsored malicious actors. Incidentally, this is not a surprise. Basically all what is broken with the system now was predicted by perceptive people decades ago.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"We're mad because Let's Encrypt makes it way too easy for the plebs to get a certificate without paying hundreds or thousands of dollars per year to a CA."
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
I've spent better part of a day to explain to My Mom how to distinguish a safe website from unsafe one. You look at the Green Bar / Lock. Is it green? you are good to give them your name and CC details.
Now I'm going to her and have to explain, that no, things have changed, if you see a green padlock, it no longer means someone at least had to fax some registration papers and pay few bucks so he's traceable. I can already see conversation going: - So you're saying that the green bar no longer means website is ok?
- Yes. Now it has to be a green padlock and a name of the organization, and you have to check it with magnifying glass because it's very easy to mistake l with I. see Mom, there's difference between AlliorBank and AIIiorBank. Do you see it? Do you?
and they're now issuing more than 100,000 HTTPS certificates every day. Should they be performing more vetting?
Why hold one CA to a completely different set of standards than every other CA?
The primary concern has been that while the growth of SSL/TLS encryption is a positive trend, it also offers criminals an easy way to facilitate website spoofing, server impersonation, man-in-the-middle attacks, and a way to sneak malware through company firewalls...
And how does any other CA prevent this after issuing certificates with the exact same level of proof of domain ownership?
Are you claiming that because it's free that criminals can now finally obtain certificates?
Criminal rings have profits and budgets orders of magnitude larger than most IT departments!
That logic is as ass backward as it possibly could be.
"I think there should be some type of vetting process. That would make it more difficult for malicious actors to get them," said Justin Jett, director of audit and compliance at Plixer, a network traffic analytics firm...
Then go get the CA/Browser Forum to amend their requirements that all CAs and web browser makers follow.
It's completely pointless to say Lets Encrypt isn't allowed to do for free what all the other CAs are still allowed to do for a few bucks.
All I want is to have encrypted connections. Why do I have to pay a shit-ton of money for connections to my server to be properly encrypted and not to be treated like a criminal by browsers? Let's Encrypt does this. Yes, they're not verified very well; neither are standard SSL certificate (I know; I bought some with pretty much zero verification).
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One big reason for the volume of certificate issuance is that LetsEncrypt forces you to update your certificates at least once every 90 days. This means that the number of certificates issued is guaranteed to be at least 4x the number that would be issued by a traditional CA, and realistically, more like 12x or even 20x.
So yes, they should be criticized, but they should be criticized for the ridiculously short certificate expiration times that result in them issuing so many certificates each day, not for the number of certificates per se. That silly policy decision inherently limits the amount of verification that they can do, so even if they wanted to do more, they can't.
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Either you encourage encryption everywhere and make it easy to get a cert, or you stop nagging people every time they go to a plain http site and say http is just fine.
Pick one.
HTTPS is meant to ensure that your communications are secure. They can help protect you from hitting a site that isn't what it claims to be.
But issuing certs is not some magical means of "vetting" ANYTHING. The very idea is absurd. Anybody should be able to buy and get signed a cert for a site they own. It isn't anybody's job to ask them if they plan to use it for illegal purposes or not. They are not the government police and asking them, expecting them to be, is asking for trouble.
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You get can certificates that authenticate a business or organization. That isn't what a basic certificate does. It just authenticates your access the site of the domain your accessing. It's totally valid for you to have payai.com and PayPal, Inc to have paypal.com. It's up to the user to look at the browser to verify both the connection is encrypted and somebody has authenticated the organization or business.
If you go to http://www.tdbank.com/ you'll notice the browser shows the owner as The Toronto-Dominion Bank (CA). The domain has been vetted as being owned by this particular business. This isn't 100% either mind you. It's not that hard to register a business legally. But.. some level of vetting has gone on.
If you go to https://www.librecmc.org/ you'll notice the browser doesn't show the owner. It just shows it's encrypted. It's up to you to decide if librecmc.org is in fact the right domain and whether or not its actually controlled by those who purport to own it. https://www.librecmc.org is the valid domain by the way of the LibreCMC project. A free software embedded distribution similar to OpenWRT and Leede.
im sure they took same math class as music indystry. 100.000x259$
oh! we are loosing 259.000.000. that makes sence. now lets cry about it and get some support for our lost money and scare some tech and number illiterate people.
Calling BS on this. There is nothing inherently wrong with issuing certs. Regardless of who issues those certs, they can only be used to create a secure identified connections between a user and a server.
They definitely do not facilitate criminality any more than Apache2 does. This is just pure silliness. There's nothing wrong here. Bad guys can get certs from other sources just as easily as anyone else. They can get them from Let's Encrypt, too. So can everyone else. A certificate doesn't facilitate illegal activity. It's just for a secure connection.
Something tell me there's more to this than simply crying wolf about bad guys getting certs easily. Someone obviously would prefer that web hosts, big and small, don't get cheap (or free) certs to secure their connections from prying eyes.
While the justification might be 'bad guys are abusing this,' I'm still calling BS. Someone (or some *cough* three letter agency) is annoyed that people can easily secure their servers.
I'd go as far as to say, Let's Encrypt is having precisely the effect it sought to have. More secure connections on all HTTP traffic across the web. Anyone can TLS up their servers now with very little effort. Good job, Let's Encrypt, you're having a profound and ultimately awesome effect on the web's privacy and shielding from prying eyes. And that effect is a good one, especially when people are crying 'omg it's too easy to get certs now!' Good. Nothing like a very secure connection to give the middle finger to three letter agencies.
The problem here has nothing to do with encryption and everything to do with the fact that companies have pushed the idea that if a connection is encrypted that the site is legitimate. The only thing that encryption does is ensure you connection cannot be spied on. The idea that encryption should be reserved for certain people is patently absurd.
Stop telling people that encryption equates to legitimacy and the problem is resolved.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Would a delay in issuing certificates change anything?
Anyway, the notion that an HTTPS certificate says anything about the site being trustworthy is a stupid mistake. All it says is that you are indeed connected to the paypa1 site that you chose to connect to and whose url is displayed in your address bar.
We've been through all this in the protracted discussion about whether Letsencrypt should issue certs for International Domain Names (i.e. special characters). I had to wait years to get a cert for my domain, for the only reason that it happens to be punycode. The consensus was that spoof domains should be prevented by registration authorities, not by a company that merely offers a free service on these domain names that has nothing to do with the respectability of the content they host.
That green secure lock on the upper left does not imply that you should trust who you're connected to, particularly if you've never been there before. LE says, "the server that has this cert has demonstrated that they control of the domain you're connecting to" and that's all that should matter.
Hmm, let's see. They have a lock on their door. Seems legit.
Lets Encrypt verifies ownership of the domain. If you see the secured indicator in the browser, its a gaurantee that your actually talking to the server of the people who own that domain. So, if people watch out for the right domain as well as the secured indicator, it provides additional safety. So, people need to know the domains of critical sites they might use, and look carefully at that domain name. This is true as well, if there were no TLS being used. TLS provides additional gaurantees you really are talking to that domain and that no one is listening. Lets Encrypt makes things much more secure, rather than less security than before. However, certs with stronger vetting would verify ownership more of the domain a well as the certificate, maybe making sure that the domain is not hosting a malicious site that is spoofing a real bank or something.
There is a solution to this: have two grades of certificates, one with one star free certicates based on the Lets Encrypt model, for low risk sites and two stars for high risk.
Lets Encrypt, would not be an issue at all, furthermore, providing we do this: It might be a good idea, to have multiple security levels in the indicator, maybe one star for a Lets Encrypt type cert, maybe two stars for more intensive verification methods. this would allow the easy availability of Lets Encrypt to continue, but for banks etc to apply for the second star certificate for higher level of verification.
For many sites, like the personal website, Lets Encrypt is fine, without it those sites wouldnt encrypt anyway since its not worth the vast sums for a certificate from one of the commercial providers. For a bank, getting a cert with stronger vetting might make sense, and there is a better trade off for them to do it.
You could then train users to look for one star for low risk sites, two stars for ecommerce and banking stuff.
Let's Encrypt! Cheapos!
they've got strong ties to a fairly oppressive government.
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If CAs were so great, how is it that microsoft.com and google.com certs have been created by approved CAs multiple times over the years?
What is to prevent a state or govt who runs the network from setting up a CA and controlling DNS so they can MITM any domains they like?
NOTHING.
The true risk comes from govt owned and managed internet providers. That happens in places we all expect, but also in so-called "democracies" too. If the govt has control over most of the networks in/out of a country, end users are screwed.
So - why don't I care about Let's Encrypt? If a cert comes from there, I know it is purely about encryption, not any real attempt for security. I'm comfortable with that. Looking forward to getting a few wild-card certs for my domains. That will make reverse proxy setups much easier.
This is utter bullshit from the CAs that aren't making money selling basic certs for HTTPS anymore.
To get a cert from Lets Encrypt you have to prove you own the domain by putting a specific file in yourdomain.com/.well-known/acme-challenge to prove you have ownership of the domain and server. Their servers request this file before they will issue the cert. If you don't have access to place that file then you can't prove you own that domain. If you don't own that domain but have access to place that file, well your domain and server are fucked anyways lol.
If you are using the automated script you don't see this since everything is done for you. But if you go to https://gethttpsforfree.com/ and generate your cert manually you'll see exactly how the process works.
Also if anyone is to be blamed for this HTTPS cert mess, it is the browser makers who make a site using a self signed cert appear to be even less secure than just plain old HTTP. We could have had a fully encrypted web decades ago using self signed certs if it didn't throw up alarms and make you jump though hoops to access a page encrypted with a self signed cert.
What has caused this mess is lumping the encryption of the traffic with validation of the owner of the site. ALL HTTPS traffic should be considered secure from the aspect of the actual data transfer is encrypted. They need to come up with some other method indicating a cert that confirms ownership validation rather than the "if its a green padlock all is ok"
Possibly what should be done is for any cert that provides for an encrypted transport display nothing, other than an error if you access an https site that doesn't actually serve encrypted content. Keep the green padlock for site validation purposes since this is what has been taught to every grandma on this planet.
it was assumed that CA has an Authority to verify that this website is who it claims it is.
And when the only claim in question is "this site is operated by the same entity that owns the domain", a CA offering domain-validated certificates has an Authority to verify this claim. Let's Encrypt does this through either a cleartext HTTP connection to the server or DNS TXT records. Verifying whether the domain owner ought to continue to own that domain, or that the domain is not misleadingly similar to the name of a large business, is outside the scope of a domain-validated certificate.
That they can break TLS. This just makes it computationally harder for them, not impossible.
First of all, TLS has many and growing number of encryption methods and key exchange mechanisms. I have no doubt SOME of those methods are broken or easily broken into. Others are not so easy, and ridiculously computationally expensive to unwind. And there are always better ones being added as they are invented.
Additionally, the more encryption that is out there operating in the field, the more computationally expensive it's going to get to a) find data you're actually interested in, and b) decrypting that data. Casual peeking is no longer viable if EVERYTHING is encrypted, whether it be difficult to break or not. You have to decide what to break into.
Why hold one CA to a completely different set of standards than every other CA?
Because most other major CAs that offer domain-validated (DV) certificates also offer organization-validated (OV) or Extended Validation (EV) certificates for a higher price. Let's Encrypt does not.
Then go get the CA/Browser Forum to amend their requirements that all CAs and web browser makers follow.
Or write a browser extension to trust DV certificates less. Then you'll get a green bar on Twitter but a warning on Facebook. Comodo's Dragon browser, for example, has included something like this, displaying a warning the first time the user visits a site using a DV certificate. The warning's text begins as follows:
said Joan Jett, director of audit and compliance at Pixar... Josh Ass, executive director of the Internet Security Research Group...
I don't see a problem with setting a txt record to a public key, then all the client has to do is sign something sent by letsencrypt with the private key.
No having to update DNS records every time you need a new cert.
No having a compromised webserver allow fake certs to be issued.
If there is no "vetting" then why have CA's? Just self-sign and call it a day.
Self-signing allows any ISP to intercept your connection and act as a man in the middle without your knowledge. A domain-validated certificate requires an attacker to intercept not only your connection to the web server but also the CA's connection to the domain's DNS server days or weeks earlier when the certificate was issued.
TLS conveniently tells you the encryption technology in use.
RSA is toast. ECC is debatable in terms of security, and with quantum computers in practical use now, may be completely owned. We just don't know for sure. So what's your "beyond ECC" technology in the hopper that makes you think we are secure?
Stop trying to fool the plebs that this is anything but a speed bump. Or perhaps you don't realize this yourself.
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To start with the second word, there should not be any "balances" in place when issuing DV certificates. It's not up to the CA to "balance" anything. A DV certificate achieves one purpose only beside facilitating encryption: certify that the server you are talking to is actually the one addressed in the URL. Nothing more. A DV certificate has nothing to do with the person or the company owning that server. It has nothing to do with the person who registered the domain. It is purely there to say the computer sending you files claiming to be slashdot.org is actually slashdot.org.
The best way of checking this is to actually force the server itself to prove that it is in control of its own URL > by modifying the contents on the server. That is precisely what Lets Encrypt does. This is far better than any human interaction, and far better than some confirmation email sent to some address in some unverified whois record, both methods which are used by traditional CAs.
Not only do Lets Encrypt have proper checks in place, they have better checks than any other CA currently issuing DV certificates. Kaspersky can go pound sand, especially when proving that he either doesn't understand this security process or that he has financial incentive to be wilfully deceitful about this security process.
Okay Google (and their lickspittles at Mozilla) decide to wall off stock http sites behind "danger" messages.
So anyone providing more than a cursory "I love me" page website has to run out and get a cert.
Let's Encrypt steps up and makes the process easy and mostly seamless.
Now people are bitching because they didn't draw out the process and make it more painful.
And they're worried about how a security mechanism can be used to make people LESS secure.
Maybe someone should have thought their way through this BEFORE making https and certs essentially MANDATORY.
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There are a number of things wrong in the comments so let's clarify them. There are three types of certificates: Extended Validation, Organization Validation and Domain Validation. The green lock only appears for sites with Extended Validation. Extended validation requires the site owner to prove they are a real company, really do own the name in the domain name, i.e. they are not spoofing something, that the DNS record is correct and that they control the domain. These are usually $250 - $500. Organization Validation has some checks and requires proof of control of the domain. It doesn't give you a green lock. Domain Validation only requires that you control the domain to get the cert. It doesn't give you a green lock. It is valuable in that, it prevents man-in-the-middle attacks and ensures that your communication is encrypted, however you have no assurances as to who is behind the domain. Domain Validation certs are usually free. Let's Encrypt only issues Domain Validation Certificates
There is a list of requirements for CAs to obey for granting certs and they are stringently audited and then the auditors are audited. (and one auditor has failed). The EV audits are extremely thorough. Further any EV certificates that are issued now have to be added to a certificate transparency log https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., so all EV certs that have been issued are publicly viewable and now auditable by everyone. (the log is a merkle tree so inclusion in the tree is easy to find and undetected changes are impossible).
Conclusion: If you are going to a website that you expect to be secure for banking or from a reputable company and the lock isn't green then you are likely visiting a spoofed or compromised page. If you are visiting Joe from down the streets cat pic site a DV cert is good enough.
What's wrong with the way Let's Encrypt validates? It just makes sure example.com does in fact lead to the server your running the check on. What more validation do you need? It's just crypto. it is not a business license or something their offering.
To justify crazy prices and markups (I have seen over $1,000 for a certificate) many companies told a story that was not true. They implied that if a site had a certificate that site was somehow to be trusted. Now let's encrypt comes along and show everyone that, actually, all that a certificate was supposed to do was to encrypt the communication between the client and the server and confirm to the client that the server it was connecting to was in fact that server it thought it was. Nothing more, nothing less.
Is that a problem?
Only to Certificate Authorities that see their business model disrupted.
Where is this certificate public database? How can I query it?
If you can dns spoof the domain you are aquiring the cert for you can dns spoof the domain of the contact mail for said domain. This should not be a surprise!
It's not like I ever saw a serious attempt at verification from VeriSign, Thawte, or GoDaddy in the 15 years I had to get code signing certs. It's a racket.
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It seems to me that we need to move to a 2 tier SSL system. Tier 1 would just provide encryption and would be easy to get. Tier 2 would provide encryption and validation that the remote server is who they say they are (like current SSL certs do).
The purpose of Encryption is to sell people Certificates. Thus Let's Encrypt is destroying the Purpos of encryption.
Very few people check the URLs. So the whole thing is pointless. EV certs do nothing but ensure that PayPalThieves.com is really owned by those thieves.
There is a technical solution. It is called Secure Remote Password (SRP). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Or even just nonce based passwords where the password entered is not sent to the server or its JavaScript.
But nobody does this. Because at the end of the day nobody cares about security other than security vendors that would hate a solution to Phishing.
In theory it's possible to break everything, given enough time. A single TLS session may take a few decades to break, how many of those do you want to break per day? It's unfeasible to break TLS except by very targeted MITM attacks (downgrading etc) by badly configured browsers and web servers.
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Who said anything about spoofing? Suppose an attacker manages to crack into one of the servers that provides a domain's DNS. That same server won't provide DNS for the domain that hosts the tech contact's email.
No, from a security perspective, checking only that you control the web server is much, much weaker than checking to see if you're the tech contact for the domain, and IMO, they should never have been allowed to cut that corner. The only reason they had to do that was that they made the decision to use 90-day certs under the bizarre assumption that servers are constantly getting compromised and their keys stolen, and that limiting the window in which stolen certs can be used is more important than preventing someone from creating a fake, valid cert for a domain that isn't getting constantly compromised.
Unfortunately, that decision led to weaker verification, and worse, the same flawed logic led to the clients rekeying every time they recert, thus preventing key pinning (another security technique intended to prevent attackers from being able to spoof domains). So all the problems that I have with LetsEncrypt from a security perspective stem from basically the same bad decision, give or take.
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If they are now only issuing 100k per day, that is a significant drop from the 100 million in the previous year.
encryption and source verification should have been different concerns.
Visit a site via SSL without a cert? No problem, browser informs user that connection is encrypted.
Visit a site with a certificate, browser informs client that website has been verified as belonging to the company that it claims to be.
The requirement to pay and deal with certs caused more people to NOT encrypt because they just didn't want to deal with it.
But since we live in a world where if you encrypt without a cert you freak out the user with a scary warning, this is what we get.
Self-signed certs force encryption, so I'm not sure how an ISP would able to crack that encryption [...] The problem with self-signed certs is there is no mechanism that requires the cert owner to actually control the domain the cert, no way to ensure the server you are connecting to actually is who it ways it is.
You answered your own question. Instead of letting a subscriber connect to a server with a self-signed certificate, the ISP would intercept the connection, act as a server to the subscriber, and act as a client to the real server. Browser publishers warn for self-signed certificates but don't warn for DV certificates because they have agreed that https in the scheme means some level of verification that the domain and server share control.