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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.
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.
That's a large part of why the CA model is broken. CAs shouldn't be competing at all; they're there to provide a service. Imagine if OpenPGP keyservers were competing... There's no reason for it unless you're a bad actor to begin with.
What LE is doing has helped people see that a security cert isn't something you should pay for, and that being signed by a CA doesn't mean anything, especially with the shitty politics Google et al have been playing at the CA level.
The well is poisoned, and the big boys are attacking the people who pointed it out.
"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?"
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.
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
No, nothing has changed about what that green bar means: encrypted connection. You pushed a false idea on to your mother, an idea that companies planted and you blindly accepted.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The fact that Chrome and FF use their own cert stores and update them unilaterally without the user ever knowing is absurd.
The browser should use the cert store on the OS. And the OS should update the certs. (And when MS updates certs, it should optionally present detailed info to the user about changes.)
The entire concept of CAs is built around trust in an environment where none of the actors and powers that be are trustworthy.
You're making assumptions about what "secure" means in this context. It means the communications are secure from 3rd parties. That doesn't mean the website you're communicating with isn't evil. It never has.
Often the only indication the user has that they are being MITMed is precisely because the browser did not use the OS cert store.