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23,000 HTTPS Certs Axed After CEO Emails Private Keys (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
A major dust-up on an Internet discussion forum is touching off troubling questions about the security of some browser-trusted HTTPS certificates when it revealed the CEO of a certificate reseller emailed a partner the sensitive private keys for 23,000 TLS certificates. The email was sent on Tuesday by the CEO of Trustico, a UK-based reseller of TLS certificates issued by the browser-trusted certificate authorities Comodo and, until recently, Symantec...
In communications earlier this month, Trustico notified DigiCert that 50,000 Symantec-issued certificates Trustico had resold should be mass revoked because of security concerns. When Jeremy Rowley, an executive vice president at DigiCert, asked for proof the certificates were compromised, the Trustico CEO emailed the private keys of 23,000 certificates, according to an account posted to a Mozilla security policy forum. The report produced a collective gasp among many security practitioners who said it demonstrated a shockingly cavalier treatment of the digital certificates that form one of the most basic foundations of website security... In a statement, Trustico officials said the keys were recovered from "cold storage," a term that typically refers to offline storage systems. "Trustico allows customers to generate a Certificate Signing Request and Private Key during the ordering process," the statement read. "These Private Keys are stored in cold storage, for the purpose of revocation."
"There's no indication the email was encrypted," reports Ars Technica, and the next day DigiCert sent emails to Trustico's 23,000+ customers warning that their certificates were being revoked, according to Bleeping Computer.
In a related development, Thursday Trustico's web site went offline, "shortly after a website security expert disclosed a critical vulnerability on Twitter that appeared to make it possible for outsiders to run malicious code on Trustico servers."
In communications earlier this month, Trustico notified DigiCert that 50,000 Symantec-issued certificates Trustico had resold should be mass revoked because of security concerns. When Jeremy Rowley, an executive vice president at DigiCert, asked for proof the certificates were compromised, the Trustico CEO emailed the private keys of 23,000 certificates, according to an account posted to a Mozilla security policy forum. The report produced a collective gasp among many security practitioners who said it demonstrated a shockingly cavalier treatment of the digital certificates that form one of the most basic foundations of website security... In a statement, Trustico officials said the keys were recovered from "cold storage," a term that typically refers to offline storage systems. "Trustico allows customers to generate a Certificate Signing Request and Private Key during the ordering process," the statement read. "These Private Keys are stored in cold storage, for the purpose of revocation."
"There's no indication the email was encrypted," reports Ars Technica, and the next day DigiCert sent emails to Trustico's 23,000+ customers warning that their certificates were being revoked, according to Bleeping Computer.
In a related development, Thursday Trustico's web site went offline, "shortly after a website security expert disclosed a critical vulnerability on Twitter that appeared to make it possible for outsiders to run malicious code on Trustico servers."
When Jeremy Rowley, an executive vice president at DigiCert, asked for proof the certificates were compromised, the Trustico CEO emailed the private keys of 23,000 certificates
Those certificates are DEFINITELY compromised now.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Sophos has a trusted root CA embedded in their enterprise firewalls which allows the firewall to launch man-in-the-middle attacks against clients to spy on them. That means all you have to do to launch a successful man-in-the-middle attack yourself against HTTPS traffic is to gut a Sophos firewall and find the private key embedded in it.
What, were they just loose on his desktop next to the vacation photos?
Dumbasses gotta dumbass.
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
I think SSL is good technology, but the certificate authorities are a scam. I believe you can create your own certificates for free and without some third-party having access to the key and make money from selling it to you.
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
If you're using email in 2018 and it's not encrypted it, stop using it, simple! The average person and especially executives, have no sense of security or secure operations. I can point to numerous companies, where even the CTO's and CSO's are widely unqualified to hold those positions, and they would and have, send non-encrypted email containing very sensitive information.
If society isn't going to grow up and start encrypting all email communication, then it's time to get rid of email.
Many CEOs are just technical enough to be dangerous. Never give your CEO:
- Direct access to your database server
- Administrator passwords of any kind, even to their own laptop
- Access to server rooms
- PRIVATE KEYS!
You CAN give a CEO a MacBook Air. They'll be happy with the sleek design, and they won't be able to do much damage, since not a lot of "work" software actually runs on it.
This is why Executives are not kings. There are parts of the business that they should not have casual access to. That is not to say they do not have a right to review and inspect with appropriate parties involved in the process, but access to data and tools like this is not the same thing as keys to the front door.
Although his action to mail the certs was not smart, the initial problem was not the executive.
The Initial problem was his company had kept copies of the private keys, an absolute no-no and when he(?) found out he wanted to communicate which keys were to be revoked.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
But why the fuck isn't the PUBLIC key signed, and the end user sends a message to the private key to verify it is authentic?
It is. You generate a certificate signing request (CSR) from your certificate (which embeds the public key and the metadata fields such as organisation name, host name and so on). You send the CSR to your certificate authority (CA). The CA then gives you back a signed certificate (which may strip out some fields from the cert that the CA doesn't want to attest to). The key exchange phase of TLS then sends the certificate to the client, which can walk the certificate chain to verify that someone (hopefully someone trustworthy) is willing to attest that the public key belongs to the organisation that you think you are communicating with. The client then encrypts using the public key and the server decrypts using the private key.
I will personally just stick to self signed certificates for exactly this private key threat model
You use self-signed certs for a threat model that doesn't exist? This problem existed only because they had customers that decided to outsource certificate creation to them, which is a bad idea and would have failed a security audit.
but obviously the entire chain of trust is untrustworthy in this day and age
If you get a CA to sign your certificate then, at worst, it is no less secure than if you don't. You are still free to distribute the hash out of band and check it. You are still able to use certificate pinning to ensure that you notice if it has unexpectedly changed. And if you don't sign it, then a malicious CA (e.g. one compromised by an intelligence agency) is still able to sign a cert claiming to be yours and have other people trust it. If you use DNSSEC and publish CAA records then you can at least narrow this down to one CA that they must compromise.
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