On 1/2/13, Steven Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu> wrote: [snip] It's ashame they've stuck with a hardcoded list of "Acceptable CAs" for certain certificates; that would be very difficult to update. The major banks, Facebook, Hotmail, etc, possibly have not made a promise to anyone, that all their future new renewal certificates will be from a specific CA; would be more interesting, if the Chrome devs provided for a mechanism for making a remote query or receiving a digitally signed "PINned cert list" download, that could be updated dynamically, /and/ provided policy and mechanisms to have sites included in the list. One of the broken things about X500, is a certificate can only have one signature. The trust could be strengthened, if there were a mechanism allowing multiple 3rd party attestations to be made (eg PGP-like multiple signatures), or a browser could be configured to only accept a certificate, if BOTH (i) Signed by a CA, and (ii) The certificate's information, or the CA information for the cert is published in a 3rd party corroborating database, that also requires proof of ID/authorization to publish in that DB. (iii) And the server does the work of querying the 3rd party databases listed by the client, by sending the CA ID, Certificate ID, through a query to some standardized URL format, and returns the timestamped digitally signed result (query answer, or affirmative proof of no entry in the DB), during authentication, together with the certificate. Depending on the authenticating browser's config, a domain not found in the 3rd party corroborating datasources, or listed by the 3rd party source with an attestation level of "Only domain control validated", might result in the CA's signature being ignored. That is: the browser (or the user) should pick how strong the certificate has to be, depending on the kind of business they will be executing over the SSL channel. CA's could later become required to check at least 2 3rd party databases, to ensure any prior certificate issued by another CA was actually revoked or expired, before allowing the signing of a new certificate.
Thanks. The list is longer, but with the exception of Twitter (and possibly intuit -- a subdomain is shown), not a lot more interesting. I don't see major banks, I don't see Facebook or Hotmail, I don't see the big CAs, etc.
--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
-- -JH