Hank and everyone, This is a very interesting problem. As it happens, some folks in the IETF have anticipated this one. For those who are interested, Paul Hoffman and Jakob Schlyter have been working within the DANE working group at the IETF to provide for a means to alleviate some of the responsibility of the browser vendors as to who gets to decide what is a valid certificate, by allowing for that burden to be shifted to the subject through the use of secure DNS. A list of hashes is published in the subject's domain indicating what are valid certificates. And so if a CA went rogue, the subject domains would be able to indicate to the browser that something is afoot. For more information, please see http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/dane/. Eliot On 9/12/11 7:22 AM, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
At 13:00 11/09/2011 -0600, Keith Medcalf wrote:
Damian Menscher wrote on 2011-09-11:
Because of that lost trust, any cross-signed cert would likely be revoked by the browsers. It would also make the browser vendors question whether the signing CA is worthy of their trust.
And therein is the root of the problem: Trustworthiness is assessed by what you refer to as the "browser vendors". Unfortunately, there is no Trustworthiness assessment of those vendors.
The current system provides no more authentication or confidentiality than if everyone simply used self-signed certificates. It is nothing more than theatre and provides no actual security benefit whatsoever. Anyone believing otherwise is operating under a delusion.
The problem is about lack of pen-testing and a philosphy of security. In order to run a CA, one not only has to build the infrastructure but also have constant external pen-testing and patch management in place. Whether it be Comodo or RSA or now Diginotar, unless an overwhelming philosphy of "computer and network security" is paradigmed into the corporate DNA, this will keep happening - and not only to CAs but to the likes of Google, Cisco, Microsoft, etc. (read - APT attacks).
If 60% of your employees will plug in a USB drive they find in the parking lot, then you have failed: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-27/human-errors-fuel-hacking-as-test-s...
The problem for us as a community if to find a benchmark of which company "does have a clue" vs those that don't. Until then, it will just be whack-a-mole/CA.
-Hank
--- Keith Medcalf () ascii ribbon campaign against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org