| Revocation Policy | Kaspar Janßen | 10/04/14 00:46 | Hi,
initially i filled a bugreport [1] about the consequences of CVE-2014-0160 but this seems to be a better place for a discussion. There were still a discussion about the problem which may be interesing. To give a short introduction: StartCom is offering free Class 1 certificates under the label StartSSL. The certification is completly free of charge but the revocation costs 25 USD. The Problem: I don't think that this is much money but I think this will prevent many people from renewing their keys which should be considered as compromised. They are, maybe not intentionally, throwing people in the pool but they don't check if they can swim. Customers of other companies were faced to the decision if they would like and can spend money for TLS. But due to the free certification, people tend to create dedicated keys for every service. That is good for the encryption side but bad if these people know have to pay ~10 * 25 USD. As a result of that, the most people just will not change their keys. That makes me question if a certificate signed by StartCom can be considered as trustworthy. I confrontated StartCom with my doubs and pleased them to find a way to solve this hurdle. They wrote me: "This will not happen without changing the entire business model". In germany, this _could_ be considered as fraud but they don't comply to european law anyway. The Consequence: I would like to start a discussion about that and the reactions. My Idea is that there should be a general policy that says that a revocation can't cost more that the creation or something like that. If someone pays 100 USD for certification, he consideres to pay 100 USD for revocation. If someone doesn't pay for certification, he will hesitate to pay even 1 USD for revocation. Yours sincerely, Kaspar Janßen > [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=994033 |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Peter Eckersley | 10/04/14 01:08 | Kaspar, suppose that Mozilla followed your suggestion and removed
StartCom's root certificates from its trust store (or revoked them!). What would the consequences of that decision be, for the large number of domains that rely on StartCom certs? > _______________________________________________ > dev-security-policy mailing list > dev-secur...@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy > |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Kaspar Janßen | 10/04/14 02:10 | On 10/04/14 10:08, Peter Eckersley wrote:I hope that an appropriate policy will force authorities to reconsider their revocation principle. I don't want to harm someone nor I want to work off in any way. The key is that anybody should be able to shout out "don't trust me anymore!" without a fee. Isn't that part of the trustchain idea? I read a few times that Chrome doesn't even check if a certificate is revoked or not (at least not the default settings). That leads me to the question: Is it mandatory for a CA in mozilla's truststore to have to ability to revoke a certificate or is is only an optional feature provided by some CAs? Kaspar |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Walter Goulet | 10/04/14 06:59 | Hi Kaspar,
Your message is very timely; I have a domain I own using a StartSSL Class 1 certificate that I was planning on requesting revocation for due to Heartbleed. I had no idea that I had to pay for revocation either; in my mind this changes the entire value proposition of their offering. I personally have not yet decided if I will indeed revoke, but I will be dropping a line to them to inform them that this 'revocation fee' should clearly be stated on their website and that their 'free' Class 1 certificate is not actually free if you need to pay for security controls like revocation! Walter |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Peter Kurrasch | 10/04/14 07:16 | This an interesting issue Kaspar and I appreciate you raising it. I also personally appreciate you framing it in terms of trust because that's really what is at issue here.
The whole idea of revocation is a gaping hole in the PKI landscape. The ability to say "don't trust me" is so poorly implemented throughout PKI as to be effectively non-existent. If for some reason you need to revoke a cert, you should do so because it's the right thing to do, but the best you can hope for is that some anti-security person doesn't figure out a way to use it anyway. This means that theft and other compromises of private keys remain viable attack vectors for those who wish to do so (government sponsored organizations and otherwise). Private keys and the certs that go with them could be usable well after when people think they become invalid. This also means that we should not be surprised to see an underground market appear that seeks to sell "revoked" certs. Given that "high value" internet destinations might have been impacted by the Heartbleed vulnerability this could definitely become a concern. Should such a place appear I would think StartCom - issued certs would easily be included for sale. This also means that all "pay to revoke" policies should be viewed as anti-security and we need to "strongly encourage" they be discontinued in short order. If a CA wishes to continue such policies I would question their trustworthiness. Further I think we are reaching the point where browsers have to refuse SSL connections when OCSP validation fails. I think it's getting harder to argue otherwise, but I'll let the Mozilla folks speak to that. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Rob Stradling | 10/04/14 07:28 | The Mozilla CA Certificate Maintenance Policy (Version 2.2) [1] says
(emphasis mine): "CAs _must revoke_ Certificates that they have issued upon the occurrence of any of the following events: ... - the CA obtains _reasonable evidence_ that the subscriber’s private key (corresponding to the public key in the certificate) has been compromised or is _suspected of compromise_ (e.g. Debian weak keys)" I think that's pretty clear! The CABForum BRs go one step further, demanding that the CA revoke _within 24 hours_. AFAICT, non-payment by the Subscriber does not release the CA from this obligation to revoke promptly. Anyone disagree with my interpretation? [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/security-group/certs/policy/maintenance/ > _______________________________________________-- Rob Stradling Senior Research & Development Scientist COMODO - Creating Trust Online |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Phillip Hallam-Baker | 10/04/14 08:12 | Before we get any further into this conversation, I'll just point out
that business models are not something we can discuss in CABForum. We can 'probably' tell you what we believe the rules to be but we can't make any comment on what they should be either in CABForum or here. Website: http://hallambaker.com/ |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Pontus Engblom | DigiSSL AB | 10/04/14 08:25 | -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1 Walter Goulet skrev 2014-04-10 15:59:> On Thursday, April 10, 2014 4:10:58 AM UTC-5, Kaspar Janßen wrote: >> On 10/04/14 10:08, Peter Eckersley wrote:>> <snip> >>>> <snip> >>> Walter _______________________________________________ Hi there Walter, I would like to inform you that when you get a service you tend to read the FAQs and Certificate Policy Statements, i.e StartSSL have a FAQ where a whole bunch of numbers concern revocation and handling fees. http://www.startssl.com/?app=25#72 (#70 to #74). So please do not claim they do not clearly state it, either you didn't read or didn't care to read. Now they do not charge the certificate in anyway for revocation, it's merely a handling fee, i.e the guys that work there need to get paid to do their job. I can agree that some certificates _MIGHT_ be compromised and need revocation, but as StartSSL stated earlier, if you got no intention of paying $24.90 you could also create a _NEW_ certificate with a different subdomain and replace yours, that would cost you.. nothing? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=994033#c4 But I can not for the life of me see why we can't pay $24.90, they have given us a service for free and now when we need to do something we think its wrong of them to charge us? Compare it to the real world, companies must make money somehow its just a question of how and where. A good point of this is by Marcus Sundberg in the bug #994033, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=994033#c23 Also this is issue is quite hard to handle, it is unknown how many certs that actually have been compromised since it's not traceable. As Rob Stradling said; This is a bit of an issue here, we don't know whom might have been targeted with this bug, I find it hard that low traffic domains could have been compromised but theres a possibility, in this case there is no way to get reasonable evidence of a subscriber loosing its private key. And to suspect every cert has been compromised well, then all CAs would need to make a huge CRL and pretty much revoke any certificate that's been active during this incident, as all might be suspected of compromise. - From the cabfpub; > Heartbleed Bug Impact > > If the servers in your SSL environment do not use OpenSSL, if your servers > use OpenSSL 1.0.0 or earlier, if your servers do not use OpenSSL > 1.0.2-beta1, or if your servers are compiled without the heartbeat extension > enabled, then your environment is not vulnerable to the Heartbleed > Bug attack. > > However, if your servers are running an OpenSSL version 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f > with the heartbeat extension enabled, then your environment is vulnerable to > a Heartbleed Bug attack. Although no Heartbleed Bug attacks have > been documented, it is impossible to know if the Heartbleed Bug vulnerability has > been exploited because the attack does not leave a trace. To actually have a chance here as a CA you would need to contact every certificate holder and get their SSL environment. Most servers usually run on older versions, for instance Debian squeeze have OpenSSL 0.9.8o. Therefor it's hard to say how many have been impacted, how many that has been targeted and what the next step would be. But as a end here, try to get a new certificate for a new subdomain if you can not pay $25. Or actually start to pay for SSL from the first place? I mean, nothing is really free in the world, something got to cost. IMHO this removing of StartCom is just bogus. Maybe that Mozilla can go together and force out a policy of instant removal from clients if they request so, but until then, they have been included, they have given out numerous certificates and even considering removing them from the trust store because of this is ludicrous. - -- Pontus Engblom -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJTRrf6AAoJEGtXimUqCrbRDTcH/1tM952lyP/x31UzgjdS511V NI1+rWbuaTQpgS6NpKFVsHzMZtHDKcJe6zeHcvNAoU3QGe9Ws3soh2ixXedlflMZ DlUhJbr+Tgpakf6+valaE1+Sd1PmKkU5U6+cZYGg1Y1GvZzaW6Oi3SNjovdM5s1M FDpLT3zf7wWrgXqr2SqeLeS6bFTVZIAd/S+G8wfNVabXmirlzQwZR3lNmHIwKZGN s1f7Nak81lmuiyMYO5GUFxo9FzbRpiuEfLCZYjvbU1plrmJ+CfPXmnyOWi15UI0D 9lV9JOOS2Y0iF44nPpJZEq9vfJhu5FRnESjwGdRM/o8eFqlk37YflPHAvOCQf+4= =51dE -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 10/04/14 09:05 | On 04/10/2014 10:46 AM, Kaspar Janßen wrote:I agree - I've saw the tweets bug reports and this posting. I'll be glad to join the discussion and we intend to take a public stance as soon as things calm down a bit. Currently all hell is lose, but I promise to get back to you all in due time and will explain our position, policy and practices and also refute some of the claims that were made. In the meantime please be patient, thanks. -- Regards Signer: Eddy Nigg, COO/CTO StartCom Ltd. <http://www.startcom.org> XMPP: star...@startcom.org <xmpp:s...@startcom.org> Blog: Join the Revolution! <http://blog.startcom.org> Twitter: Follow Me <http://twitter.com/eddy_nigg> |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Pontus Engblom | 10/04/14 09:10 | Thorsten Glaser skrev 2014-04-10 17:48:
> Pontus Engblom | DigiSSL AB dixit: >> I do not disagree with people needing to get their money. > I’d happily pay 5 € for certificates, and possibly a handling > fee for a revocation “on my whim”, but not acting in the face > of a security breach like this one is inacceptable (and, as > Rob Stradling pointed out, a violation of their obligations). > Yes, I can agree the timing of this is bad, but a company have its policies to follow, if they have a fee for revocation it's quite hard to step away from it. Now when we know the extent of this bug we can just wait and see what happends, but as you mention further down, the best way would be to either reboot the system or either do something and try to implement a new system. > No. We must assume that all private keys ever used in vulnerable > systems have been compromised; there is evidence that this has > been exploited as early as November 2013. > I do agree with you that its been around for a while and that we should treat every system compromised that had thoose vulnerabilities. But I know plenty of people that just upgraded their OpenSSL and restarted apache and think their good. Also alot of thoose systems are extremely lowlevel traffic or no traffic domains either. I'm just pointing out that if all CAs were to remove ALL suspected compromised certs (which would require alot of time and effort to track down all systems that the admin doesnt know about this), there would be no Class 1 certificates left untouched, every single Class 1 cert should in that case be revocated. And this can cause a bit of a problem on alot of websites. >> revocation, but as StartSSL stated earlier, if you got no intention of> This would help absolutely nobody because the attacker *still* > can use the private key (which they stole from you) and the > StartCom-signed certificate (which they get during the handshake > anyway) to do an MITM attack on your visitors, with StartCom > saying that the MITM attacker is “the genuine thing”. > > The only option is, for example, if you have www.foo.org as > StartCom certificate, to remove A and AAAA records for both > www.foo.org. and foo.org. from the DNS, and get a certificate > for www2.foo.org – good luck getting any traffic there. And > even then, an attacker can just redirect their target’s DNS, > making the attack once again successful. > > No, no matter what, those StartCom/StartSSL-issued certificates > *must* be revoked, or StartCom/StartSSL *must* be removed from > the trusted root store, no later than this Friday. > This assumes that the domain has been targeted yes and that a evil person would want to harm users using that domain yes. If we go in an event like this, it's not actually the CAs fault, neither the system administrators fault, this was a bug. Who should we really blame? If we are to blame the CA for not revocating, why aren't there a proposal for a explicit policy that forces CAs to remove certs that users ask for, but it's up to the CA to then either charge the client for a new certificate or not do business with that client. I am not really sure about this, but I never said that I support not revocating, all I say is that this is one way for StartSSL to actually earn some income. Which I must say can not be easy when everyone just want the stuff for free and not pay at all for security. > It’s an obligation. CAs have an oligopoly and as such, they have > certain social responsibilities, for the good of the SSL ecosy- > stem as a whole. > Yes, they have no obligation to give us free certificates either. They could start charging us like any other CA, that would just end up in lots of unsecured domains. Most people that holds a Class 1 I doubt would want to pay for SSL, at the current price ranges, but what do I know. > Yes. (It would probably be easier to reboot the system…) But for all > we know, they need to act. > > (Note that I am currently running a StartCom certificate that was > never compromised (due to only using OpenSSL 0.x) on one system, > a compromised one (which they refuse to revoke) on another system, > and a healthy mix of GoDaddy-rekeyed ones on most other systems.) > I am not defending any actions by anyone here, I just pointed out that this is a business model of StartSSL to survive as a company. What if they would go bankrupt for not getting any income at all? Then what? Now I do think they got their revenue stream under control but, a company cost, servers cost, facilities cost, audits cost. Somewhere you need to get that money, now this is a ill place I agree but hopefully Mozilla and StartCom could come to a meeting point in this matter. > Right, there’s still two years of certificates, and a stable release > of Debian, two releases of OpenBSD, and other OSes, to cover. Since > responsible admins would contact StartCom and ask for rekey/revoke > Right Now™ (or after getting back from vacation, i.e. this month, > probably), it would not be bad for them to waive their fees this > month to people citing this vulnerability. Just revoking *every* > certificate is probably a bit too much. > > The important thing is to do that *right now*, and issue a statement > that they accept their responsibility for the ecosystem and will > waive fees for everyone affected. (I fully understand they will > want handling fees for “at-will” revocals normally. But this is > an exceptional situation!) > I have to agree to that, but normally a Class 1 certificate has a lifespan of 1 year, which means that StartSSL should have a year of certificates to revoke, this can brake alot of websites. > Are you speaking for DigiSSL AB here, or just privately? > > bye, > //mirabilos > I am speaking for myself. The DigiSSL isn't anything active or current, its just a domain I use for mailing but no business from. -- Sincerely, *Pontus Engblom* pontus....@digissl.eu <mailto:pontus....@digissl.eu> |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Matthias Hunstock | 10/04/14 08:45 | Am 10.04.2014 17:25, schrieb Pontus Engblom | DigiSSL AB:The point is: issueing for free and revoking for fee is a model that will lead to non-revocation of certificates with leaked keys. Even if the business model is neither part of a CA's policy nor of the Mozilla CA review process, this is a critical point, especially (but not only) in combination with heartbleed. Actually it's the obligation of the certificate owner to care about the security of the private key and to become active if something happens. At the end it is his server(s) that can be MITM-ed. Don't cry about that, Mozilla doesn't check them anyway. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Dave Cridland | 10/04/14 06:21 | On Thursday, April 10, 2014 10:10:58 AM UTC+1, Kaspar Janßen wrote:The actual policy of the CA might annoy me, and I might think it's wrong, but that in and of itself is not a reason to remove trust. I did have them in my trust store up until now, despite having recommended against them for some time due to their policy, which I consider a bait-and-switch. In other words, I trusted their cryptography, but disliked their business model. Many of my contacts in the XMPP world used their free certificate offering to secure their servers. However, I have removed them from my trust stores at this time because of the number of cases I'm personally aware of where potentially compromised end-entity certificates have not been revoked due to an inability or unwillingness to pay. This does absolutely cause problems; in fact there's a clear argument that it's lowering security by removing my ability to authenticate the certificates of other XMPP servers. However, it's also removing the risk of authenticating a compromised certificate as genuine due to lack of revocation. To put it more simply, the certificate authority has a very high volume of untrustworthy certificates in circulation. At this point, I can no longer generally trust certificates signed by the CA, and I would recommend others do not trust the CA either. This is an unusual situation, and I'd expect cases such as this to be both rare and to require decisions on a case-by-case basis. StartCom can revoke certificates, and are willing to do so for a fee. This is not a question of technical ability. Any CA, to function as a legitimate and trustworthy authority, ought to be able to revoke a certificate, and provide revocation information as published in their certificates according to the relevant standards. StartCom do pass this bar. As to whether or not Chrom[ium] checks revocations, it's possible to set it to do so (and therefore be secure), and insecurity of some client applications is obviously no excuse for a CA to be insecure, but this is really a moot point in this case. Dave. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Greg | 10/04/14 03:44 | On 10/04/2014 10:08, Peter Eckersley wrote:The consequences would be that those domains would not be considered to be secure any longer. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. The certificates must be considered to be compromised if the domain was exposed to the Heartbleed Bug. In order to act responsibly, StartCom must do one of the following: 1) make it possible for all their certificate holders (paid or not) to claim exposure to the bug and have the certificate revoked for that reason without charge, 2) revoke and reissue all active certificates issued by them, or 3) their root CA must be removed from all user agents. Revocation must not require a fee; re-issuing can. That gives certificate holders the option to either re-issue using StartCom, or find another CA. |
| Re: Bug#744027: Revocation Policy | Raphael Geissert | 10/04/14 08:05 | On 10 April 2014 16:38, Thorsten Glaser <t...@mirbsd.de> wrote:
> http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bk0DY8XCEAAPpS7.png:large You can not expect an implementation that doesn't provide key usage checks to, well, check key usage. That said, even if for instance OpenSSL supports them, applications must tell the library what they want it to check for. From a previous look at the openssl-using applications in Debian, those cases are rare. Cheers, -- Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer www.debian.org - get.debian.net |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jon DeVree | 10/04/14 07:52 | On Thursday, April 10, 2014 10:28:38 AM UTC-4, Rob Stradling wrote:I agree 100% and had posted almost this exact statement to bugzilla before being directed here for discussion. The question of whether or not they can (or should) charge fees for this is essentially entirely seperate from the issue at hand. They have failed to revoke certificates reasonably known to be compromised and this is in clear violation of the Moaillz CA Policy. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jon DeVree | 10/04/14 06:33 | My $0.02 is that by charging a fee in order to revoke the certificate of a compromised key, StartCom is violating section #2 of the Mozilla CA Certificate Maintenance Policy which requires that certificates be revoked under certain circumstances, including reasonable evidence that the private key is compromised.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/security-group/certs/policy/maintenance/ Whether or not StartCom can charge (or should) fees for revocations has come up on this list before. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/3naC_Qosfq4/G90NCqzVuK8J In principle I actually agree with Eddy (who is the owner of StartCom) that it isn't the role of Mozilla to dictate a business model to the CAs. The exception to this is that it is Mozilla's role to dictate some security policies to the CAs and these security policies can impact some business models. In this case it is revocation of compromised certificates as stated under section #2 of the CA Policy. The CA policy requires these certificates to be revoked if there is reasonable beliefe that the private keys may be compromised, by making revocation contingent on receiving payment, a CA will fail to comply with this section if a customer does not pay. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Thorsten Glaser | 10/04/14 02:27 | Peter Eckersley dixit:
>> If someone pays 100 USD for certification, he consideres to pay 100 USDNo. I fully expect a revocation for security reasons (as opposed to just a customer saying so out of a whim) to be free of cost, in all cases. It is acceptable for the CA to not reissue a cert to that customer subsequently. A rekey would be preferable.
>Kaspar, suppose that Mozilla followed your suggestion and removedMozilla is big enough to make StartCom reconsider this stance (especially as approximately two or three people *did* get the fee waived – I, along with several others, didn’t, and there are cases where such a fee cannot realistically be paid). And, if not, well, bite the bullet. Distrusting StartCom would aversely affect me too, but unless StartCom changed their stance until Friday, 16:00 UTC, I’ll be pushing for removal of all of their certificates from the root store. This is not a contractual matter between StartCom and their users. This is about the stability of the cryptographic ecosystem, and, in this case, a CA, every CA, has a public responsibility (especially due to the oligopoly they have). See also my eMail <Pine.BSM.4.64L.1404092200300.3173@herc.mirbsd.org> which apparently hasn’t made it to this list yet. bye, //mirabilos -- (gnutls can also be used, but if you are compiling lynx for your own use, there is no reason to consider using that package) -- Thomas E. Dickey on the Lynx mailing list, about OpenSSL |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Thorsten Glaser | 10/04/14 07:38 | Walter Goulet dixit:
You *must* revoke. http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/04/heartbleed-vulnerability-may-have-been-exploited-months-before-patch/ not only shows that this has been exploited since November, but also contains a comment from the guy who said “don’t panic, it is unlikely that private keys have leaked” yesterday, correcting himself. See also: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=744027 ObAmusing: switching to other implementations? Nope. OpenSSL, NSS and the Java™ crowd are the only ones to mostly get it right. http://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bk0DY8XCEAAPpS7.png:large bye, //mirabilos -- <Natureshadow> Warum ist MirWebseite eigentlich so cool? <mirabilos> weil ich ich sie geschrieben habe <Natureshadow> Hast du sie geschrieben oder geforkt? <mirabilos> geschrieben, from scratch <Natureshadow> Ach, deshalb finde ich auch so selten Bugs dadrin. Irgendwie hast du Recht. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Thorsten Glaser | 10/04/14 08:48 | Pontus Engblom | DigiSSL AB dixit: >I would like to inform you that when you get a service you tend toThey apparently changed this practice sometime in between. People who signed up for their service years ago did not have any “handling fee” for revocations.
I do not disagree with people needing to get their money. >I can agree that some certificates _MIGHT_ be compromised and need No. We must assume that all private keys ever used in vulnerable >revocation, but as StartSSL stated earlier, if you got no intention of This would help absolutely nobody because the attacker *still* >But I can not for the life of me see why we can't pay $24.90, they It’s an obligation. CAs have an oligopoly and as such, they have >Also this is issue is quite hard to handle, it is unknown how manyAll certificates that have been in use on systems running OpenSSL 1.x versions since the introduction of the bug and before its fix, even if only for a fraction of a second. We must assume everyone has been compromised, by now. Please see my messages to https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=744027 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=994033 for sources.
Yes. (It would probably be easier to reboot the system…) But for all >> If the servers in your SSL environment do not use OpenSSL, if your Right, there’s still two years of certificates, and a stable release >To actually have a chance here as a CA you would need to contact everyYou cannot access every SSL system. Things like firewalls exist. This does not change the fact that there are already-compromised keys and certificates signed by a trusted CA out there, waiting to be used (or already being used, who knows?) by attackers to fraud by pretending false identities.
Are you speaking for DigiSSL AB here, or just privately?-- <diogenese> Beware of ritual lest you forget the meaning behind it. <igli> yeah but it means if you really care about something, don't ritualise it, or you will lose it. don't fetishise it, don't obsess. or you'll forget why you love it in the first place. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Dave Cridland | 10/04/14 10:55 | On Thursday, April 10, 2014 4:25:46 PM UTC+1, Pontus Engblom | DigiSSL AB wrote:I absolutely agree; however I'd also suggest that the point is moot. The question isn't whether or not people should have known, or even did know, that StartCom's business model is based around charging fees for revocations. It doesn't matter whether anyone thinks this is fair or not - I think it's a dangerous business practise, and I'm surprised that it's considered in line with §2 of Mozilla's CA Certificate Maintenance Policy, but that again is largely irrelevant. That's a worrying position to take. It's actually irrelevant whether the certificate my site is legitimately using is compromised or not. It's whether anyone else can use it to impersonate my site in such a way that's undetectable to my users. Preventing this requires a revocation, so even if you do use a new free certificate, or even switch CA, you still need to revoke the old one. Again, it's not relevant whether I would pay, or you would pay. I'm aware of several people either unable to, or unwilling to. This is a logical consequence of a free certificate service, that charges for revocations, I'm afraid. Ordinarily this probably wouldn't even matter, but the situation we have is hardly ordinary, and therefore there are potentially thousands of StartSSL certificates in circulation, many for Open Source projects and non-profits, which are potentially compromised and therefore untrustworthy. Also irrelevant. It's potential compromise we need to address, since that has a direct bearing on the trustworthiness of the certificates. Yes; that's more or less what needs to happen, unfortunately. Thousands of certificates have been, or are being, revoked currently at the request of their owners. It doesn't matter if I trust StartCom; it does matter that I do not trust the certificates they have signed. While I firmly agree that using a sensible choice of CA, paying a small fee now to cover against disaster later, and all you suggest is sensible, unfortunately I for one cannot trust certificates signed by StartCom at this time and have removed it from my trust anchor list. In the words of the inclusion policy's section 4, I feel they cause me "undue risk". This means that sites such as eff.org and xmpp.org are no longer trusted by my browser; though I note that both seem to be running certificates issued last year, so this is actually a good thing. I'm curious as to what reasoning other people feel a CA which is known to have thousands of potentially compromised certificates in circulation is suitable as a trust anchor. Dave. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jon DeVree | 10/04/14 11:31 | On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 10:55:17 -0700, Dave Cridland wrote:Given that Mozilla no longer checks CRLs anyway, the discussion in general may be largely irrelevant: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=867465#c12 OCSP is still alive and kicking, but it has some pretty notable issues regarding how easy it is to make it soft-fail: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/02/05/crlsets.html In light of all of this, removal of the CA from Mozilla for this would be a bit out of proportion. After all, if a certificate is revoked in the forest and no one is around to watch, is it really revoked? -- Jon |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Kurt Roeckx | 10/04/14 11:41 | On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 02:31:29PM -0400, Jon DeVree wrote:Which is why I think we should really work on getting the majority of the servers to do OCSP stapling. Kurt |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Erwann Abalea | 10/04/14 12:34 | Le jeudi 10 avril 2014 16:28:38 UTC+2, Rob Stradling a écrit :FWIW, I'm pretty confident that my private key hasn't been compromised, even if my personal server was "Heartbleed-enabled". So far, private key leaks have been demonstrated on FreeBSD systems, not on Linux. And only when the first request after the server launch is a HB one. It may be related to different memory allocators. What is absolutely certain is that passwords, cookies, bankind card numbers, and other sensible data has been easily leaked, you probably tried it, like I did. And I bet my bank won't reissue me a new banking card (for free?). |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Dave Cridland | 10/04/14 13:18 | On Thursday, April 10, 2014 7:31:29 PM UTC+1, Jon D wrote:CRLs are a fairly painful method for a browser to check certificate status, as well as lagging behind (they're large - very large right now - and infrequently updated). I'd personally prefer these to be background-downloaded and used as a fallback instead of pass-on-fail OCSP, but hey. If you're arguing that Mozilla should start distributing a CRL of sorts of sites that it deems important, I'm impressed. Yes, OCSP can fail sometimes, and adds an additional initial time. Firefox at least does pass-on-fail by default; sensible users will have turned on fail-on-fail. You're assuming that removal of the CA from Mozilla only affects Firefox. Firstly, the effects are very different on an email client like Thunderbird. There, the OCSP "overhead" is trivial. Secondly, the CA list from Mozilla is used by Debian, Ubuntu, and others who defer trust anchor maintenance to Mozilla. Even if Firefox dropped revocation checking entirely - which would be very foolish in my opinion - it would still affect thousands of applications. As a final point, the status quo in the Mozilla policy is that revocations must be supported; I am not, and do not intend, arguing for any kind of policy change. Dave. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Kaspar Janßen | 10/04/14 13:22 | Thanks for your contribution Pontus.
Admins a telling StartCom that they are holding an valid certificate to an compromised key but they keep the cert valid. Why should Mozilla trust their root anymore? > If we are to blame the CA for not revocating, why aren't there aThis discussion shouldn't just lead to a decision about StartCom. We need a policy that generally prohibits a fee for a revocation. I am not sure if a rekey should be part of a companies freedom or not. I could image that StartCom would say they revoke the certs for free but want the fee for rekeying. In real life this wouldn't change much. At the end of the day, they would stay untrustworthy due to we have to assume a large number of compromised but active certs. The rule of encryption: in doubt compromised! >To stretch it a little bit: If we assume that they don't have a working business model. Maybe I should donate them some money.. maybe in reward of *.google.com? I think I wouldn't be the only interested person. Maybe the NASA? :D It's clear what I mean. This also doesn't make a CA more trustworthy. > Yes, they have no obligation to give us free certificates either. TheyIf a website is plaintext you know what you have. Also if it is self-signed. Someone could still use CaCert or build an own CA. If a CA is in the truststore, he should behave responsible. If this is not possible with a reliable and free offer then we have to deal with it. I don't want to lift the CaCert problem. - end of response - On some comments and on twitter I read things like "crying freetards" and things like that. This makes me angry. I bet these people never heard of things like BEAST or Compression Side Channel Attacks. We are dancing with really bad problems in TLS and know there is a widely trusted CA who gives a **** what he keeps signed. Sorry but this is ridiculous, otherwise the EFF could stop the the development of https everywhere and start feed the world. No they won't and that is good. Kaspar |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Kai Engert | 10/04/14 13:59 | Can we try to gather more information about other CAs?
Do we know if there are other CAs who charge for revocations? Are there CAs where getting a certificate revoked is difficult, because it's not discoverable in the CA's web interface and not mentioned in FAQs, etc.? Any experiences here? Regards Kai |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Peter Eckersley | 10/04/14 16:47 | I think one large and tricky open question here is what the standard for
"suspected of compromise" is. Most of the people who feel strongly about this issue and are posting here are applying what might be termed a precautionary standard: if there was a conceivable way that something might have been compromised, they suspect it of being so. That's the appropriate attitude for highly valuable or sensitive systems. There's a different metric which can be applied, which is what we actually think the probability of a randomly sampled Class 1 CA cert being compromised in the wild is? In order to evaluate that, there are several sub-questions: 0. What is the probability that the cert was on a vulnerable server? As a baseline, 17.5% of HTTPS servers were vulnerable ( http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/04/08/half-a-million-widely-trusted-websites-vulnerable-to-heartbleed-bug.html), though perhaps for Startcom Class 1 it's a bit higher, and for people who ask StartCom for revocation it's probably in the 60-90% range. 1. What is the probability that key extraction from the vulnerable server was possible? We don't really have a number here yet. At EFF we've been trying to replicate reports of key extractions, setting up FreeBSD systems with matched library versions, and we haven't succeeded in obtaining portions of any private keys yet. I would guess the probability on a random server is somewhere between 0.1% and 10%, but the confidence interval there is still pretty low. 2. How long was the window of likely successful attack? Widespread attacks began after the announcement of the bug at around 17:30 UTC on Monday 2013-04-07. Researchers in Alex Halderman's group at the University of Michigan were watching for IPv4-wide attack scans, and saw the first one at 23:01 GMT on 2013-04-09. Servers that were unpatched at that point were almost certain to be attacked maliciously. Servers that were near the top of the Alexa charts or otherwise interesting to some attacker accumulated a growing risk of malicious attack as elapsed time after 17:30 UTC on Monday grew. At EFF we have been investigating the possibility that there were attacks in the wild, and we currently think that was probably the case ( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/wild-heart-were-intelligence-agencies-using-heartbleed-november-2013), although we have yet to receive any reports of replications of Terrence Koeman's observation. Our current most likely belief is that an intelligence agency did use this bug prior to public disclosure, but not on a widespread basis. Servers that are likely to be of interest to these types of APT actors are in a different risk category to other servers. Overall, where does this leave us? I think the situation is genuinely somewhat ambiguous. Given the current evidence, I think that the vast majority of private keys certified by Startcom remain secret, and this may be sufficient for StartCom to argue that the "suspicion of compromise" is not significantly higher than the baseline in a world filled with malware and bugs to begin with. However it's also clear that rekeying is a sound precaution, and that suspicion of compromise is especially rational for cert holders who (a) ran FreeBSD, (b) failed to get a patch deployed quickly, (c) who are plausible targets for APT attackers, or (d) who were likely to receive a lot of malicious attention after the bug was published. I think the *right* thing for Startcom to do here is to revoke and reissue for anyone who cares to ask. Implementing a new tool that lets that happen automatically, using a signature from the previous key, might be the right way to make that scale. However whether a probabilistic suspicion of compromise is objectively rational depends on a lot of variables, and probably only applies if at least one of (a),(b),(c), or (d) is true. Lastly there's a question about whether all old X.509 certs, or all Startcom certs, or any such category, should be distrusted in bulk. I think it would be a disservice of insane proportions to Mozilla's users, since doing so effectively imposes a TLS tax on every poor admin who has to repair a server knocked over by that action, and the vast majority of certs distrusted in such a campaign were in fact still good and serving to make users safer. One last point: please implement Perfect Forward Secrecy if you haven't already everyone! That's the single biggest thing we can do to reduce the risk created by intelligence agencies' key compromise attacks. On 10 April 2014 07:28, Rob Stradling <rob.st...@comodo.com> wrote: > The Mozilla CA Certificate Maintenance Policy (Version 2.2) [1] says > (emphasis mine): > > "CAs _must revoke_ Certificates that they have issued upon the occurrence > of any of the following events: > ... > - the CA obtains _reasonable evidence_ that the subscriber's private key > (corresponding to the public key in the certificate) has been compromised > or is _suspected of compromise_ (e.g. Debian weak keys)" > > I think that's pretty clear! > > The CABForum BRs go one step further, demanding that the CA revoke _within > 24 hours_. > > AFAICT, non-payment by the Subscriber does not release the CA from this > obligation to revoke promptly. > > Anyone disagree with my interpretation? > > > [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/ > security-group/certs/policy/maintenance/ > > > On 10/04/14 15:16, fhw...@gmail.com wrote: > >> This an interesting issue Kaspar and I appreciate you raising it. I also >> personally appreciate you framing it in terms of trust because that's >> really what is at issue here. >> >> The whole idea of revocation is a gaping hole in the PKI landscape. The >> ability to say "don't trust me" is so poorly implemented throughout PKI as >> to be effectively non-existent. If for some reason you need to revoke a >> cert, you should do so because it's the right thing to do, but the best you >> can hope for is that some anti-security person doesn't figure out a way to >> use it anyway. >> >> This means that theft and other compromises of private keys remain viable >> attack vectors for those who wish to do so (government sponsored >> organizations and otherwise). Private keys and the certs that go with them >> could be usable well after when people think they become invalid. >> >> This also means that we should not be surprised to see an underground >> market appear that seeks to sell "revoked" certs. Given that "high value" >> internet destinations might have been impacted by the Heartbleed >> vulnerability this could definitely become a concern. Should such a place >> appear I would think StartCom - issued certs would easily be included for >> sale. >> >> This also means that all "pay to revoke" policies should be viewed as >> anti-security and we need to "strongly encourage" they be discontinued in >> short order. If a CA wishes to continue such policies I would question >> their trustworthiness. >> >> Further I think we are reaching the point where browsers have to refuse >> SSL connections when OCSP validation fails. I think it's getting harder to >> argue otherwise, but I'll let the Mozilla folks speak to that. >> >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: Kaspar Janßen >> Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 4:12 AM >> >> On 10/04/14 10:08, Peter Eckersley wrote: >> >>> Kaspar, suppose that Mozilla followed your suggestion and removed >>> StartCom's root certificates from its trust store (or revoked them!). >>> What >>> would the consequences of that decision be, for the large number of >>> domains >>> that rely on StartCom certs? >>> >> I hope that an appropriate policy will force authorities to reconsider >> their revocation principle. I don't want to harm someone nor I want to >> work off in any way. >> >> The key is that anybody should be able to shout out "don't trust me >> anymore!" without a fee. Isn't that part of the trustchain idea? >> >> I read a few times that Chrome doesn't even check if a certificate is >> revoked or not (at least not the default settings). That leads me to the >> question: Is it mandatory for a CA in mozilla's truststore to have to >> ability to revoke a certificate or is is only an optional feature >> provided by some CAs? >> _______________________________________________ >> dev-security-policy mailing list >> dev-secur...@lists.mozilla.org >> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy >> >> > -- > Rob Stradling > Senior Research & Development Scientist > COMODO - Creating Trust Online > > > _______________________________________________ > dev-security-policy mailing list > dev-secur...@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy > |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Matthias Hunstock | 11/04/14 04:06 | Am 11.04.2014 01:47, schrieb Peter Eckersley:you are supposing to trust a signature created by a possibly compromised key ? |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Peter Eckersley | 11/04/14 09:46 | On 11 April 2014 04:06, Matthias Hunstock <no-...@ple4se.org> wrote:Of course, yes. For revocation this is the correct approach. Supposing you are unlucky and strange guy named Eve has the private key from your cert. Now there are two people who can revoke your certificate: you, and Eve. Reissuance should of course still involve fresh Domain Validation. Which is only moderately secure, but that's as good as PKIX can ever do for you today. |
| Cloudflare heartbleed challenge, Re: Revocation Policy | Jürgen Brauckmann | 12/04/14 00:27 | Am 10.04.2014 21:34, schrieb Erwann Abalea:
> FWIW, I'm pretty confident that my private key hasn't been > compromised, even if my personal server was "Heartbleed-enabled". So > far, private key leaks have been demonstrated on FreeBSD systems, not > on Linux. And only when the first request after the server launch is > a HB one. It may be related to different memory allocators. Cloudflare set up a challenge with nginx on Ubuntu. Seems some people succeeded in extracting the servers private key: https://www.cloudflarechallenge.com/heartbleed http://blog.cloudflare.com/answering-the-critical-question-can-you-get-private-ssl-keys-using-heartbleed Juergen |
| Re: Cloudflare heartbleed challenge, Re: Revocation Policy | Florian Weimer | 12/04/14 05:42 | * Jürgen Brauckmann:
FWIW, I've asked Comodo to revoke the Cloudflare certificate due to this compromise. The challenge itself is probably against the subscriber agreement, but that is an internal matter between Cloudflare and Comodo. On the other hand, I do think that a rule that requires CAs to revoke keys against the subscriber's will can be problematic. But nevertheless, it's a rule, and we'll see if all those costly audits are good at ensuring that CAs follow it. |
| Re: Cloudflare heartbleed challenge, Re: Revocation Policy | Peter Eckersley | 12/04/14 14:57 | Florian, there's something that about legal rules that is often quite
unintuitive to those of us with technical backgrounds: lawyers don't necessarily expect them to be followed exhaustively all of the time. At least in common law countries (.us, .uk, .ca, .au, .il, and many more), legal rules exist most profoundly to resolve disputes between people who cannot resolve their dispute by less formal means. As a legal instrument, the Baseline Requirements should be understood in the same tradition. They exist as operational guidelines, and as a fallback mechanism if there is an unresolved dispute with a CA. The Cloudflare Challenge is a pretty unusual case that probably wasn't anticipated by whoever drafted the BRs and the Comodo CPS. But if there's nobody who has a security problem because of the Cloudflare Challenge, why on earth would the cert be revoked? Putting it another way, given that the Cloudflare Challenge is good for Internet security (it's giving us better information about what the blackhats can and can't do), why would you try to make Comodo revoke it? |
| Re: Cloudflare heartbleed challenge, Re: Revocation Policy | Florian Weimer | 13/04/14 13:36 | * Peter Eckersley:
And they tend to withhold compassion (or technical judgments). Exactly, once lawyers are involved, formalities matter, and the rules are quite different compared to what we would use otherwise. I totally disagree with that, for two reasons. The first one is that we are not merely dealing with a dispute between two contracting parties. If subscribers and CAs were free to negotiate alternative terms, the current frameworks of policy reviews and audits would be completely pointless. The second reason is the following: What you are proposing is a value judgement. But these have no place in the browser PKI. For example, a properly contained sub-CA which issues interception certificates for internal company use arguably increases security for the covered users because content passing in and out can be reviewed independently from the end points. Furthermore, many people will agree that interception certificates for targeting terrorists and other criminals would result in a net benefit as well. I think it is extremely difficult to draw the line between "good" CA policy violations and "bad" ones, so it's better not to start. Requesting certificates with the intent of leaking the private key is against the rules, so just don't do it. It is debatable whether the rules makes sense (especially the CA-initiated revocations on key compromise, as mandated by Mozilla's rules, seem problematic to me), but then the rules need changing. |
| Re: Cloudflare heartbleed challenge, Re: Revocation Policy | Peter Eckersley | 14/04/14 16:54 | On 13 April 2014 13:36, Florian Weimer <f...@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:I agree with everything you say above: the PKIX should be a way of reliably mapping between domain names and keys, and nothing more. Value judgements and policy belong at different layers of the stack that PKI (ideally, in layers with more user control and less exposure to 50-150 jurisdictions). Unfortunately, the people who set up the PKIX didn't understand this, and put a lot of foolish policy-like language into the hybrid CPS-Baseline Requirements-industrial complex. Now to make matters worse, there are *some* cases where we really expect CAs to be doing extra legwork and revoking proactively. Basically, that's any situation where we should expect centralisation of expertise to be socially productive. Looking for and revoking certs that *without the domain's knowledge* had a weak key (RNG bugs, for instance) in it is an appropriate thing for CAs to refuse to issue/revoke on. Heartbleed could turn into such a scenario, where we really think that some large and identifiable set of certs now have untrustworthy keys, but the evidence isn't there yet. The cloudlfarechallenge.com case is totally different to a case where a domain was unknowingly using a weak key. Here we have a scenario where the purpose of the domain is to *test* whether the name <-> key mapping is secure. Nobody is going to that site for any other purpose. Of course cloudflare could rekey the site now that the contest has been won, but actually that would be slightly inconvenient to its users, since they can't check claims of key compromise on Twitter as easily if the key on the site changes. And probably they want to leave it running a vulnerable OpenSSL, so we can learn how much the blackhats and intelligence agencies could have done with this bug. Another distantly related example would be a site that knowingly selects an RSA key with more than two factors, as an informed performance/security tradeoff. I think that forcing CAs to revoke in such cases is foolishly importing judgement calls into the PKIX layer, just as much as going after the "terrorists and other criminals'" certs would be. |
| RE: Cloudflare heartbleed challenge, Re: Revocation Policy | Jeremy Rowley | 14/04/14 20:21 | Some comments:
[JR] Incorrect. From 5280: "The goal of this specification is to develop a profile to facilitate the use of X.509 certificates within Internet applications for those communities wishing to make use of X.509 technology. Such applications may include WWW, electronic mail, user authentication, and IPsec. In order to relieve some of the obstacles to using X.509 certificates, this document defines a profile to promote the development of certificate management systems, development of application tools, and interoperability determined by policy." [JR] Your statement above was a policy statement and value judgment. By doing so, you are placing a policy constraint on PKI that does not exist in the RFCs. [JR] I think they understood it quite well. It was designed to map keys to subject information and permit a variety of uses. In that, PKI is quite flexible as evidenced by the broad use across a variety of platforms and applications (including email, access control, sign-on services, SSL, etc). Jeremy |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Matthias Hunstock | 15/04/14 00:27 | Am 11.04.2014 18:46, schrieb Peter Eckersley:Ah, for revocation. Your post read as if you meant reissuance also. Regards |
| Re: Revocation Policy | tyler...@gmail.com | 18/04/14 02:32 | Would it be feasible for Mozilla to maintain a CRL-like that sidesteps the need for the CA to revoke a cert?
This way if a CA is behaving badly the certificate still gets invalidated. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Daniel Micay | 21/04/14 09:32 | On 18/04/14 05:32 AM, tyler...@gmail.com wrote:I think it would be a lot saner to simply stop showing a shiny green lock for a CA violating the policy. This way, sites will continue to work for users and there will be no loss of security. However, Firefox won't be giving users a false sense of security. Mozilla has all the cards in their hands here. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Radu Hociung | 21/04/14 17:50 | On Monday, April 21, 2014 12:32:43 PM UTC-4, Daniel Micay wrote:Indeed. I'm glad to see others before me reached the same conclusion, that the appropriate response is to remove the trusted status of Startcom. The original bugzilla #994033 was closed, this issue has been debated in the mailing list for a few days, but what is the resolution? AFAICT, Mozilla's position is "Startcom is here to stay"? |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Daniel Micay | 21/04/14 18:03 | I think it's only realism to leave them in the trust store. Removing it
would break sites and cause users to flee to other browsers. Having it stop being shown as a secure connection is a very realistic option. It can still be shown as https, just without the "secure" marker. It would also be great if it stopped telling users the connection is secure when the cipher lacks perfect forward secrecy. If you want servers to start supporting it, that's exactly how. We all know this OpenSSL bug is not going to be the last. Traffic captured today over connections not using perfect forward secrecy is *not secure*. Firefox should stop telling users it is. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Peter Eckersley | 21/04/14 18:18 | Removing Startcom from the trust root would be a catastrophe for the
security of Mozilla's users, since it would move the Web from one free CA to zero free CAs, thereby forcing over a hundred thousand websites from HTTPS (which is actually still not terrible, even if you had a window of Heartbleed vulnerability) to HTTP (which is completely and utterly insecurable). Startcom needs to implement support for free self-signed revocation, but I don't think they're obliged to reissue for you. And my advice to any website that (a) wants to do something to feel better about Heartbleed and (b) isn't willing to pay $25 for reissuance would be to turn on Perfect Forward Secrecy and keep using their old cert. That's going to get you to a better final state than revoking and using HTTP or self-signed w/ cert warnings.
|
| Re: Revocation Policy | Tyler Szabo | 21/04/14 22:18 | It's worth noting that StartCom isn't actually a free CA. They've
demonstrated that with the business model they're using. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Pontus Engblom | 22/04/14 08:04 | So, getting a certificate for free, isn't free?
Or are they just a free CA up until you need to revocate? Every business need to get a income from something, now this fee was put on revocations to keep people from revocating/re-issuing etc, think before you buy or whatever you like to call it. The $25 fee been there since around 2010 at least according to web.archive.org, meaning that none of your certificates can be claimed "Well hey, this policy wasn't there when I signed up". Yeah, it kinda was. And yes, I agree with Peter that maybe it would be better to implement free revocation from StartCom's side but take out a fee for reissue, that might be a plan for the future. Now post-heartbleed we have learned that if you have a certificate at StartCom, you have to pay to get it revoked (but some people claimed their certs got revoked without paying), most people that seek to StartCom is just in it for the padlock, their not willing to invest any money whatsoever into security (if so, they clearly would have paid the $25 and carried on with their day), we should really be focusing on a Mozilla revocation policy, which must be a lot clearer (and *stricter*?). |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 23/04/14 08:51 | On 04/10/2014 07:05 PM, Eddy Nigg wrote:
> I agree - I've saw the tweets bug reports and this posting. I'll be glad > to join the discussion and we intend to take a public stance as soon as > things calm down a bit. > > Currently all hell is lose, but I promise to get back to you all in due > time and will explain our position, policy and practices and also refute > some of the claims that were made. > > In the meantime please be patient, thanks. > Alright - things have calmed down luckily by now. As my first input to the discussion please read carefully my explanation, thoughts and comments I've written down in my blog at https://blog.startcom.org/?p=230 -- Regards Signer: Eddy Nigg, COO/CTO StartCom Ltd. <http://www.startcom.org> XMPP: star...@startcom.org <xmpp:s...@startcom.org> Blog: Join the Revolution! <http://blog.startcom.org> Twitter: Follow Me <http://twitter.com/eddy_nigg> |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Radu Hociung | 23/04/14 12:32 | The total cost of the certificate is not $0. Total cost would include issuance, re-issuance and any revocations.
But consider this, when you go about your daily browsing business, for some of the forums and sites you visit, someone other than the site's owner also holds a private key and a valid startcom certificate. On these sites, you can be MITM'd. What will you do do avoid this? Check what's behind the (now meaningless) green lock? what if the site replaced its certificate with a new one, non-startcom ? You can still be MITM'd using the existing, valid cert, so you can't even be certain that you're safe. Instead of forum, you can also think IMAP mailbox, or other services which are not browser based (jabber, vpn, SVN repo, etc), so there is no green lock that you can click on to investigate. How can you prevent being owned? 1. You can avoid putting your private info anywhere. 2. You can right click the lock before clicking "submit", and double check if you're not trusting a startcom certificate, or if you are, figure out if this particular certificate has ever been susceptible to being heartbled? 3. Edit the certificate store and Untrust StartCom? What is a typical person to do? I do feel that discussing this further is pointless, as Mozilla still tells us to trust CNNIC, and a few other highly questionable CA's. It's probably unwise to trust Mozilla. Consider also that the presence of Startcom in this market is a barrier to entry to other, honest and potentially inexpensive CAs. How can they compete with the perceived "free" certificates that Startcom floods the SSL space with? BTW, I cannot find any discussion on Microsoft/Apple's position WRT Startcom? Please share a link if you have one. Also, where can one buy some of those pkeys? Any links? |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 23/04/14 15:00 | On 04/23/2014 10:32 PM, Radu Hociung wrote:I do have a few questions to you! How can you know that a site using a certificate from ANY CA isn't or wasn't affected by the Heartbleed bug? Do you know how many certificates from CAs other than StartCom have NOT been revoked? And can you tell me which of the currently installed certificates no matter who the issuer is were issued after a revocation of a previous certificate? Once you can answer me these questions I have an interesting surprise for you.... No, it's not, otherwise StartCom would own 100% of the market share which it doesn't. The offerings of StartCom suite certain users and others not. They are free of charge no matter what - and under normal circumstances will not cost anything. Approximately 17% might be affected by this bug, another 87% are not. This means users are getting year after year a free service for 0.00 US$ from StartCom and keep getting it now and in the future, the rare exception which isn't even under our control are revocations. And if it wouldn't be necessary to raise a fee for that we wouldn't either. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Radu Hociung | 23/04/14 19:04 | On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 6:00:41 PM UTC-4, Eddy Nigg wrote:I'm planning on a more thorough answer that cross references the SSL observatory data from 2010 with a fresh update, and with published CRLs. One would expect that each CA would have about 17% of their issued certificates be revoked and re-keyed due to heartbleed. In a day or two I should have some stats. But meanwhile, there is no way for me to know how many pkeys out there have been leaked. Google and a couple others had advance notice of the bug and I would imagine they've scanned the internet before the bug was announced, and have a more comprehensive list of certificates at risk. Maybe someone from Google can chime in? I fully expect them to build a blacklist into the SafeBrowsing Chrome filter. As you well know, there is a sizeable number of admins that had the bug, and used a Startcom certificate, who are not planning on paying your fee. I have not heard of similar hardship from admins who use other providers' certificates. So it's fair to say, that the name Startcom will appear on a lot more compromised certificates, than the other guys names. I hope to update you in a few days with some stats from my investigation into SSL-Observatory vs. current CRL lists, but I can tell you now that I see some CAs that had an average of 20 revocations/day in March but have shot up to 300 revocations/day in April (ie, 15x increase). Startcom went from ~4 to ~22/day (5x increase). One would expect 17% of about 130k Startcom certs to be revoked due to heartbleed. (or a cool $500K, right?). However at the current rate of 22/day, 82% of the affected certificates will still be valid on their expiration day. Perhaps you are unaware of the competitive advantage you're currently enjoying. Regards, Radu Hociung |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Martin Rublik | 24/04/14 00:12 | On 24. 4. 2014 4:04, Radu Hociung wrote:SANS has a nice overview of recent revocation activity https://isc.sans.edu/crls.html Martin |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 24/04/14 10:15 | On 04/24/2014 05:04 AM, Radu Hociung wrote:Don't waste your time, I'll help you....: https://isc.sans.edu/crls.html Now, using current data from Netcraft which I'm not really allowed to publish shows StartCom with slightly above 100,000 certificates. Without leaking any more data from Netcraft I can tell you that the revocation rate of StartSSL is in fact higher than any other CA except GlobalSign, but their situation is unique (and maybe also problematic due to the CRL size). Assuming that 17% of all certificates were affected by teh bug you can see easily that about 1.5% of all certificates were revoked in average excluding GlobalSign. StartCom's revocations is currently slightly short of 2%, above average. It also means that in average there are still 15.5% of certificates that might be affected and still not revoked, assuming none of them expired. Not that I believe that those keys in fact have been compromised, but applying your logic there are a bunch of CAs you probably should disable now. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 24/04/14 10:24 | On 04/24/2014 08:15 PM, Eddy Nigg wrote:Sorry, this statement should have said higher than the average and not every CA. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Kathleen Wilson | 24/04/14 13:03 | On 4/24/14, 10:15 AM, Eddy Nigg wrote:In case anyone missed this one: http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-hard-costs-of-heartbleed |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jan Lühr | 25/04/14 01:35 | Hello,
Yes. It is. I requested the revocation of two StartSSL certificates due to CVE-2014-0160 more than two weeks ago. The revocation has not happened, probably due lack of payment methods I provided so far. IMHO: This violates mozillas polices (as quoted). I think, there is an urgent need for a public statement from mozilla: Being either: -> An explanation, why StartSSL is still in the trust store although violating or mozilla's policies. OR -> An explanation, that StartSSL is removed. This statement is urgently needed - imho. Thanks, Jan |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eric Mill | 25/04/14 07:25 | Eddy -- it's a worldwide security vulnerability. Just make an exception.
One time free revocation for any class 1 certs where the customer uses the word "Heartbleed" in their revocation request. It's not too late to change your mind. -- Eric > _______________________________________________-- konklone.com | @konklone <https://twitter.com/konklone> |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Zack Weinberg | 25/04/14 09:14 | -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
> Alright - things have calmed down luckily by now. As my first inputI would like to point out that this assumption > According to my understanding of this vulnerability, for [the private > key to be leaked] an attacker must have performed the attack on the > server right after a restart when the private key is loaded into > memory and still within the first 64K allocated memory space has been demonstrated to be false: due to further implementation bugs, one of the RSA secret primes, 'p', has a chance to be copied to a higher memory address, and not erased thereafter, upon each new TLS handshake. Please see http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2014/04/25/heartbleed-and-rsa-private-keys/ for more detail. That being the case, Heartbleed-related revocations should, per section 4.9.1 of https://www.startssl.com/policy.pdf, be handled as the case where "the subscriber's key is suspected to be compromised". It is my understanding of that document that such revocations do *not* carry a handling fee; handling fees only apply to the final clause in the list ("the subscriber makes a request for revocation") *without* any of the other cases applying. (I admit that the document is ambiguous - you should also redraft it to make the scope of the (*) footnote clearer.) Moreover, it is my personal opinion that as a matter of basic business ethics, this is a cost you (or rather, your insurance) should absorb, not your customers. zw -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 Comment: Using GnuPG with Icedove - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJTWoniAAoJEJH8wytnaapk0uAQAMdB3/IEWgHr+MdM4OBy/V1p vG5Hkxa5hWJfrRs9zKc7L/30nzBeGaUqSzr6z++u/utVDbL6i0xc8Q02U31+CasJ cC7XeytpId+au1cd6uf2el3CbSc12mQGHzSYXczqW0ThawL0JaEfscfol7TXTfDH MS1qW6mTnzRtgwJLRUrV9tywqaB1zEAfH9JqwWO9XHQ+Ssl6/1TZ8C8VBYXl6A4M D4tZS/KPEpRdPCrgg23MsV7cNawmPJiX6Xt7JGB979CfiCwc7j3+iEpqdtPkvCAT SHvye1CTfDPn5wKWi1b5e7O0zhzn/rTU16Wi8nV6K1WN8POgaukdxEzEvbrp9XKA xLcbu/ynYlD2icfqkE0Z0hBZFYraFOaksQbmIkVW7fmb1o3QVJDULpQRoQ8NjTp7 //XvK4gPTipAVl7h6ga4cr0ReY4tws9BflgovWVKj3ZOnI8D6q0Tiwix4q5zTs/2 g7OHVW2zndmTrjOGY+DsZEb0GoIeE/1vt8emegmF1kbvijMyUazlSvrZlLULGMA3 yxZabJTBgJgisYhG3FbzFHLKjc4It6R8Jy1i9w7KHFlnFYYglo7K0Ch2IHSPC21E dibDD4STURX4F/5gxcwwaBHizh2MH65xNBo4nL/4sAtr6fP3XQaNSWI8yKBR/Cji +VTeKZTjjm3MsTuDonSc =r8JA -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jan Lühr | 25/04/14 10:50 | Hello,
thanks for explaining your reasons, but I don't agree on your position in two major points. You say: "The majority understands and cooperate fully, but there are those that cry foul. Unjustified though, because StartCom has clearly disclosed this fact at its web sites and policies and has never hidden it." What's your argument here? Is "crying foul" "Unjustified", because nobody "cried foul" the moment you published your policies? Please consider: Heartbleed-scale problems have hardly happened before. I'ven't considered any mass-key-compromise scenarios before [1] - Looking at the state of OSCP out there, I might not be the only one. Personally, I am "crying foul" because I'm re-thinking your policies having heartbleed in mind. Is this unjustified? I don't think so. But arguing it is, because I could have done this earlier is not constructive. The crucial part is - imho: Is StartSSL still trustworthy while having these policies? - aka: Does it comply with the mozilla ones? Personally, I vote no. StartSSL is not revoking certificates assumed to be compromised, if a subscriber doesn't pay. IMHO it boils down this question: What is the likelihood and impact of encountering compromised, non-revoked StartSSL-certificates? -> You say it is small / low by describing the circumstances under which it happens and causes an impact. -> Others disagree, going safety first. "(...) private keys should be considered as compromised and regenerated as soon as possible." [2] I respect your / StartSSLs opinion, but vote for safety first. IMHO "safety first" is an important property of a trustworthy CA. However, it's not up to me to decided whether StartSSL is still "ok" to be shipped with mozilla. I hope to see an official statement of mozilla, soon. Greetz, Jan P.S. (i) I really hope, that you change your mind by doing revocations for free and charge for re-keying. This will break the issuing-revocation-cycle, too, while going safety first. (ii) I strongly don't agree with that point: "For private sites that are usually not visited by the public (administrative panels for example), changing the host name, deleting the previous DNS entry, obtaining a new certificate and never visit the original site again might work too. Many of the free Class 1 level certificates are used for such purpose." The point is: After key-leakage mitm attacks are possible. Think of an insider being in a encrypted Wifi network. Having "valid" cert for an unused subdomain can do harm ... [1] "Debian-randomness" is the only think, I can remember, but it was smaller, afaik. [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2014/msg00071.html |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Radu Hociung | 25/04/14 11:24 | On Friday, April 25, 2014 1:50:35 PM UTC-4, Jan Lühr wrote:Let's not forget that the StartSSL Class1 certs are issued with two Subject Alternative Name: the subdomain's, (imap.example.com) and the *root domain*s (example.com). This plan implies serving nothing at example.com I too would like to see a statement of official position wrt. Startcom's trustworthiness from Mozilla. Eddy: How many Class1 certificates have you issued that are active and not expired? Check your OCSP logs for activity and your CA logs for expiration, but don't quote Netcraft's estimates. That's dishonest. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Zack Weinberg | 25/04/14 12:29 | -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On 04/25/2014 01:50 PM, Jan Lühr wrote:This does not eliminate the perverse incentive to certificate holders. Revocation *and* reissuance need to be zero-cost in a circumstance like this -- **whether or not** the initial certificate was paid for. iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJTWrd/AAoJEJH8wytnaapkuKwQAKdWWJYzR9mU7feU7yiI57j5 yvzQY/Pe0N2hLCy6MviahdD+QjiRsHKSrgqring1DTgDEJ45aTcZXZddWe1zAMc6 wa43OyZH1hIEL12QWkarA/Qo/P2h08v4holfqy68ZzUKXx6VJhRBuzliewx1t1pJ kaVfQNxZnVKxX8LgVifJmi3wWvL6XzueHCE431gQN/epRFArI0HBiQSBdnQYB1W+ yU3yDR4dbopBGLT10DJdnUeUUxUgz/QG3RAtbtmpYf0j1U8/edHa5BT6A35ktAX5 ya6N/O+BYChbn93xBqLTiF83Vicql0NSMziv9k2W2gVkg9JO4QvyACKtxuqxAYSx gYIdkxzJnNDryrhW6T5wRxkr58D5rTukbzJeSBCfld0bmWcvR82c24Zb1C5oJQbN Yz6BpX2wKA9d94GP9P49VyouC2q4BHCqx8XUFUw0YIc9s0n4Wu2pp9Hfth/RceD7 d2sVkpv5FmI5Y4RPVJ0hQ+6si+OmBl/9N5oAplbOqrJ1VCMlQld3+UpBMiZWUkrl itG5/2LBfy5mEc9o8hXqljPM0oQW5PvirgZRMC3lbOCIEiiGl1j7kZnlbcCcd+0n EpUODP7eS1SlyMEGVXZoeGZV8XSVZjxq7bIfEdej4vVFKxH8TlCrC5DImaNw225d nJmgGMujAsC8c4Z2bqCX =Rz2F -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Erwann Abalea | 26/04/14 01:51 | Le vendredi 25 avril 2014 18:14:39 UTC+2, Zack Weinberg a écrit :Please define "customer". |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Zack Weinberg | 26/04/14 06:29 | The people who receive(d) certificates from this CA. Why, do you think
some other category of people is more appropriately considered a CA's customers? zw |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Erwann Abalea | 26/04/14 07:26 | A customer is someone who *buys* goods/services from a business. Buying involves money (or anything playing the same role). I have certificates from Startcom, I didn't pay a single penny for that, therefore I'm not a customer.
All this is a money problem, and nothing is free. Running a CA is expensive, costs associated to revocation (procedures, CRL downloads, OCSP requests) are hidden but far from being negligible. They are usually covered by the price of the certificate. In Startcom's case, this isn't true. Maybe the business model needs to be changed? |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Zack Weinberg | 26/04/14 08:45 | -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On 04/26/2014 10:26 AM, Erwann Abalea wrote:Bullshit. If a business chooses to give some or even all of its services away free, those who benefit from those services are still customers and still in the same ethical relationship with the business as people who paid for services (perhaps the same service, perhaps not). In particular, the business may *not* duck out of ethical obligations incurred by circumstances beyond any customer's control (e.g. catastrophic bugs in software everyone relies on ;-) just because some of its customers are not *paying* customers. CAs should be carrying insurance to cover exactly this sort of low-probability-but-still-foreseeable, high-cost event. iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJTW9SmAAoJEJH8wytnaapkVYUP+gPeX63M/Zkc7XkwQvUX1GvN GWadUxZVD1PZDIHbyfudzlJgC+ru3AjPE33QV1hjZIY9Ez5MAgpUAkU+/Eav4J7K wP/a6y+oh1GNF+1uz1w8QVgOV1fVD2hMGw3LJdorGDpl76+w63Bsal3x9Z5P1UVm qDEiA23t4OOxVKJYhaDny84SzjNmIBePcYP4f0eke1kQqbnBXdu8bVaAlROVhxSn /DYbP9+xb67eOpHTp8gmywc3rEb7v2oEr0xZOl0BhzErUzzASe2Pxf8ibkh36OBG PhUn2F4vXariRFlyaGi5ZxPeQGj1Vs7q/trhFpnVI1wQIQwBolD7/Lh8SoigTt2N WyRKGfYQCg7K8xGslA3C4O7SM3k3hsjXHwrZlku/xpwgt9ArpkB/0KTW6IMgc6lD 4+NutuXSosZYv+b4GMn/Gje69pmaNXuww36jWuibQ2ZUGSR6ZYYrUQSqobWx52aT esZHnwQ+bwS7Zgqr+EZ81Vi0LINHihZUS6yL1wNswAMlDhvqJxMzuDEnY8GdgKvg yJ00fG9w8KPmE8rDSRr8J6vkpo7KH9k0ZNaOG1DRCBd3WJs6xexIMfP6G6xYxMi+ 3NwHSHGB5lQ+KMmaAFW7DZL66lhGvYIBcJqvAm9tjd6DCi25mD3SrkxJY/3bEoDS PpVaZ93c95iRd/DoChq2 =7HgX -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Daniel Micay | 26/04/14 12:53 | On 26/04/14 10:26 AM, Erwann Abalea wrote: > A customer is someone who *buys* goods/services from a business. Buying involves money (or anything playing the same role). I have certificates from Startcom, I didn't pay a single penny for that, therefore I'm not a customer. > All this is a money problem, and nothing is free. > Running a CA is expensive, costs associated to revocation (procedures, CRL downloads, OCSP requests) are hidden but far from being negligible. They are usually covered by the price of the certificate. In Startcom's case, this isn't true. Maybe the business model needs to be changed?If the free certificates were not creating revenue by luring people into the paid offerings, I doubt they would be offered. There's no need to feel pity for a working business model. The Mozilla CA policy states that certificates suspected of compromise *must* be revoked and gives the Debian OpenSSL bug as a clear example of a case where they should be revoked. It doesn't say the customer must be given an opportunity to pay for a revocation... it says they *must be revoked* if the CA is made aware. Mozilla is making it very clear to every CA that these policies do not need to be taken seriously. They're free to violate it as much as they want, and Mozilla will likely only take notice if it causes a major media storm. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 27/04/14 15:07 | On 04/26/2014 10:53 PM, Daniel Micay wrote:You probably aren't around long enough to remember or know about how the StartCom CA was started. Of course to be a serious and realistic certificate provider that has taken down the costs of SSL certificates in general and in order provide an alternative to the existing model, a different business model had to be implemented that makes the operation sustainable. Of course those that enroll for higher validations actually pay partly the issuance costs of the non-validated (Class 1, Free) certificates, however those costs are fairly low considering they share the same infrastructure and personnel. Bottom line is, that though StartCom needs the higher validations in order to sustain the operations, it's the result of the former and the free certificates are not the result of the latter (initially StartCom had only domain control validated and free certificates). |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 27/04/14 15:07 | On 04/25/2014 07:14 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:Thanks for that link, we'll certainly study it too. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 27/04/14 15:07 | On 04/26/2014 06:45 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:We call all of them "subscribers" and we make no difference between a "paying" subscriber and "non-paying" - the difference is only the verification level and respective certificates according to that level. Some of the services carry a fee and some don't - for example no validated subscriber pays actually for the certificates, he/she pays for the validations performed which entitles them for certain type of certificates. Nobody ducks here - such a bug is not under the control of the subscriber and not of the issuer of the certificates, nor can the issuing instance control with which software the certificates are being used, how the keys are handled and so forth. This is not a one-way street and it takes at least two to tango. The subscriber has to comply to the terms and conditions (Subscriber Obligations) the issuer set forth. And the subscriber has to pay certain fees when they apply. Interestingly CAs can insure themselves for mistakes made at their end (errors and omission, but not for mistakes of others. That's exactly the reason why those costs can't be turned onto the insurer (otherwise we'd have done exactly that). |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 27/04/14 15:07 | On 04/25/2014 08:50 PM, Jan Lühr wrote:It's unjustified if as a subscriber you are not willing to accept the terms and conditions of that service, e.g. you want to accept the convenient part of it but not commit to your obligations. True - the closest would be probably the Debian weak keys. I did - I learned from the Debian weak keys a lot. You can't really rethink our policies, this is something we might have to do at some point. You can either agree or disagree with them though. You are expecting to receive all benefits without taking responsibility for your part? Or lets put it like this: As you stated before, how likely is it that such an event like this one occurs? It might have never happened and in fact some 83% are not affected (world-wide), which means that they will happily keep obtaining certificates without ever paying a dime. Would you have used a different software, you could be easily one of those 83% too. Now, exactly because of this and other scenarios, where revocation of a certificate is necessary or is requested for any other reason by the subscriber and it's not due to a failure of the CA we decided to charge a fee in order to protect us from losses. Otherwise the current business model would probably not work...and I'm not even talking about easy abuse that's possible with the current model without raising a fee. Currently the facts show that StartCom's revocation numbers are not lower, in fact a bit above average. And here some more interesting facts: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/04/25/heartbleed-why-arent-certificates-being-revoked.html |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eric Mill | 27/04/14 19:53 | Hi Eddy,
I appreciate how diligent you're being about responding to everyone. And, as I've said elsewhere, I haven't believed that there's an ethical problem with offering free certs with paid revocations as a general business practice. But I'm still not hearing you explain why an exception shouldn't be made for an unprecedented event like this. Debian weak keys was a big deal, but did not have as widespread ramifications as Heartbleed. Resist generalizing: would offering a one-time free revocation for any domain whose owner says the word "Heartbleed" be feasible *right now* for Startcom? Could Startcom get through it okay? Presumably, your CRL lists have already expanded and your bandwidth costs increased. If the number of vulnerable certificates is small enough that you haven't felt guilt-ridden about charging them for revocation, it should also be small enough that the additional marginal cost of waiving the fees for them shouldn't cost you that much. So if you can, just do it. Going forward, everyone will be much more aware of Startcom's revocation fee. If the answer is no, and Startcom has gotten itself into a position where it cannot afford to set aside its general business policy for an Internet-wide emergency, then I guess I have to conclude that yeah, it's not an ethical general business practice either. Part of having a sustainable business is having enough of a buffer so that you can weather an occasional tornado without having to lock your neighbors out of the shelter. -- Eric |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jan Lühr | 27/04/14 23:30 | Hello,
I can changed my mind. I try to learn from errors / mistakes I made, while reflecting / rethinking. As stated earlier, I’ven’t considered mass key compromise so far. Is it my fault? Yes it is and you can blame me for doing so. But this is not the point we’re talking about. Absolutely not. I’m not expecting any benefits and it’s not about that. It’s about the community (aka Mozilla) accepting StartSSL's gift (aka free certificates) by including StartSSL in your their products - or - rejecting it due to side constraints (aka revocation policy). To make this clear: Nobody is expecting StartSSL to do anything for free! Do what ever you like, for the price tag you like. I expect StartSSL to follow mozilla’s policies if they’re shipped with their products. This is one of the criteria _everybody_ needs to follow to be included. Don’t follow it - fine. Give out certificates for free while not being in the truststore (aka being a competitor of CAcert): Fine, I don’t care. We’re not taking about a provider customer relationship (aka: who has to pay?, who is to blame?) here. It’s about: What is the impact of StartSSL policies? I can do the math, too, but there’re no math and no probabilities in mozilla's policies: It is safety first - imho. I’m perfectly fine with raising fees. This is ok - imho. But please do this while following mozilla’s policies. Greetz, Jan |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jeremy Brookman | 28/04/14 00:11 | On 27 April 2014 23:07, Eddy Nigg <eddy...@startcom.org> wrote:Since you bring up the question of subscriber obligations (and this is a slightly tangential issue)... If we take the StartSSL principle that subscribers need to pay a fee to request revocation even in the case of key compromise where there is no malpractice, but then combine it with the subscriber obligation to request revocation in the case of (confirmed?) key compromise, then in receiving a signed class 1 certificate, subscribers accept a financial liability in circumstances outside their control. Can this product therefore really be described as "100% Free"? In the heartbleed case most people only have suspected key compromise and not proven key compromise, so it can be argued that this problem hasn't kicked in. But given the year TLS has had so far, who's to know what'll happen next week? We're all stilling lessons from heartbleed. One lesson is that charging for revocation has wider practical implications than earlier thought; so revocation can't be decoupled from issuance, and therefore that to keep the blanket charge on revocation, StartSSL will have to forego the "No charge and 100% Free" branding on its class 1 certificates. Jeremy |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jürgen Brauckmann | 28/04/14 00:48 | Jeremy Brookman schrieb:
>Which practical implications do you refer to? So, if this turns out to be true in the long run, then the implication is clearly that all CAs should charge for revocation to drive up their revocation stats, right? Juergen |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jeremy Brookman | 28/04/14 01:43 | On 28 April 2014 08:48, Jürgen Brauckmann <brauc...@dfn-cert.de> wrote:Sorry, that was poorly expressed. I meant that needing revocation because of key compromise resulting from security bugs seemed to be a more theoretical than practical consideration; now it's become more real (for me at least; others with more experience might have been more aware already). In particular, for private servers it seemed unlikely. I could imagine needing to revoke a certificate because, say, I'd made a mistake somewhere and needed the certificate reissuing (maybe losing the key or something, or even ), but not otherwise; it seemed to be more a consideration for larger organizations where more people had access to the private key, and there was more likely to be a breach of trust. Live and learn! Jeremy |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Bruce | 28/04/14 07:03 | Although certificate revocation is funded by the certificate subscriber, revocation is for the billions of relying parties. These are the parties that don't know anything about Heartbleed or any other threat that could jeopardize a certificate or a website.
In the CP and/or CPS, the CAs generally have a relying party agreement which says don't trust the certificate unless you have checked the certificate status (i.e. CRL or OCSP). How can the relying party effectively meet this obligation, if the correct certificate status is not responded? Bruce. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Zack Weinberg | 28/04/14 10:53 | -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On 04/27/2014 06:07 PM, Eddy Nigg wrote: >> CAs should be carrying insurance to cover exactly this sort ofI find this both surprising and disturbing. Are you saying that you tried to obtain insurance against the possibility of this sort of catastrophe (keys compromised due to bug in software maintained by third parties) but could not, because no insurer would write the policy? Or are you saying that there is some rule that forbids you to seek such insurance in the first place? Or some third possibility I am not thinking of? Whichever way, this seems like a major problem that needs to be corrected before the *next* time one of these bugs turns up. iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJTXpWwAAoJEJH8wytnaapkW8IP/2BS5qiF/U2C4XI52o9qkgVl hCyZAgyeO9L+rinYOYS/p1KqBjbAyN3sMJM/4WTf06e9p3XXpSoyv6cqXiR5AvNj sjSrHwA0mEsP8hIMmI1idM3KWMCOyc2giGIG7NgZ1EtK+rLULpp5NFgKbYVVYbw3 q39gAhM2czV4SrXOYv67mE7ux8e/cLejOZx7bjkz570JG4myzOU9skNEcqq5crh5 0YIWTDA7jzx0LGPmVcWcX+8w6MMkZxduq+465k/4kdJEPLkpube0APnTLl8zZfIl A/WIQQUgmCkwRRqJpktfwmuHMLdUbH8FPV08mkxlw9gYmn8stdH/HOf7jH9VNb8s Xn+aIEuDBUubWMo23WptSAFZdWSLpD5IYN9IiEqBsxXZj29DxKbhSdbD5Uafxu4j tLMnijky5SDUXx2tt6vVDpx14j+2lVkFfvXWnojKPN48aORrmotaK8eVlOY0RKY8 W8XaawZMbEJ4U0m9cJWECcf28bb5myK390ZRIRF/OfwnLKn4n6+dqDtLgo3xEiCo xGWGtWF1DOhEzqbC3e+BTqIF64mWT7Ndh/4YJ6LZuSWvuczynVqKz32+1xUrDyS6 vhweBPMSwpnnqheFPAgX3qaGnFRyR6ipR8qHmggTw7UMSHhb8KlcTGJ+gu7ZxdIG iejUpsSBUSVMm8onVBsj =xwf2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 28/04/14 12:20 | On 04/28/2014 08:53 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:The typical insurance is protection against claims by third parties due to a failure by the CA. Those are fairly expensive but possible, whereas the sort of catastrophe you mentioned I haven't heard of so far. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 28/04/14 12:20 | On 04/28/2014 10:11 AM, Jeremy Brookman wrote:That's probably true, it's not a negligence on part of the subscriber, in this case it's probably simply bad luck (a different software could have had a bug with similar result at a different time). We've seen it in the past that it can happen (weak keys). That's of course a question of interpretation and probably also of simplicity. Not all services are free of charge of course and our FAQ tries to explain that like this: https://www.startssl.com/?app=25#90 (item 90) |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 28/04/14 12:20 | On 04/28/2014 05:53 AM, Eric Mill wrote:OK I don't think so, not without a financial loss, which we would have to cover from somewhere else. A change to the business model would be more likely in the future, which I however wouldn't really like to see, but there are different options and considerations on the table. All in all the actual result is rather positive with most subscribers complying to the requirement and pay their fees, with the exception of a rather noisy minority - which in turn I can understand too and maybe was to be expected. I think the question about guilt isn't appropriate - I don't feel guilt-ridden. We follow a policy and business model we decided long time ago which is implemented. As any competitor can charge whatever they want for whatever they want, they don't have to feel guilty either, they are running a business. Our CRLs doubled or more since the bug, our OCSP infrastructure isn't exactly cheap either and those that receive the benefits from it are charged a fee as we disclosed and implemented. I believe that's exactly the point, sustainability is important and we took care that the operation will be sustained even in case of a tornado (see also other reply to the list regarding insurance). The subscriber has obligations too and if it happens, the subscriber has to carry some of the costs (maybe never, maybe only once or maybe more than once, that's the risk/benefit). |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jan Lühr | 28/04/14 14:05 | -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1 Hello, [...] well... sadly, I don't think that were actually making any progress in this discussion. The positions seem to be fixed and there hardly any new arguments provided. Thus I vote for a resolution. @certif...@mozilla.org - I _really_ think that we need an qualified / official statement by Mozilla. Please provide it asap - or - give an estimation on a certain time frame: Does StartSSL violate Mozilla's policies by not revoking certificates assumed to be compromised? (Compromised, due to heartbleed, not revoked, because of non-paying subscribers?) If yes: Is StartSSL still considered to be trustworthy, aka shipped the truststore? (This is why I CC'ed certif...@mozilla.org) Thanks in advance, Jan Luehr -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJTXsJ/AAoJEBbh0SAKTJyukM0QAJRZyplHDmeXwsJanL2WTXSJ WyxEWPiuFrPeVuwExX/Suh+nnWW6Iy6rAOszKK4J7DO87zJ4XypFwPbPZE+Yi7G0 auvyVYt8ZN9WOjs8r97ikfRTZVFtsDQlmhEgZqa0n6bxn7KblxyrHki/3DZli21e X4udPCeJPuBZFy60IjSaoJoD5/cADxIDyFOhWGKBACRp4kPXsrDOv6znS248iBDV Be7ygi45RnnKbX+mQN4I7qM0aMOxA8YRVASgA4DD2/nMBCSMMsaAN9bZw83Lre9N dRfsvfnioMwdS/y4WWZzPS7KrbTG+SoWjz2FRRrNiMSNi6SW9NwZVK8jWD44eQSm X3nfvnp3pPMDFfgd5gwZVk9VL2M84E7rOoQyj6XE5qWRozGLhs3K84tO3gHj80NP cuPz8Qiktt0q+RpnS6ecZlre/0MiWO7ljcBI26cLadQMGKQJRnV1161gZLQd8oEf GOsaKunetgvq6O10hHmaSRq9ARWmoHl1Mgd6rNwcOrn9bRxTiCNHq3vbAjPkm8RD Ju4d26GdOLjXtEX6yYIlrOgtZUydhK1wOVq6w1gKxxgxJgwKJA9u+grpQHG1v8lP fHW1mHWBs6bRPeHqT55k30Obz+o9diDA8WV8qdGB/VOX+OEY0i1I+XSpR6S3PH79 e58C/Am59x9UP5Gr/2/m =LIfE -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 28/04/14 14:25 | On 04/29/2014 12:05 AM, Jan Lühr wrote:/Assumed/ it perhaps a good description since it's rather difficult to confirm an actual compromise and if the certificate/key was supposedly hosted at an affected server during its life-time. We believe it's the responsibility of the subscriber to make the correct assessment and do whatever is necessary to get the certificate revoked (or not). I don't want to speak for other CAs (as we are currently taking the burnt on this one), but I'm pretty sure that other CAs have their limits as well what revocations concerns and certificates are not endlessly revoked. Netcraft reports about many reissued certificates, but relatively few revocations: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/04/25/heartbleed-why-arent-certificates-being-revoked.html So this can't be just an issue of StartCom, but perhaps easier to hit because there is a charge involved. Our CRLs can be measured and I believe we've done a fairly good job during those hectic days when the bug was disclosed. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Kathleen Wilson | 28/04/14 16:16 | On 4/28/14, 2:05 PM, Jan Lühr wrote:In regards to policy… In general, Mozilla’s CA Policy does not tell CAs how to structure the finances of their business. According to Mozilla’s CA Maintenance Policy, a CA has to revoke a cert when “the CA obtains reasonable evidence that the subscriber’s private key … has been compromised or is suspected of compromise”. Does showing that the subscriber was running a bad version of OpenSSL count? Many sites that were vulnerable to heartbleed were not provably compromised. Mozilla’s CA Maintenance policy does not say that a CA has to revoke a cert if the software on the server had a bug in it. If the subscriber shows evidence (logs, etc) that their private key was accessed or compromised, then the CA is required to revoke the certificate. But Mozilla’s CA Policy does *not* say that a CA has to issue a replacement cert. My personal opinion… I have personally benefited from "free" certs, and would be sad to see such services go away. However, I understand that in light of recent events CAs who have previously offered free certs might consider adding an up-front fee or shrinking the certificate validity period for free certs. The heartbleed bug caught many of us by surprise, and has caused many of us to reconsider our policies and practices regarding revocation. A positive side effect is that more attention will be put on revocation. (more about this later) Kathleen |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jan Lühr | 29/04/14 01:18 | Hello,
thanks you for your statement! I appreciate this a lot. Ok - I take this as a "StartSSL is not violating Mozilla's policies" - I think that by the nature of heartbleed hardly anybody is able to provide this evidence. I think, the debate is settled now and will leave it. Thanks to you all for your helpful input! I benefited from free services, too. But - personally - the risk of being fooled by assumed-to-be compromised certs is more important to me. By that decision, I removed StartSSL from my truststore. But - as said - this is a personal decision and I don't see any reason for arguing about that. 100% agree - sadly :-/ Being positive here is a nice thing. :-) I'm more and more depressed about the state of PKIs and TLS / SSL out there :-( Greetz, Jan |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jürgen Brauckmann | 29/04/14 01:59 | Jan Lühr schrieb:
> I'm more and more depressed about the state of PKIs and TLS / SSL outWell, did you look into BGP or DNS security recently? In contrast to public opinion, PKI and TLS security is constantly *improving* since 6 or 7 years, because nowadays people actually care. Such "minor" stuff as the Apple "goto fail" bug wouldn't have made it into the mainstream media ten years ago. Due to the effort of e.g. Mozillas CA programm, Microsofts CA programm, the CA/B-Forum and all those people that write "TLS is broken" papers, things are actually getting better. The only question is whether the speed of improvement is fast enough. Its an error to think that technical stuff is secure and sound if nobody talks about it, and its also an error to think that the area where all people are crying foul is the worst with regard to security (or safety). Juergen |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Gervase Markham | 29/04/14 03:33 | On 29/04/14 00:16, Kathleen Wilson wrote:
> My personal opinion… And mine: Free-at-the-point-of-issuance certs have been a great thing for the Internet, and I would be very sad to see them go away. I also think in general that the charging structures of (non-insurance :-) business models are best when they reflect the cost structure incurred in providing the service. Otherwise, one set of customers is subsidising the other ones. (At the moment, for the other CAs, non-Heartbleed-vulnerable customers are subsidising the costs incurred by Heartbleed-vulnerable ones.) I do not understand the logic of "There is now an unexpected expense associated with doing the right thing. Despite the fact that my subscriber agreement says that I should bear that expense, I refuse to do the right thing until the CA bears the expense for me." That seems entirely wrong to me. A contract is a contract. If you don't like contracts which say that the subscriber should pay for revocations, don't sign one, and encourage others not to do so also. And if you signed one, you should meet your obligations. "Let your Yes be Yes, and your No be No." (Jesus). Gerv |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Gervase Markham | 29/04/14 04:09 | On 26/04/14 16:45, Zack Weinberg wrote:Hi Zack, Let's imagine StartCom said to you: "OK, we will perform free revocations for all Heartbleed-affected certificates, as you request. And we are changing our business model to charge up-front for certs like all the other CAs, so we don't get hit with a big cost like this again. No more free-of-charge 1-year-valid certs on the Internet." Would you consider that a good trade-off, in terms of improving the general security of the Internet? Gerv |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jan Lühr | 29/04/14 07:31 | Hello,
Side note - since we're discussing of sth. else: I vote for "yes". Reasons: - At the moment, StartSSLcertificates are not free. They are advertised as free. But the fee for revocation make 'em non-free due to a certain probability. Free in 85% (or sth. %) of all cases is not free in general. - I think, revocation of assumed-to-be compromised certs is important for Internet security. There should be no tempting argument for not doing so in any situation. Laziness, costs are tempting arguments imho. - By advertising certs to be "non-free" and putting the actual price tag on it, alternate CAs like CAcert might get a boost in popularity, emphasizing their importance for global internet security. At the moment, many people skip CAcert in favor of StartSSL, cuase they just can get a "free" certificates in major browsers. I'd like to live in a world, were revocation is without any hassle an Community Driven CAs like CAcert are providing security for sites to be interested in. Greetz, Jan |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Eddy Nigg | 29/04/14 14:48 | On 04/29/2014 05:31 PM, Jan Lühr wrote:And lets assume CAcert would gain that popularity - how do you expect that to be financed exactly? Do you really believe this could be sustained with ideology? I suspected that there are a few CAcert groupies around here with this discussion ;-) But I tell you a little unknown secret, the first time I heard about charging for revocations it was exactly from the folks like Duane and later Ian. You can ask them and they might even confirm it, because they too were looking for solutions to a problem. |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jan Lühr | 29/04/14 15:18 | Hello,
I expect (as in expected value) CAcert to die soon. They hardly(?) sponsors - their own folks consider CAcert to be dead and leave [1]. I It wouldn't surprise me, if they run out of money soon and vanish. Nope. I'm just painting a picture of my ideal world. It clashes with reality far too often :-/. Interesting side node ;-) [1] https://lists.cacert.org/wws/arc/cacert/2014-03/msg00024.html |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Gervase Markham | 30/04/14 03:54 | On 29/04/14 15:31, Jan Lühr wrote:That sounds to me like: "I'd like to live in a world where whatever costs there are for having a certificate system are not borne by me under any circumstances." Gerv |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Jan Lühr | 30/04/14 04:56 | Hello,
No - I’m just dreaming of do-it-yourself communities. But this is off-topic here - plz contact in person if you’re up to discussing this. Regards, Jan |
| Re: Revocation Policy | Zack Weinberg | 02/05/14 10:36 | -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256 I had to think about this for quite a while, and my answer winds up being "it depends". First off, I want to say that estimate the risk of leaving certificates unrevoked post-Heartbleed fairly low, *despite* evidence that it could be exploited to capture private keys, because no one has credibly demonstrated that it was being exploited prior to disclosure (if I'm wrong about this please tell me!) Therefore, as long as the affected server was patched promptly, the odds of a key compromise are low. (At this point, though, there are weaponized exploits circulating, so CAs in general really ought to to crawl their subscriber database and unilaterally revoke certificates that are on servers that are *still* vulnerable.) Because of that, the things we are trading off are (as I see it): marginal probability that someone starting up a new website will make it an HTTPS website, versus aggregate probability that, in response to *similar future* catastrophic events, everyone who should have revoked their certificate does so. I think the main thing that swings this tradeoff is how much that upfront charge is. If you are considering the acquisition of a certificate, you are already paying for a domain registration; domain names cost order of (US)$15 a year, which is peanuts compared to the cost of the server / hosting provider. So a charge on the order of $15 per certificate per year is, I think, not that likely to deter people from making their site HTTPS. Conversely, we know from this very discussion that lots of people considered revoking their free StartCom cert and didn't, precisely because it *wasn't* free. Relatedly, people are generally more comfortable with costs that are predictable than with costs that are unexpected, even if they wind up spending more money in total with the predictable costs. On the other hand, if the cost has to go up to $50 or more, that starts sounding like people who have concrete, not-just-in-principle reasons to make their site HTTPS *will* be deterred, which would be bad. Pulling in something you said in response to Jan: > That sounds to me like: "I'd like to live in a world where- -- I keep coming back to my earlier observation that this sort of low-probability, high-cost event is what insurance is for. Eddy said that he had "never heard of" insurance against losses incurred because of catastrophic failure of software that the business relies on, but given that the state of play in the software industry is to disclaim all warranties at all times while shipping code riddled with bugs, I cannot bring myself to believe that such insurance is unobtainable. It seems like something lots of businesses should want. zw -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJTY9eOAAoJEJH8wytnaapkKjUP/ApOkFHdvk6DhXQuhYt2X5Ot L5or2YprV+I1wRlGWAX2CZLngQWEq0KGGe0Sv59//C4Yq87JlGWjg6uFl8ioE40W H3tI71lGm7W5QneZsg9Acb6jSHGk/ufNNTkTpxQuQCZK6BGRTMXBssV7ucK9dZWc P9VGORKjnSFf8RfBAkRH6OaYrh3f7X3J/AmGI8lYIqKrowV89BiKV89d8KR+7sRa ixfR+1TbOs3D8sAoZoKZZ6ZjBOYhhFFuFnoUu237Sl89AKcVLFjKY/ahv7LMKu+h pRAlczrOwGZY5RHUXuTb0Yg9IZebp6/VqScRzeuugqQ9cFNgEU/5T1F3JMjmOSSS Ae1w6X8O8KhcQjRKcGC4sjG0qDNmF6zFKAC55iglV42QeNvTNAh0b6ZG/ygPw8yN fTN/GxI4JEX4IVAGnM35We3Cmg4KlLwFDhRx6YXrVtfnWyTRHJXAWl8Zbc7z/t6d 5m74F/ZXlHTfLEua/hwnPwk/jTJ50pgnHVVjr/Bl/Sf5URkbNdN7ybpZg/SK2e2J jH3DUwNwqFtUyz6RRlfc4Kr7tP7deyE9Mr+l1cVthPQfTVN918sXZHr2FcaUTZ01 CM9AyZTJzDgFiUqV4sJoXsi4pQOdqhtm0WFnC2iZBczW36B5hdIHbW3oJxQ8vEbM VMN7BHGKew4f0LufVk9n =Lesr -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |