AC Camerfirma's organizationName too long incident report

[mart...@camerfirma.com]

Hello,

We detected 5 certificates issued with ERROR: organizationName too long (X.509 lint)

1. How your CA first became aware of the problem (e.g. via a problem report submitted to your Problem Reporting Mechanism, a discussion in mozilla.dev.security.policy, a Bugzilla bug, or internal self-audit), and the time and date.

We detected these certificates checking the CA issued certificates into crt.sh on August 3, 2018.

2. A timeline of the actions your CA took in response. A timeline is a date-and-time-stamped sequence of all relevant events. This may include events before the incident was reported, such as when a particular requirement became applicable, or a document changed, or a bug was introduced, or an audit was done.

2018-08-03 09:58 UTC --> We detected these 5 certificates and asked the team that manages them to revoke them.
2018-08-03 15:35 UTC --> All the certificates are revoked.

3. Whether your CA has stopped, or has not yet stopped, issuing certificates with the problem. A statement that you have will be considered a pledge to the community; a statement that you have not requires an explanation.

The issuance of certificates from this CA was suspended until the operational control was deployed.


4. A summary of the problematic certificates. For each problem: number of certs, and the date the first and last certs with that problem were issued.

https://crt.sh/?id=617995390
https://crt.sh/?id=606954201
https://crt.sh/?id=606953975
https://crt.sh/?id=606953727
https://crt.sh/?id=604874282


5. The complete certificate data for the problematic certificates. The recommended way to provide this is to ensure each certificate is logged to CT and then list the fingerprints or crt.sh IDs, either in the report or as an attached spreadsheet, with one list per distinct problem.

https://crt.sh/?id=617995390
https://crt.sh/?id=606954201
https://crt.sh/?id=606953975
https://crt.sh/?id=606953727
https://crt.sh/?id=604874282


6. Explanation about how and why the mistakes were made or bugs introduced, and how they avoided detection until now.

There was no effective control into Multicert's PKI platform about DN's O lenth and this CA wasn't included into Camerfirma's quality controls until 2018-08-03.


7. List of steps your CA is taking to resolve the situation and ensure such issuance will not be repeated in the future, accompanied with a timeline of when your CA expects to accomplish these things.

- Multicert's team have added an operational control and they'll delploy the techinical control on August 9
- Multicert's team will check crt.sh for misissued certificates (from today forward).
- Camerfirma will check for certificates issued by new intermedite CAs into crt.sh no more than 24 hours after the CA certificate issuance (from today forward).

Your comments and suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!
Juan Ángel

[Ryan Sleevi]

Hi Juan,

Can you speak more to what the technical controls being deployed are?

The DNs O length comes from X.509v3 and RFC 5280, so it's a bit baffling to
understand how there wasn't an effective control there. It does call into
question the potential for a lack of other effective controls, which could
be concerning.

With respect to Camerfirma checking post-issuance what Multicert is doing,
that's certainly the minimum expected, as you've cross-certified them. Can
you help explain why this wasn't already part of your process and controls
when working with third-party CAs? Can you explain why Multicert's PKI
platform is allowed independent issuance, rather than having Camerfirma
manage and maintain that for them, and how the community can rely on
Camerfirma appropriately supervising and mitigating that risk going forward?

I think it is good that you detected this, but note that your incident
report doesn't actually examine when Multicert first had this issue.
Looking at https://crt.sh/?id=617995390 for example, I see it being July
24. Can you explain why it took so long to detect? Can you discuss how far
back you've examined Multicerts issuance?

[Wayne Thayer]

Thank you for the incident report Juan. I created
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1481862 to track this issue.
Please update the bug as action items are completed.

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