Despite revoked CA’s, StartCom and WoSign continue to sell certificates | Hacker News Reader

Despite revoked CA’s, StartCom and WoSign continue to sell certificates

ma.ttias.be

83 pointstombrossman26 comments

Author of the article here: I learned in the meanwhile that the situation is less bad than it sounds. It's not a link-bait article, but keep in mind that they now resell other CA's certificates, they're not selling their own anymore.

There will however be a brief period where they did sell their own certificates, signed by their own CA, that are now being blocked.

Should we trust them as a reseller? If/when they mess up again, are they nearly so easy to revoke? Does the cert contain their name still?

As far as I'm aware of, validation is performed by the original CA even if you buy the certificate from a reseller.

But I've only bought certs from a handful of resellers, so maybe there are other ways for resellers to integrate with a CA's system. StartSSL's unusual pricing scheme (validate once, get unlimited certs for a year) makes me a bit suspicious in this regard.

I think it goes beyond just trust - they have violated the intent of the concept of trust. The nature of their behavior appears to be malicious. Beyond just not trusting them, they should be ostracized.

Certificate resellers are only taking money in exchange for the cert. They are not doing any validation.

This is true even in cases like Gandi.net where some of the certs they sell come from a custom-branded intermediate certificate. The root CA is Comodo and they are doing the validation, controlling the private key's of the certs that handle issuance, etc. Its just a branding thing.

There are a few cases with Sub-CAs/Registration Authorities where a third-party company is handling some/all of the certificate validation. Symantec is currently in trouble for the bad actions of CrossCert, a Korean company that was licensed to be a Sub-CA. But WoSign/StartCom would not be able to participate in any sort of arrangement like this without being immediately banned again.

So there is no inherent problem with a banned CA continuing to sell certificates that another CA is validating. However, in the investigation of WoSign it was found that the company is deeply dishonest, incompetent, and even a little bit malicious. So anything that puts money in their pocket should be avoided.

> It's not a link-bait article, but keep in mind that they now resell other CA's certificates, they're not selling their own anymore.

Thank you for the information, but I disagree, this is exactly a link-bait article; the headline clearly implies that they are still selling their revoked certs.

Link-bait means the article was written with the intention of getting links. The author is the only person in the world who knows his own intention. You can't really argue him about that because you can't look inside his head and find out his intentions.

He also offered an alternative explanation: the title was a mistake.

I think we can expect to see more questions like this on StackExchange in the near future: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/103405/install...

Disgusting.

Looks like all the browsers need to do a better job communicating that error. Firefox and Safari are the only two that provide any clue as to the problem, however Safari seems to jump to conclusions a bit.

This is the ideal time to switch to Let's Encrypt, and be done with certificate issues once and for all.

https://letsencrypt.org/

https://certbot.eff.org/

You no longer have to ask year after year for a new certificate. It will be renewed automatically for as long as your webserver lives. And everything is backed by good protocols, a strong community and a trustworthy organization (EFF).

> You no longer have to ask year after year for a new certificate.

Now you have to ask every three months.

Not if you can use certbot. Once you set it up your web server will periodically ask for a new cert, get one, and install it automatically, with no interaction required on your part.

Which is intended as an incentive to automate the process, for which there are a bunch of great tools available.

It improves security at the small cost of having to slightly improve your deployment process.

> Now you have to ask every three months.

No, you have a script running that updates your certificate automatically, and you never ever have do that that manually again. Or, you don't need that script because your webserver (e.g. Caddy) does that for you.

Oh, and just in case one of the intermediate certificates of Let's Encrypt had to be revoked for some reason: The very same mechanism would provide you with a new, working certificate as soon as possible. This, again, is fully automatic without any headache on your side.

Do you know any other CA where get this level of comfort?

Nice in theory, but just when I think I have it figured out something changes and the script quits working. Specifically with 3rd-party hosting like NearlyFreeSpeech, not my own, but still a PITA.

That sounds like an integration issue of 3rd-party hosters, not like an issue with Let's Encrypt itself.

I have a running system with Let's Encrypt certificates for webserver (HTTPS) as well as mail server (SMTPS, IMAPS, POP3S), based on nginx, exim4 and dovecot, using certbot.

Setting up Let's Encrypt literally consists of just 3 steps:

1. In the webserver for all domains on HTTP, add alias /.well-known/acme-challenge to /var/www/letsencrypt/.well-known/acme-challenge

2. Run "certbot certonly" once for every domain

3. Add cronjob for "certbot renew" with a post-hook that restarts your webserver and mailservers.

Well, to be honest, there is one more step, but that one is specific to my own setup, and also just a one-time effort:

3a. Add a post-hook command that fixes a permission issue with Debian-exim. Note that this is only needed if you want to use the certificates for SMTPS and use exim under Debian.

If you add a new domain later on, this is just a single step, no need to touch the cronjob:

1. Run "certbot certonly" once for that domain

So yes! Once you have the setup running, setting up a new SSL/TLS domain is actually easier with Let's Encrypt than with any other CA.

(Of course, you'll also have to add the domain to your webserver configuration, but that's always needed, whether you use Let's Encrypt or not.)

Let's Encrypt is great for one-off dev servers but lousy for anything at scale, and certbot doesn't work on Windows, which further limits the CA's utility. certbot would be about a million times more useful if it shipped with support for DNS-based domain validation and dynamic DNS updates.

StartSSL was at the perfect price point for my needs (which are a weird mixture of SMB with Large/Enterprise). It's a damn shame what happened to it.

Unfortunately, StartSSL appear to be claiming that the SSL certificates themselves are free, and that they are only charging for the validation process - and while validation is potentially valuable, if you are unable to issue an SSL certificate that can make use of it, it seems limited.

To say this is "shady practice" is putting it nicely; I daresay few but the keenest observers would pick up the problem.

Well, the "we charge for the validation, not the certificates" approach is how they've done things for ages.

Prior to the clusterfk of becoming untrusted by Mozilla (etc), it was really useful.

Once verified you could generate many certificates (subdomains, etc) without forking over cash each time.

Compared to the general (scam-like?) model of other providers, it seems like a sane alternative.

Now they're untrusted though, it's kind of moot. :(

Maybe a bit off-topic, I encountered a pretty rude experience with StartSSL's free certificate validation process and from then on I would rather pay some money to other vendors than getting a free cert from StartSSL.

But I have been using Let's Encrypt which is pretty automated, and did I say it is totally free? Awesome is a word I will describe this kick-ass product.

Did anybody notice that the Opera browser company and Wosign are both owned by Qihoo? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qihoo_360

What is the status of Wosign/Startcom certificates in the Opera browser? And in the Qihoo ("360 secure") browser?

Is this why I had problems with my new free certificate from StartSSL about 2 weeks ago? It wasn't obvious, I ended up using Let's Encrypt.

Google can use its monopoly to accomplish almost anything!

All major browser vendors, not just Google, distrusted WoSign and StartCom. And it was for a good reason, not just because.

My understanding is the issue with WoSign and discovery of their purchase of StartCom (which violated trusted CA process by not informing anyone that they were sold) was originally done by Mozilla, which was also the first to act to remove them from trust stores.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2016/10/24/distrusting-new...

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