DigiNotar root CA trust removal follow-up

For the backstory, this conference was at 00:30, and interrupting the public channels only happens when there's big news, plane crashes, etc.

"Gebruikers van SSL certificaten kunnen afhankelijk van de desbetreffende browserleverancier geconfronteerd worden met een mededeling dat het certificaat niet vertrouwd wordt. Dit is in 99,9% van de gevallen onjuist, het certificaat kan wel worden vertrouwd. Dit kan handmatig door de gebruiker zelf worden aangegeven in de browser (hiervoor kunt u terecht op de FAQ op onze website)."

Translates (roughly) to this:

Depending on the browsers a user of SSL certificates may be confronted with a message stating the certificate is not trusted. In 99.9% of the cases this is not correct, the certificate can be trusted. The user can do this manually using his browser (see our FAQ).

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Given the situation I don't think that is the right message. I think people should not be told that 99.9% of certificates can be trusted even though their computer says no.

They are willing to give people new certificates chained to the PKIOverheid, but that comes with the rules and requirements of those certs, and looking at later news it sounds like the Dutch government has revoked their access to that and will be taking over.

Size of the company doesn't really matter too. If it matters we would have a single CA.

Apparently even my new passport is signed by the Diginotar PKI. I'm wondering when this will be big news in Holland.

I think it's much more likely that lacking any evidence of widespread active fraud, ecommerce would simply go on as usual but with more trip wires to detect fraud and perhaps delayed payments to reduce the chance that money from fraudulent transactions would make its way to the bad guys. And of course, they'd switch out all the certs ASAP. It's a chance merchants and banks would be willing to take, I suspect, and sort out damages in court afterwards.

Point and laugh at them until they look up from counting their money long enough to realize that the entire value proposition of their business model is at risk.

Maybe they're ready for some change now?

Because we were dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of commitments, we needed a certificate architecture that would verify the seller, the buyer, and for each of those parties to verify the site.

I went to Verisign and asked them for the best solution, and this is what they setup:

- we had a Verisign terminal setup in the office. This was a normal computer, but locked down to only run Verisign software. It was a flavor of UNIX

- the terminal had a smart-card reader on it, and a private net connection that went only back to Verisign.

- the authentication to login to the computer was two passwords, both with secure tokens, and two smart cards

- when you login, you do the ID shuffle, which involved two people who had background checks conducted on them etc.

- we generate a certificate, which is then signed using a sub-CA certificate that Verisign issues to us

- Our certificate thus acted as a CA, but it was authorized by Verisign, so the certs that we signed would then check out using the built-in browser CA certs

This cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to setup, and cost us hundreds of dollars for each cert we signed. When I did the due dilligence on the solution, I visited 3 london-based banks who had implemented the same system. The selling point was that we could act as a CA, but without really being a CA.

Verisign's sales pitch was that you could never become the root CA because of the stringent policies that had to be put in place (isolated networks, key generation, etc.), but for the fraction of the cost, we could sign certs using our cert which would be verified up the chain to the root CA which was Verisign

I can't stress how secure this whole procedure was. The root CA store was the holy grail - nobody that did't have the infrastructure or procedures like Verisign would get anywhere near it. I now read stories 10 years later of dodgy dutch companies with no budgets being given root CA privileges, and I am just blown away.

If these guys needed a solution to sign certs, they should have been setup with what we had, and what the other banks had, not just given placement in the root cert store. Verisign would check and double-check everything we did, and would frequently revert certs we signed where they suspected something was wrong.

With this story it seems there was a completely amateur operation given privileges to sign certs as part of a root CA.

I have 163 root CA certs on my OS X machine. 10 years ago I am certain the number was 4 or 5

note: this was so long ago that I probably have some of my terminology mixed up, but what we bought was the right to sign certs as a sub-CA of Verisign, a privileged root CA. I also got a very cool tour of Verisign which is another story.

Myself. I don't understand why governments don't become their own CAs, limited to issuing certificates for official websites and documents.

Of course, it would be better if browsers could limit CA trust to certain domains and subdomains (for example, the Portuguese govt CA should only be trusted for .gov.pt domains) to prevent abuse, but on the other hand we all know that if a govt is dirty enough to abuse that they'd be able to pressure some national CA into issuing it.

However I trust open source because people _I know_ told me they are trust-able not because of a higher authority. I trust Amazon because friends of mine are satisfied customers and not because Verisign says so.