GoDaddy Pulls Lavabit's Security Creds Because the FBI Got Its Encryption Keys | Hacker News Reader

GoDaddy Pulls Lavabit's Security Creds Because the FBI Got Its Encryption Keys

forbes.com

95 pointsbcn50 comments

I think the revocation misses the point: "if" the NSA has been logging all the traffic from Lavabit for the last 6 months, they can now use the SSL key to decrypt all the data they've stored. It's not just about future communications, but about decrypting the past.

I will repeat my previous comment: Perfect forward secrecy, bitches.

If you use a protocol that supports perfect forward secrecy, and you ought to, then the private key is used only to authenticate the ephemeral session key, not to encrypt it. Compromise of the private key does not allow previous sessions to be decrypted. (Compromise does allow impersonation, though, which is why you need pre-distributed certificate revocations.)

I agree. But like virtually any site of which I am aware, Lavabit didn't force PFS. It's browser-negotiated. The "funny" thing is that there's a good chance that any one user might have been using PFS, so it's less likely that they can get a specific user's data (Snowden) and more likely that they can get a random sampling of other, non-target users' data.

But does pfs protect meta data as well?

> “[W]e’re compelled by industry policies to revoke certs when we become aware that the private key has been communicated to a 3rd-party and thus could be used by that party to intercept and decrypt communications”

This raises an interesting possibility of civil disobedience. Imagine if there was a site hosted in, say, russia, which received tip-offs from NSL recipients about these SSL seizures. And imagine they then informed the SSL issuers, who would revoke the certs, rendering the old ones useless and forcing the FBI back into court, with no-one to point a finger at.

I suppose the FBI would just request an order for all future certs as well.

Well, the finger is pointing at the NSL recipients. They are supposed to be the only people that know about the order, so they carry the can if it gets leaked.

There'd be a lot of people inside the FBI with knowledge. Proving it was an NSL recipient, let alone nailing down which one, would be difficult if not impossible in court.

Snowden's leaked a whole lot more than any NSL recipient ever did...

In that case you could use flapping certificates as a dead man's switch.

flapping certificates?

If the certificate keeps changing, regardless of whether it is valid and/or expired, then it is an indicator that not all is well.

Deleted comment

What? Why would you give them your private key in the first place? You only need to sent in your public key to have it signed. The only two scenarios I can imagine is if they had generated both the public and private key for you or if they had offered to backup it up.

Maybe ditching one's certs can become the new warrant canary.

I have wondered what the legal implication of revoking certificates after complying with a court order to turn over private keys would be. I assume that the court would hole you in contempt for doing so, but IANAL.

This is why competent people use write-only key modules with aggressive tamper-detection and self-destruct capabilities.

Can I buy these on Amazon?

Sorta? http://aws.amazon.com/cloudhsm/

already discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6517553

no need for a Forbes link of all.things.

I found it interesting that GoDaddy revoked the certificate - previously, I had assumed Levison did it himself.

I don't think it's entirely clear that GoDaddy revoked the certificate on their own. Their statement was they were made aware, it's unclear if they became aware based on news coverage, or Levison made them aware of the key compromise.

I'm not entirely convinced GoDaddy would want to insert itself voluntarily into a federal court case based on news reports. But I do think they would revoke a certificate if Levison reported the key compromised as standard procedure. I can see threats of obstruction charges being thrown at GoDaddy for interfering with the investigation.

It is them. See the link in my response to crb above.

And it's Levison making the statement not GoDaddy. He's perfectly free to state one thing in public and do another in private. I may just be reading too much into the quotes from GoDaddy but in my mind none of them point to them definitively killing the certificate on their own.

I may be naive, but I don't see why he would state such a thing rather than not saying anything if you were right. I also don't see why GoDaddy would put themselves in the middle of a court affair with the feds for nothing.

You might not know this, but Mandrake (of Enlightenment WM and VA-Linux fame) is just recently now become in charge of computery people and things at GoDaddy. I hadn't thought to make the association until you put it out there, but he is a straight up hax0r, and I kind of expect that if his underlings hadn't already picked up the news and done this on their own, he would be momentarily busy reprimanding folks until they did. If we didn't know, it's one thing, but GoDaddy are not the ones who got the NSL in this case. So, why wouldn't they?

Feds or no feds, GoDaddy's business is international and they are responsible to us all, just like ICANN. These companies/NGOs have been accused of being tools of the US government enough times without actually being accountable to the US Government (well, that's ICANN, I don't know about GoDaddy). I don't see it so much as striking back, as it's like... not being giant tools in a public forum kind of way.

I am curious if the FBI could step in and prevent GoDaddy from taking this action. Secret courts do not seem to have realistic limits.

In this context, can SSL be trusted?

Well, now that the certificate has been revoked, it's too late for the FBI to do anything: either users saw that the certificate has been revoked, or they didn't yet but if a new certificate is installed they will see that it's a new one with a different fingerprint (at least their browser should warn them of that).

Yep, that's why I submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526487 as soon as I saw it, I didn't see that one. It is Ladar Levison himself saying that GoDaddy did the revokation, not him.

Good point - linked article missed that (crucial IMHO) piece of data.

Thanks to Lavabit’s design, Levison could not simply offer a tap of a particular user’s communications if that user had paid for a secure, encrypted account.

That line really bothered me. The government demanded access to all user's data and this line places the responsibility for that onto Lavabit. The government wants all of our data, all of the time. They are the responsible party not Lavabit.

While the government might want all of our data, the NSL in question (at least according to the New Yorker piece ) requested only the data on one user(presumably Snowden). Levison was unwilling to put the software into place to tap into this single person's communcation. There was a warrant, but he wanted to charge $3.5k for the effort. I don't know how I feel about that.

In any case the Judge then said to just hand over the SSL keys so that they could do it "the old fashioned way" (listening to everything on the line).

Anyways, the point is that the original intent was not to get everyone's data, yet this is the point everyone keeps on parroting. The original intent was always to specifically get this single user's information, not some sort of power play by the FBI.

Maybe things changed down the line but I feel like none of us are in a position to know that (although who knows, Mulder might spend his time trolling HN)

> There was a warrant, but he wanted to charge $3.5k for the effort. I don't know how I feel about that.

How would you feel if the police/FBI came to you with a warrant that requested all video footage from outside your home so they could spy on your neighbor's comings and goings. Oh, and by the way, you don't have a security camera system, and they aren't going to reimburse you to install one. If you do not produce video evidence, you are then disobeying the warrant and are in contempt of court.

Lavabit's system was not designed to listen in to one persons communications. It would cost money to implement that system. He requested he be compensated for his effort ($3500 is a piddly amount of money anyways), and they came back and said that was too much effort, so they'll take the entire thing. Back to the analogy, should the cops/FBI be able to possess your home in order to spy on your neighbor because you don't have a security system installed?

your analogy is wrong, it'd be more like "should the cops be able to get keys to your house".

In fact , it isn't even that, it's "should the cops be able to see who is coming in and out of your house, and searching them when they come in".

How did Lavabit's system work? I mean at one point there's an entry point, and the FBI wanted the info for the metadata, so just checking at the entry point for who's logging in would do it. You're going to have to convince me that it's non-trivial to implement something to scrape the metadata at the door (as in more than a couple hours work at most).

I don't know how to feel about it because $3500 is way too much money for what is asked, if this were a contracting job, and I think that if the police have a warrant for something they are reasonably entitled to what they're looking for. But asking people to do work without compensation.... I feel like there must be a precedent somewhere. At one point things become obstruction. I don't know what we should consider to be reasonable in these situations.

Remember that Levinson was not just a private contractor looking for work; taking time to build a whole new wiretapping system into his product wouldn't just cost him development time, but it's an opportunity cost as well, since he could have spent that time otherwise developing his business.

As for the triviality of implementing a metadata tap, I don't think the FBI was looking just for Snowden's IP address and browser. IIRC, they wanted metadata from his communications: email titles, recipient email addresses, time of transmission, etc. Lavabit was designed in a way that this was impossible. Levinson would have had to implement a system that flagged particular users and then saved metadata before encryption.

In a production, business environment, this isn't just a one-liner. Especially given the security-focused nature of Lavabit, the required development time and effort makes $3500 appropriate for the task.

Ah, I didn't know they wanted that information as well. Does seem like a hefty task.

I wonder if there's a precedent for paying people for this sort of work.

"It's just metadata" is an absurd rationalization, nothing more. Here is what that type of information can leak about you, http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/.

Also, $3,500 is 2.3333 days at $1,500/day rate. Trivial.

Apparently yes, the police have commandeered a home to spy on the neighbors. https://www.courthousenews.com/2013/07/03/59061.htm

That line bothers me too, but for a different reason - isn't the onus on a business owner to offer a reasonable avenue for obtaining information on email records when presented with a warrant? I suspect that the architecture of the service would make an appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court extraordinarily difficult to win, since there is plenty to question, and that it is not a clear example of being compliant & being penalized unrightfully given the circumstance.

I would not expect much to come from this appeal - looking in from the outside, the case doesn't appear terribly strong.

That line bothers me for a different reason: it is not true. Nothing in Lavabit's design prevented Ladar from tapping any one user's communications. In fact, the entire design of Lavabit makes it possible, since all cryptographic operations are performed server-side.

What the line should say is, "Thanks to Lavabit's design, Ladar would have had to spend half an hour coding a wiretapping solutoin."

Regardless of how long it would take to implement such a solution, the fact that he took such a principled stand against the entire might of the US government is extraordinarily commendable. The ire around this case should be directed exclusively at the agencies and parties involved in creating this rapidly growing police state, not at the people who are involved in making the story public. The world needs more people like Ladar Levison.

Yes, it is comendable that Ladar took a stand. That does not change the fact that Lavabit did not provide its users with the kind of security that people claim. If Ladar had been less principled, then what?

We need people who will take stands, but we also need systems that are inherently hard to wiretap.

I agree that crypto is no doubt the best way to go. However, it seems clear that in the case they do not get what they want initially, the next step is, "Okay, we'll just take it all."

God bless the USA...

People still use GoDaddy?

GoDaddy gets a lot of nerd hate (for good reason). However, they also market a lot which = mainstream dollars. They're the number one domain registrar with 32% of the market. The second largest is Enom with 8%. Source: http://www.webhosting.info/registrars/top-registrars/global/

I still use GoDaddy for a couple of names because they support DNSSEC DS records. I'd like to move them out, but my other providers don't even have a roadmap to implement DS/DNSSEC.

Price is why, for a 2 year wildcard certificate:

GoDaddy is $180 per year

Comodo is $428 per year

DigiCert is $535 per year

I think it also has to do with a lot people who are registering domains don't know any better.

They're $170 with Namecheap

The site is down due to Lavabit's decision. GoDaddy pulling it's certificate is just a PR move. GoDaddy supported SOPA, which is very much in line with what NSA demanded of Lavabit.

At the risk of saying anything nice about GoDaddy, this seems like it was the right move. Known compromised keys should be revoked. This key was clearly compromised.

Now what other Microsoft/Skype/Yahoo/etc keys can we demonstrate were also handed over to the government?

Knowing that the FBI has Lavabit’s keys, GoDaddy shuttered its secure site.

Next: Getting a judge to forbid GoDaddy etc from revoking the certificates.

Interesting times we live, a parallel reality is created

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