Many sites reusing Heartbleed-compromised private keys | Hacker News Reader

Many sites reusing Heartbleed-compromised private keys

zdnet.com

50 pointseliot_sykes10 comments

You should not be responsible for website security if you don't understand the absolute basics of SSL certificates.

It would be helpful if the CA (or reseller) confirmed (dispay a warning) that you really want to reissue with the same private key and explain the implications of doing so.

When reissuing a certificate the default behaviour should be to revoke the old one after some specified time has elapsed - that is what reissuing is for and what distinguishes it from simply buying a new certificate.

This.

The problem is that many people in the industry doesn't really understand the basics. How come is there a leak of your certificate, if that's the public key you're showing to every single client that connects to your SSL enabled site?

I've even seen sysads advising on forums about reissuing certs after Heartbleed, but no word about the keys.

Maybe they should just be advised to use PFS/ECDHE instead (which should be done anyway), and it would solve this problem by itself.

That would not solve the problem of active man-in-the-middle attacks.

Yes, even renewing your keys and certs doesn't mean any previous communication is not compromised :)

I think that "no word about the keys" is simply due to a huge gulf in understanding. To the people giving out the advice, it's obvious that "reissue your certificates" implies "with a new private key", so obvious that they can't even imagine someone doing otherwise. It's easy to skip out on the basics that you're sure "everyone knows".

Ugh. I think it would be better if revocation covered the public key instead of the serial number. (I'll ignore CRL bandwidth costs and the questionable usefulness of revocations.)

YUP! I covered that exact subject (http://aminastaneh.net/2014-04-23/misconceptions-about-mitig...), but it didn't catch on in HN.

i.e. they re-used the same CSR without realising that the CSR references the old compromised key.

The odds of this being a real issue that will affect anyone are in the tiny fractions of a percent range.

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