Free SSL Certificate for Open Source Projects
globalsign.com
globalsign.com
There are no user registrations taking place or sensitive informations. It's just binaries.
[1] http://www.gpg4win.org/package-integrity.html
[2] http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/authenticity-is-broken-in-s...
A distributed system that verifies identity would be much better. For example, namecoin based identities and checksums committed to the blockchain.
In fact, any self-signed public key system with a MAC distributed to many sources would be good enough. It doesn't have to have proof of work. The only requirement is that there are enough root CAs that you can't compromise them all.
This should be taken care of by browsers themselves!
I wrote this 3 years ago and since then nothing has been done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024164
I think there is movement on this type of system, but it's slow because people don't realize just how insecure HTTPS is when CAs and the US government are involved.
Now, the fact that people are more inclined to trust the bundled ca keys, rather than a web-of-trust backed pgp key is generally just because people don't understand trust.
Say, if you're in Thailand[1] and require a secure way to communicate, where do you get your os/browser-bundled ca keys? Do you trust a CA that is under influence of the Thai government? Under influence of a sympathetic government?
Do you really trust all the CA keys bundled with your os/browser/phone? Do you know which they are? If not, please don't spread FUD wrt web-of-trust based trust models.
To be clear, both have a bootstrap problem -- but only web-of-trust offers a reasonable way for the individual to ensure proper trust chains. No trust chain is (by definition) without trust, so no model (ca or wot) is immune to being betrayed. But at least wot is designed for the user to be able to influence (and be aware of) trust -- and for easy auditing (most keys are personal, or anchored to personal ids, while it can often be hard to tell who are able to access ca keys and sign possibly rogue certs).
[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/thai-police-we-ll-get-you-for-j...
If you were distributing packages over HTTP and distributing the verification signatures over a secure channel, I'd agree (this is similar to what Debian does[0]). But using one insecure channel to verify another doesn't provide you with any more security.
Furthermore, using SSL provides an additional layer of privacy - the path of the URL (everything after the domain) is hidden to eavesdroppers. They can tell which server you're accessing, but they can't tell which resources you're trying to access[1].
[0] Debian signs the packages (GPG, I believe), and the public keys for these signatures are distributed in the ISO that is used to install the base system. So the validity of the signatures is as trustworthy as the ISO used to install the entire OS (which is hopefully very trustworthy, or else there's a much bigger problem!).
[1] It's for this reason alone that I still wish Debian would distribute packages over SSL even though the GPG signatures provide more security in the authenticity of the packages than SSL would provide.
Yeah Raspian (debian's RPi clone) used GnuPG to check precompiled package signatures.
sorry, my bad.
I suppose in theory one could take a snapshot of CA keys, sign them with pgp and use that a s "know set" (note: not known good, as there is no way to be able to fully trust all the certs typically supplied as CA roots -- a subset could probably be verified). But that's not how the CA system is designed.
Any ideas how we could ask Mozilla, Google, Apple and Microsoft to include DANE (and/or, maybe, TACK and/or Convergence) support into their browsers?
Why do people pay for SSL certificates
You must use Class 2 or higher for commercial.
They used to be cool, but recently they have become a major hassle to the point where it's faster and easier to just pay per certificate at more conventional CAs like those reselling instantssl. If your time has an hourly price, you'll probably even save money.
Edit: I'm sure it's a noble goal that they do not want to certify domains they cannot prove are owned by the customer, but it doesn't really do much good in practice when the CA next door will happily issue a certificate as long as you can read administrative email for the domain.
Their $25 fee for revocation during the Heartbleed situation left many of their users who could not pay their fee vulnerable to attack. During these extenuating circumstances you would expect them to offer the revocation for a discounted price or even free, but they did not. I did not have any certificates registered with them and am very glad I didn't.
I imagine that there are a huge amount of StartSSL users who cannot pay the $25 per certificate and have no choice but to leave their server vulnerable. This was pure short-sighted greed on the part of StartSSL.
I'd strongly recommend https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates/comodo.a... It's a great price and their support has been excellent in my experience. If you have an open source project then the GlobalSign free certificate is hard to beat.
That is a terrible reason to recommend against SSL.
If you obtain a free certificate then $25 per certificate probably is an issue, especially since there is no guarantee that this won't happen again in the near future.
Many people probably have several subdomains which needed certificates, $25 per subdomain can add up quickly if you have several.
No, they were not obligated to offer revocation for free, but a significantly discounted price would have allowed a much larger percentage of people to revoke their certificates. It's not too much different than extortion, since many people who obtain free certificates are not aware of the possibility of the need to revoke a certificate, then they are basically screwed when they are forced to either pay up or have their server left insecure.
Hypothetical Situation: If I start a free SSL cert service and put in my terms that there is a $1,000 revocation fee, would that be acceptable? Many people would signup without thinking they would never need to revoke a certificate, then another Heartbleed-like situation occurs and many of your users have servers that are at risk without revocation, would it be acceptable to say, "Oh well, pay up or else someone could hack your servers".
StartSSL exploited their customers during a time of crisis (yes, servers leaking private information is a crisis) and they deserve the negative PR they are receiving from it.
Many people have even been proposing that StartSSL be removed from the trusted CA lists included with OSs and browsers since so many StartSSL certificates will remain unrevoked, and there is a valid point to that.
This would allow for a MITM attack which would obtain user credentials and unauthorized access to a server.
Since the attack isn't recorded it's unknown if it was used extensively before it was made public. The time between announcement and patching was likely significant enough for the potential of someone stealing the private key during that period as well.
This is also why re-using the same private key for the new certificate is a bad idea.
Think about the wide variety of sites that would use a free SSL certificate that might not have the funds for revocation. Almost every site I've ever seen has had people try to hack it.
There is a fairly decent chance that a very small site would not have someone steal it's private key, but it's hard to make that assumption, that's why every site about Heartbleed suggests revocation of the old certificates.
1. Attacker steals the private key via heartbleed or other means
2. Attacker sets up their own server using the stolen private key
3. Attacker tricks a user into accessing their server rather than the real server via any of a number of methods, such as a compromised hotspot.
4. User provides their sensitive information to the attacker, thinking they're on the real site.
No server-side action can mitigate the risk of a stolen private key in the above scenario, since the user never communicates with the legitimate server. That said, most browsers ship with certificate revocation lists disabled by default, so revoking the certificate doesn't help nearly as many people as we'd like. But for people who do enable CRLs, they'll see the scary warning rather than their browser trusting the revoked cert.
I grudgingly paid the revocation fees, and now they've lost my business now forever, as they essentially held the security of my domains to ransom for a quick buck.
They offer unlimited free certificates, so, naturally, I've issued one per service (they even encourage that with "web server"/"xmpp server" certificate distinction). I.e., a separate one for mail server, a separate one for HTTP server, a separate one for XMPP server and so on. Naturally, I expected that it's more likely for one service to break (i.e., say, for nginx to have some buffer overflow that'd allow extracting the keys) than all of them, like it was the case with Heartbleed.
That means, revocation would cost me not $25, but $600. Can't afford that.
Luckily, the most sensitive information I protect are my own emails, 99% of which are spam and service notifications.
StartCom is appealing as they'll issue as many certificates as you want for a one-off fee.
so I had protected my service against parts of it being compromised, but then I was screwed over completely by heartbleed.
50 certs? that'll be $1250
I'm using StartSSL verified, it costed me 99$ (personal verification) plus 99$ (company certification), and I can create any certificate I want, at any time, valid for two years and wildcard included.
Since my company provides custom subdomains for clients, and every client can have multiple subdomains on his own subdomain, we can't afford the price for every client. (I know we should charge them, but this issue is out of my hand).
The 25$ revocation fee sucks, yeah.. but StartSSL has his advantages too.
(edit: typo.)
Sometimes you do say users, but other times you say customers.
Converting users into paying customers is very important, and forcing a fee during an emergency is not a recommended way to obtain loyal customers.
You pay as soon as a human being's work (or other substantial effort) is necessary.
With regard to revocation, I do not understand the complaints since the deal with StartSSL was pretty clear and revocation does not work in practice anyway. That does, however, NOT mean that a server has to remain vulnerable, just get another certificate …
Exceptions would obviously include higher priced (OV/EV) certificates, which are no different cryptographically. Even the CA mentioned (GlobalSign) states this fairly clearly on their website.[1]
[1] https://www.globalsign.com/ssl-information-center/types-of-s...