Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web
eff.org
eff.org
The certificate authorities are quite in love that the self-signed certificate errors are turning redder, bolder, and bigger. A self signed certificate warning means "Warning! The admin on the site you're connecting to wants this conversation to be private but it hasn't been proven that he has 200 bucks for us to say he's cool".
But so what if he's cool? Yeah I like my banking website to be "cool" but for 200 bucks I can be just as "cool". A few years back the browsers started putting extra bling on the URL bar if the coolness factor was high enough - if a bank pays 10,000 bucks for a really cool verification, they get a giant green pulsating URL badge. And they should, that means someone had to fax over vials of blood with the governor's seal that it's a legitimate institute in that state or province. But my little 200 dollar, not pulsating but still green certificate means "yeah digitalsushi definitely had 200 bucks and a fax machine, or at least was hostmaster@digitalsushi.com for damned sure".
And that is good enough for users. No errors? It's legit.
What's the difference between me coughing up 200 bucks to make that URL bar green, and then bright red with klaxons cause I didn't cough up the 200 bucks to be sure I am the owner of a personal domain? Like I said, a racket. The certificate authorities love causing a panic. But don't tell me users are any safer just 'cause I had 200 bucks. They're not.
The cert is just for warm and fuzzies. The encryption is to keep snoops out. If I made a browser, I would have 200 dollar "hostmaster" verification be some orange, cautious URL bar - "this person has a site that we have verified to the laziest extent possible without getting sued for not even doing anything at all". But then I probably wouldn't be getting any tips in my jar from the CAs at the end of the day.
no. It means "even though this connection is encrypted, there is no way to tell you whether you are currently talking to that site or to NSA which is forwarding all of your traffic to the site you're on".
Treating this as a grave error IMHO is right because by accepting the connection over SSL, you state that the conversation between the user agent and the server is meant to be private.
Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee that to be true if the identity of the server certificate can't somehow be tied to the identity of the server.
So when you accept the connection unencrypted, you tell the user agent "hey - everything is ok here - I don't care about this conversation to be private", so no error message is shown.
But the moment you accept the connection over ssl, the user agent assumes the connection to be intended to be private and failure to assert identity becomes a terminal issue.
This doesn't mean that the CA way of doing things is the right way - far from it. It's just the best that we currently have.
The solution is absolutely not to have browsers accept self-signed certificates though. The solution is something nobody hasn't quite come up with.
SSH has. It tells me:
WARNING, You are connecting to this site (fi:ng:er:pr:in:t) for the first time. Do your homework now. IF you deem it trustworthy right now then I will never bother you again UNLESS someone tries to impersonate it in the future.
That model isn't perfect either but it is much preferable over the model that we currently have, which is: Blindly trust everyone who manages to exert control over any one of the 200+ "Certificate Authorities" that someone chose to bake into my browser.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@@@ WARNING! THIS ADDRESS MAY BE DOING SOMETHING NASTY!! @@@
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IMHO no. We don't SSH to the same 46 servers everyday. But we do log into that many (or more) websites. Can you imagine the amount of homework users need to do in order for this to work?
Not to mention the amount of non-tech savvy users who just won't put up with it.
The problem is that this is a huge hassle for incidental visitors. Whereas SSH does not have incidental visitors. Same goes for email, if it's your own server, you know the cert to be the real one, and you can accept it, you're not bothered again.
Encrypted (Certified) COOL GREEN
Encrypted (Self-Signed) EVIL RED
Unencrypted NOTHING / NEUTRAL CHROME
I think we can agree that this case is correct. If you have a properly vetted cert, more power to you. The browser should tell your users that you do own this domain.
> Encrypted (Self-Signed) EVIL RED
Not quite. Your user does have the ability to permanently trust this certificate. However, if I am trying to access gmail.com over HTTPS, I better not get this error. Otherwise, I know for a fact someone is messing with me.
> Unencrypted NOTHING / NEUTRAL CHROME
This case should be eliminated. We need to stop publishing stuff over HTTP. Period. The browsers should start fast tracking dropping support for HTTP altogether so we don't even have to think about this case.
Now the solution for case #2 is that every time you buy a domain, your registrar should issue you a wildcard cert for that domain. Moreover, you should be able to use that private key + cert to sign additional certs for individual subdomains. That way we can eliminate all the CA's. We would essentially use the same infrastructure that already supports domain name registration and DNS instead of funding a completely parallel, yet deeply flawed CA industry. As a bonus, this way only your registrar and you may issue certs for your domain.
This is all castles in the sky, but IMO that's the correct solution.
There are plenty of other things to complain about. EV for one.
Encrypted (Certified) EVERYTHING'S FINE
Encrypted (Self-Signed) OMG!!!
Unencrypted EVERYTHING'S FINE (while it's not) Encrypted (Certified) AUTHENTICATED & ENCRYPTED
Encrypted (Self-Signed) NOT AUTHENTICATED & ENCRYPTED
Unencrypted NOT AUTHENTICATED & NOT ENCRYPTED
Connecting to a blog? Encryption is a plus (and is the topic of this very HN post). But unencrypted is also okay.
The original CA system was not designed to defend against mass surveillance so it had little incentive to separate these concerns.
No, I wouldn't say so. Having SSL is better than having nothing pretty much on any site. But if you don't want to pay $200 somebody for nothing, you would probably consider using http by default on your site, because it just looks "safer" to the user that knows nothing about cryptography because of how browsers behave. Which is nonsense. It's worse than nothing.
And CA are not "authorities" at all. They could lie to you, they could be compromised. Of course, the fact that this certificate has been confirmed by "somebody" makes it a little more reliable than if it never was confirmed by anyone at all, but these "somebodies", CA, don't have any control over the situation, it's just some guys that came up with idea to make money like that early enough. You are as good CA as Symantec is, you can just start selling certificates and it would be the same — except, well, you are just some guy, so browsers wouldn't accept these certificates so it's worth nothing. It's all just about trust, and I'm not sure I trust Symantec more than I trust you. (And I don't mean I actually trust you, by the way.)
For everyone else it's not really about SSL, security and CAs, it's just about how popular browsers behave.
So, no, monopolies existing for the reason they are allowed to do something are never good. Only if they do it for free.
Actually just read their terms of service, which may as well be summarised as "we issue certificates for entertainment purposes only".
There are certainly other options too: here's my suggestion-
The first time you go to a site where the certificate is one you haven't seen before, the browser should show a nice friendly page that doesn't make a fuss about how dangerous it is, and shows a fingerprint image for the site that you can verify elsewhere, either from a mail you've been sent, and with a list of images from fingerprint servers it knows about that contain a record for that site shown next to it.
Once you accept, it should store that certificate and allow you access to that site without making a big fuss or making it look like it's less secure than an unencrypted site. This should be a relatively normal flow and we should make the user experience accessible to normal people.
It's basically what we do for ssh connections to new hosts.
I believe verification should be done out-of-band, using some other way (e.g. advertising) to transmit the fingerprint to the users. I've used self-signed certificates to collaborate over HTTPS with people I know in real life, and all I do is give them little pieces of paper with my cert printed on them.
This is misguided thinking, pure and simple. Because of this line of thinking, your everyday webmaster has been convinced that encrypting data on a regular basis is more trouble than it's worth and allowed NSA (or the Chinese or the Iranian or what have you) authorities to simply put in a tap to slurp the entire internet without even going through the trouble of targeting and impersonating. Basically, this is the thinking that has enabled dragnet surveillance of the internet with such ease.
That would be correct if you could assume that the NSA couldn't fake certificates for websites. But it can, so it's wrong and misleading. It's certificate pinning, notary systems etc. that actually give some credibility to the certificate you're currently using, not whatever the browsers indicate as default.
FWIW, (valid) rogue certificates have been found in the wild several times, CAs have been compromised etc. ...
And it's only going to get worse as SHA-1 become more and more affordable to crack.
It occurred to me that this is a really good way of establishing a trust path: while they're only using it to guide you to the right app, they could embed a little public key in there. Then you could authenticate the new printer or fridge by physically being near it.
We'd have to extend our UIs a bit to cover these use cases (it should basically act like a trusted self-signed cert), and probably you only want to trust NFC certs for *.local.
Maybe a security-conscious person thinks that, but the typical user does not knowingly choose http over https, and thus the danger of MitM and (unaccepted) snooping is at least as large for the former.
So it's somewhat debatable why we'd warn users that "hey, someone might be reading this and impersonating the site" for self-signed https but not http.
The self-signed cert risk has nothing to do with the NSA... if it's your cert or a known cert, you add it to the trust store, otherwise, you don't.
It's as if a building manager, scared that small amounts of sound can leak through a door, decided that the only solution is to nail all the office doors open and require you to sign a form in triplicate that you are aware the door is not completely soundproof before you are allowed to close it to make a phone call. (Or jump through a long registration process to have someone come and install a heavy steel soundproofed door which will require replacement every 12 months.)
After all, if you're closing the door, it's clearly meant to be private. And if we can't guarantee complete security against sound leaks to people holding their ear to a glass on the other side, surely you mustn't be allowed to have a door.
How would you inform people going to www.mybank.com which is presenting a self-signed cert in a way that a) they clearly notice but that b) doesn't annoy you when you connect to www.myblog.com which also is presenting a self-signed cert?
A self-signed certificate is trivially MITMed unless you have a way to authenticate the certificate. At the moment CAs are the best known way to do that (and before anyone brings certificate pinning or WoT, they come with their own problems, please read this comment of mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616766).
EDIT: You can downvote all you want but I'm still right.
Each time anyone repeats the "self-signed certificates are still better than HTTP plain text" lie is hurting everyone in the long run.
They're much worse, both for the users and from a security perspective. Self-signed certificates are evil unless you know exactly what you're doing and are in full control of both ends of the communication (in which case just trust it yourself and ignore the warnings).
http://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2l7ufn/alwa...
Certificates don't even solve the problem they attempt to solve, because in practices there are too many weaknesses in the chain. When you first downloaded firefox/chrome, who knows that the NSA didn't tamper with the CA list? (not that they'd need to)
Unfortunately, no browsers adopted the project, and it is no longer compatible with Firefox. There are a couple forks which are still in development, but they are pretty underdeveloped.
I wonder if Mozilla would be more likely to accept this kind of project into Firefox today, compared to ~4 years ago when it was first released, now that privacy and security may be more important topic to the users of the browser.
That's what PGP/GPG people seem to do, anyway.
Why can't I get my personally-generated cert signed by X other people who vouch for its authenticity?
Well... that's true regardless, as the NSA almost certainly has control over one or more certificate authorities.
But I agree with the sentiment. :)
Nah. The NSA, or any adversary remotely approaching them in resources, has the ability to generate certificates that are on your browser's trust chain. Self-signed and unknown-CA warnings suggest that a much lower level attacker may be interfering.
We do have a solution that does accept self-signed certificates. The remaining pieces need to be finished and the players need to come together though:
https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain
If you're in San Francisco, come to the SF Bitcoin Meetup, I'll be speaking on this topic tonight:
http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin-Social/events/18...
Let's Encrypt seems like the right "next step", but we still need to address the man-in-the-middle problem with HTTPS, and that is something the blockchain will solve.
That being said: Identity verification is important as the encryption is worthless if you can be trivially man-in-the-middled. All encryption assures is that two end points can only read communications between one another, it makes no assurances that the two end points are who they claim to be.
So verification is a legitimate requirement and it does have a legitimate cost. The problem is the LOWEST barriers to entry are set too high, this has become a particular problem when insecure WiFi is so common and even "basic" web-sites really need HTTPS (e.g. this one).
HTTP can be man-in-the-middled passively, and without detection; making dragnets super easy.
In order for HTTPS self signed certs to be effectively man-in-the-middled the attacker needs to be careful to only selectively MITM because if the attacker does it indiscriminately clients can record what public key was used. The content provider can have a process that sits on top of a VPN / Tor that periodically requests a resource from the server and if it detects that the service is being MITM then it can shut down the service and a certificate authority can be brought in.
Edit: Also, all this BS about how HTTPS implies security is besides the grandparent's point: certificates and encryption are currently conflated to the great detriment of security, and they need not be.
Nothing can be man-in-the-middled passively, that makes no sense. That isn't what a MitM is. It requires active involvement by its very nature.
> In order for HTTPS self signed certs to be effectively man-in-the-middled the attacker needs to be careful to only selectively MITM because if the attacker does it indiscriminately clients can record what public key was used.
I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to say.
> The content provider can have a process that sits on top of a VPN / Tor that periodically requests a resource from the server and if it detects that the service is being MITM then it can shut down the service and a certificate authority can be brought in.
If the MitM originates from a specific location (e.g. a single Starbucks, a single hotel, an airport, etc) it would never be detected by that method.
> Also, all this BS about how HTTPS implies security is besides the grandparent's point: certificates and encryption are currently conflated to the great detriment of security, and they need not be.
Only MitM protections AND encryption provide a secure connection when together. Individually they're insecure.
If someone wants to come up with a security scheme which doesn't depend on certificates that would be fine. You just have to solve the encryption issue (easy) and the identity issue (hard).
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/starttls-downgrade-att...
For example, in an individual user situation, if the "CA" is a mac user, you use a local exploit, and export the private key from the Keychain. Done.
Most of the time, I'm much more interested in a domain identity than a corporate identity. If I go to bigbank.com, and is presented with a certificate, I want to know if I am talking to bigbank.com -- not that I'm talking to "Big Bank Co." (or at least one of the legal entities around the world under that name).
Therefore it would make much more sense if your TLD made a cryptographic assertment that you are the legal owner of a domain and that this information could be utilized up the whole protocol stack.
That would not have a legitimate cost, apart from the domain name system itself.
What's especially baffling about self-signed certificate advocacy is the implied threat model. Low- and mid-level network attackers and crime syndicates can't compromise a CA. Every nation state can, of course (so long as the site in question isn't public-key-pinned). But nation states are also uniquely capable of MITMing connections!
Could you elaborate here? With a self-signed cert, the server is still not sending secret information in the first few packets; it just tells you (without authentication) which public key to use to encrypt the later packets (well, the public key to encrypt the private key for later encryption).
The threat model would be eavesdroppers who can't control the channel, only look. Using the SS cert would be better than an unencrypted connection, though still shouldn't be represented as being as secure as full TLS. As it stands, the server is either forced to wait to get the cert, or serve unencrypted such that all attackers can see.
First, TLS has three principles that, if you lose one, it becomes essentially uselsss:
1) Authentication - you're talking to the right server
2) Encryption - nobody saw what was sent
3) Verification - nothing was modified in transit
Without authentication, you essentially are not protected against anything. Any router, any government can generate a cert for any server or hostname.
Perhaps you don't think EV certs have a purpose - personally, I think they're helpful to ensure that even if someone hijacks a domain they cannot issue an EV cert. Luckily, the cost of certificates is going down over time (usually you can get the certs you mentioned at $10/$150). That's what my startup (https://certly.io) is trying to help people get, cheap and trusted certificates (sorry for the promotion here)
But it's not like MITM attacks are not real. CAs don't realistically do a thing about them, but it is true that you can't trust that your connection is private based on TLS alone. (unless you're doing certificate pinning or you have some other solution).
Our hope is that Let's Encrypt will reduce the barriers to CA-signed HTTPS sufficiently, that it will become realistic for browsers to show warning indicators on HTTP.
If they did that today, millions of sites would complain, "why are you forcing us to pay money to CAs, and deal with the incredible headache of cert installation and management?". With Let's Encrypt, the browsers can point to a simple, single-command solution.
The next step will be to replace the CA system with something actually secure, but that comes after we move the web to a place where most websites are at least trying.
Back in the Netscape days, it did. People got tired of clicking OK every time they searched for something.
Site: Here's my public key. Use it to verify that anything I sent you came from me. But don't take my word for it, verify it against a set of trusted authorities pre-installed on your machine.
Browser: Ok, your cert checks out. Here's my public key. You can use it for the same.
Site: Ok, now I need you to reply this message with the entire certificate chain you have for me to make sure a 3rd party didn't install a root cert and inject keys between us. Encrypt it with both your private key and my public key.
Browser: Ok, here it is: ASDSDFDFSDFDSFSD.
Site: That checks out. Ok, now you can talk to me.
This is what certificates help with. There are verification standards that apply, and all the certificate authorities have to agree to follow these standards when issuing certain types of SSL certificates. The most stringent, the "Green bar" with the entity name, often require verification through multiple means, including bank accounts. Certificate authorities that fail to verify properly can have their issuing privileges revoked (though this is hard to do in practice, it can be done).
https://www.expeditedssl.com/pages/visual-security-browser-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubjectAltName https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
"Your certificate is due to expire.
If your certificate expires, your site will no longer be encrypted."
Just blatantly false.
Of course, we know that's not true either, but try explaining to your visitors how to bypass the security warning (newer browsers sure don't make it obvious, even if you know to look for it).
There are trusted free certificates as well, like the ones from StartSSL.
> if a bank pays 10,000 bucks for a really cool verification, they get a giant green pulsating URL badge
Yeah, $10 000 and legal documentation proving that they are exactly the same legal entity as the one stated on the certificated. All verified by a provider that's been deemed trustworthy by your browser's developers.
Finally, if a certificate is self-signed, it generally should be a large warning to most users: the certificate was made by an unknown entity, and anybody may be intercepting the comunication. Power-users understand when self-signed CAs are used, but they don't get scared of red warnings either, so that's not an issue.
But a man-in-the-middle attack will remove any secrecy encryption provides and to prevent that, we require certificate authorities to perform some minimal checks that public keys delivered to your browser are indeed the correct ones.
You've got a point about how warnings are pushing incentives towards more verification, but they serve a purpose that aligns with secrecy of communication.
Running a CA has an associated cost, including maintenance, security, etc. That's what you pay for when you acquire a certificate. Whether current market prices' markup is too high would be a different question, but paying for a certificate is definitely not spending 200$ to look cool.
CAs are the best known way (at the moment) to authenticate through insecure channels (before anyone brings pìnned certs or WoT, read this comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616766)
EDIT: You can downvote all you want but I'm still right. Excuse my tone, but slandering a system without an intimate understanding of the "how"s and the "why"s (i.e. spreading FUD) hurts everyone in the long run.
Downvote sprees without an explanation detract from healthy discussion since they basically mean "I'm so mad about how wrong you are that I don't even care about why you think you are right".
I guess I'll just ignore them...
This is huge if it takes off. The CA PKI will no longer be a scam anymore!!
I'd trust the EFF/Mozilla over a random for profit "security corporation" like VeriSign any day of the week and twice on Sunday to be good stewards of the infrastructure.
OK, that's a little awkward. A browser extension could automate this. But in practice, nobody wants to do this, because hardly anyone has opinions on particular CAs. It's a sort of meta-opinion - some people feel strongly they should be able to feel strongly about CAs, but hardly anyone actually does. So nobody uses such browser extensions.
On Firefox it's preferences -> advanced -> certificates -> view certificates.
Unfortunately, it couldn't on Chrome, because you can't even access a page's certificate from an extension in Chrome:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18689724/get-fingerprint-...
And Firefox's certificate API is not much better, only passive access without ability to block connections if you detect an unwanted cert.
Incidentally, I can also add my own CA.
This new SSL scheme is mostly security theater. There's no particular reason to encrypt traffic to most web pages. Anyone with access to the connection can tell what site you're talking to. If it's public static content, what is SSL protecting? Unless there's a login mechanism and non-public pages, SSL isn't protecting much.
The downside of SSL everywhere is weak SSL everywhere. Cloudflare sells security theater encryption now. All their offerings involve Cloudflare acting as a man-in-the-middle, with everything decrypted at Cloudflare. (Cloudflare's CEO is fighting interception demands in court and in the press, which indicates they get such requests. Cloudflare is honest about what they're doing; the certificates they use say "Cloudflare, Inc.", so they identify themselves as a man-in-the-middle. They're not bad guys.)
If you try to encrypt everything, the high-volume cacheable stuff that doesn't need security but does need a big content delivery network (think Flickr) has to be encrypted. So the content-delivery network needs to impersonate the end site and becomes a point of attack. There are known attacks on CDNs; anybody using multi-domain SSL certs with unrelated domains (36,000 Cloudflare sites alone) is vulnerable if any site on the cert can be broken into. If the site's logins go through the same mechanism, security is weaker than if only the important pages were encrypted.
You're better off having a small secure site like "secure.example.com" for checkout and payment, preferably with an Extended Validation SSL certificate, a unique IP address, and a dedicated server. There's no reason to encrypt your public product catalog pages. Leave them on "example.com" unencrypted.
Regarding the rest of your post, however, I'm calling bullshit. You give very bad advice. Deploy TLS on every website. Deploy HTTP Strict-Transport-Security wherever you can.
The sites people visit are confidential, and yes, are not protected enough at the moment. (That will eventually improve, piece by piece.) That's absolutely no excuse at all for you not protecting data about the pages they're on or the specific things they're looking at, even if your site is static, or not protecting the integrity of your site. You have no excuse for that. Go do it.
Your other big problem is thinking that anything on your domain "doesn't need security"! Yes it does - unless you actually desire your website to be co-opted for use in malware planting by Nation-State Adversaries with access to Hacking Team(s) (~cough~) - or the insecure parts of your website being injected by a middleman with malicious JavaScript or someone else's "secure" login page that's http: with a lock favicon. (I have seen this in the wild, yes.) If you've deployed a site with that bad advice, it could be exploited like that today: go back and encrypt it properly before someone hacks your customers. This is why HSTS exists. Use it.
Regarding your CDN point, kindly cite - or demonstrate - your working "known attack" against Cloudflare's deployment?
Black Hat 2009, "Why TLS Keeps Failing to Protect", Moxy Marlinspike, slide 42: https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-14/materials/us-14-Delignat...
Basic concept: 1) find target site A with shared SSL cert. Cloudflare gets shared SSL certs with 50+ unrelated domains. 2) find vulnerable server B in a domain on same cert. (Probably Wordpress.) 3) attack server B, inserting fake copy of important pages on site A with attack on client or password/credit card interception. 4) use DNS poisoning attack to redirect A to B.
All it takes is one vulnerable site out of the 50+ on the same cert.
The whole shared-cert thing is a workaround for Windows XP. Cloudflare does it because they're still trying to support IE6 on Windows XP, which doesn't speak Server Name Identification, and they don't have enough IPv4 addresses to have one per customer.
5) Cloudflare's sni??????.cloudflaressl.com presents an error to you because the Host: header is either missing, doesn't match the SNI, or otherwise, serves the correct site to you instead of your phishing page.
You obviously haven't tested this. And it's Moxie.
Vhost-confusion is a relevant attack on TLS with non-HTTP protocols, HTTP/0.9 and sites which serve a default domain to clients with no Host: headers. Cloudflare quite specifically does none of these, and is not vulnerable in its deployment - it needs the Host: header to know which site you want it to select with its reverse-proxy, and you can't poison that because it's protected by TLS to Cloudflare.
Also you, the attacker, don't have the cert.
If you can DNS poison away from Cloudflare, please report it to their security team, but you'll find they're looking at deploying DNSSEC soon.
Plenty.
Off the top of my head:
It protects people/companies from having their reputations ruined by a MITM attack that replaces content on their site with something offensive.
It protects sensitive/important content on sites from being tampered with by an attacker. For example, if I am hosting a binary for download I can make a signature available for that binary on my site. In order for the signature to serve its purpose the user needs to be sure it hasn't been modified en route.
HTTPS encrypts the URL paths you access [1]. Would you rather an adversary knew which IPs you visited, or the IPs plus the URLs?
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/499591/are-https-urls-enc...
Comcast was recently caught injecting self-promotional ads via JavaScript injection. Sites using HTTPS are immune from this sort of attack. [1]
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/why-comcasts-java...
I do think behind-the-CDN interception, in-front-of-the-CDN compromises, and weak CDN crypto are all serious concerns. I won't name any names here, but the employment histories of major CDNs' security team members definitely deserve closer scrutiny by civil society groups and reporters, especially those interested in fighting mass surveillance.
But overall, I think it's important to respect the privacy and security of users first, and work toward solving the engineering problems that need to be solved in order to affirm that commitment to users, as these folks have tried to do.
In this case, SSL protects against MITM attacks. If a customer goes to the unencrypted "example.com" site and gets a bunch of ads for porn, it will give the customer a negative impression of the company. All it would take is a few pitchfork-wielding high-profile twitter accounts to cause a PR nightmare. Even if the cause is a hacked coffee shop wireless access point, it may be hard to restore public opinion.
That scenario is a long-shot, but in my opinion, the potential negative consequences outweigh the time and energy required to set up SSL (especially since a basic SSL certificate is free).
From where? StartSSL only gives out free certs to individuals. For my company, they've actually required me to get organizational validation in the past, which wasn't cheap ($200, IIRC—$100 for the organizational validation, plus $100 for stage 2 personal validation, which also required me to upload images of my driver's license and passport).
Even so, I'd argue that $200 is a fairly cheap way to protect the integrity of your company.
https:// helps protect the act of participation and deters the building of dossiers.
Its the difference between the books in the library and the list of books in the library you have read.
how about the SPDY protocol and the faster speed it offers?
Of course this is true in theory, but in practice, both clients and customers get 'warm fuzzies' from seeing that green lock in the URL window.
It let's them 'know' that the company they are dealing with is at least somewhat reputable. Whether this is true or not doesn't matter; it is the perception many people have, and it does affect sales numbers in the real world.
"A recovery token is a fallback authentication mechanism. In the event that a client loses all other state, including authorized key pairs and key pairs bound to certificates, the client can use the recovery token to prove that it was previously authorized for the identifier in question.
This mechanism is necessary because once an ACME server has issued an Authorization Key for a given identifier, that identifier enters a higher-security state, at least with respect the ACME server. That state exists to protect against attacks such as DNS hijacking and router compromise which tend to inherently defeat all forms of Domain Validation. So once a domain has begun using ACME, new DV-only authorization will not be performed without proof of continuity via possession of an Authorized Private Key or potentially a Subject Private Key for that domain."
Does that mean, if for instance, someone used an ACME server to issue a certificate for that domain in the past, but then the domain registration expired, and someone else legitimately bought the domain later, they would be unable to use that ACME server for issuing an SSL certificate?
[0] https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-spec/blob/master/draft-b...
The previous issuing CA should have revoked the cert they issued when the domain was transferred. But a CA speaking the ACME protocol might choose to look at whois and DNS for additional information to decide whether it issues different challenges in response to a certification request.
An interesting thing happened at a meet-up at Square last year. Someone from google's security team came out and demonstrated what google does to notify a user that a page has been compromised or is a known malicious attack site.
During the presentation she was chatting about how people don't really pay attention to the certificate problems a site has, and how they were trying to change that through alerts/notifications.
After which someone asked that if google cared so much about security why didn't they just become a CA and sign certs for everyone. She didn't answer the question, so I'm not sure if that means they don't want to, or they are planning to.
What privacy concerns should we have if someone like goog were to sign the certs? What happens if a CA is compromised?
There aren't a whole lot of privacy concerns with CA's as long as you use OCSP stapling, so users browsers aren't hitting up the CA each time they visit a website (Chrome never does this but other browsers can do).
Re: CA compromise. One reason running a CA costs money is that the root store policies imposed by the CA/Browser Forum require (I think!) the usage of a hardware security module which holds the signing keys. This means a compromised CA could issue a bunch of certs for as long as the compromise is active, but in theory it should be hard or impossible to steal the key. Once the hackers are booted out of the CA's network, it goes back to being secure. Of course quite some damage can be done during this time, and that's what things like Certificate Transparency are meant to mediate - they let everyone see what CAs are doing.
That's something imposed by the audit criteria (WebTrust/ETSI). What you detailed is also why roots are left disconnected from the internet - if you compromise an intermediary, that can be blacklisted as opposed to the entire root.
These are the things you pay for when you buy a certificate from a CA. In fact, I would be 100% opposed to obtaining my website's cert from a CA if it were free-of-charge, because I know good physical security is expensive. However, I already trust the EFF and the Umich researchers (and their assurances of physical security), so I'm absolutely happy with obtaining a free certificate from them.
While probably not officially scriptable, free certificates have been available since a long time ago: https://www.startssl.com/?app=1
Also, no free wildcard certs. Which I really want.
> What happens if a CA is compromised?
Looking at past compromises, if they have been very irresponsible they are delisted from the browsers' list of trusted roots (see diginotar). If they have not been extremely irresponsible, then they seem to be able to continue to function (see Comodo).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar#Refusal_to_publish_r... https://blogs.comodo.com/uncategorized/the-recent-ra-comprom...
NB: This is a bit unfair, because the existing for-money CAs haven't always stopped someone from registering microsoft.com.
1. Over the wire encryption (which this handles)
2. As a bad, but the best we've got site identification system for stopping phishing mechanism.
Currently, for even the cheapest certs (domain+email validated) - the CAs will reject SSL cert requests for anything that might be a phishing target. Detecting "wellsfargo.com" is pretty easy, where it gets tricky is things like "wellsforgo.com", "wellsfàrgo.com" etc. Which if I'm looking at this right will just sail through with LetsEncrypt.
I suspect we're going to actually end up with two tiers of SSL certs as the browser makers have started to really de-emphasize domain validated certs [1] like this vs the Extended Validation (really expensive) certs, to the point where in most cases now having a domain cert does not know green (and maybe doesn't even show a lock) at all.
As a side note, Google had announced that they were going to start using SSL as a ranking signal [2] (sites with SSL would get a slight bump in rankings), from this perspective the "high" cost of a cert was actually a feature as it made life much more expensive on blackhat SEOs who routinely are setting up hundreds of sites.
1 - Screenshots: https://www.expeditedssl.com/pages/visual-security-browser-s...
2 - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-...
There have been previous attempts, e.g. http://www.cacert.org/
AFAIK they failed in the politics front (getting accepted in mainstream browsers). Sounds like EFF might have better leverage.
https://www.globalsign.com/certificate-authority-root-signin...
There are a few other vendors that I've seen offer similar services.
Even once they have the CA it needs to be added to browsers which will take time. Taking into account release cycles of embedded devices (read phones where the manufacturer hasn't released an update), summer 2015 seems rather optimistic.
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Let me be clear here: I'm not complaining that I don't get my free cake now. I do think however that most people at the EFF and Mozilla would agree that we needed something like this a couple of years ago. In that context I think it's a least noteworthy that they decided to wait until other parts of the system are ready.
There's a scenario (simplified for illustration, but entirely possible) that's normally not a huge risk because there are many CAs, and they are private, for-profit companies that have an economic incentive to protect you and your certificate's ability to assure end users that a conversation's privacy won't be compromised.
1) browser requests site via SSL
2) MITM says, "let's chat - here's my cert"
3) browser asks, "is this cert legit for this domain?"
4) MITM says, "yes, CA gave us this, because of FISA, to give to you as proof"
5) browser says, "ok, let's chat"
I'm not trying to spread FUD, but if you're NSA and you've been asking CAs for their master keys for years, doesn't a single CA sound great (free and easy == market consolidation), and doesn't EFF seem like the perfect vector for a Trojan horse like this, given its popularity and trust among hacker types gained in recent years?
http://www.certificate-transparency.org/
There's also HPKP, TACK, and DANE, plus the prospect of having more distributed cert scans producing databases of all the publicly visible certs that people are encountering on the web.
Only one "root CA" to trust per TLD, and it's free if you own a TLD that supports DNSSEC (most do these days).
Now we just need the DANE check built into the browser without any plugins that require installation.
How does having _fewer_ CAs make anything easier? Why is the EFF a better route than any of the various other companies that have gotten themselves in the CA program? And given that all the CAs are equivalently trusted at a technical level, why does the human trust afforded the EFF affect whether it's a better target?
Let's Encrypt is only planning to issue DV certificates, since that is the only type that can be issued in a fully automated way. Many organizations will want something other than DV, and they'll have to get such certs from other CAs.
Also, our software and protocols are open so that other CAs can make use of them.
Browsers will be able to check any cert signed by the Let's Encrypt CA against the published list. If there's a discrepancy, that will be immediately detectable.
However, if the client is ever subsequently on a non-MITMed connection, it can detect the certificate disappearing from the append-only log - and the signed certificate and signed append-only log constitute irrefutable evidence that the two authorities were compromised.
As all legitimately issued certificates are in the Certificate Transparency logs, browser vendors can grandfather them in so they keep working after they drop the CA certificate from the trust root. This kills the CA.
This would give CAs the power to refuse requests from the NSA, because their hands are tied - no matter what coercion the NSA threatens, the CA can't issue an MITM certificate without getting shut down.
Obviously it remains to be seen whether this will work in practice.
It does rely on the legitimate site owner actively checking the records to notice the misissuance. Maybe that process could be automated somehow.
And pretty much every major government directly or indirectly controls one or multiple CAs that are in the standard set.
If I'm running a single web app on a single Ubuntu server using Apache then I'm set! If I'm running multiple web apps across multiple servers using a load balancer, nginx on FreeBSD then...
All the same I'm really looking forward to this coming out, it can be nothing but good that all of these companies are backing this new solution and I'm sure it'll expand and handle these issues as long as a good team is behind it.
We'll be doing quite a bit of work based on user feedback between now and when we go live. We're well aware that we need to cater to a variety of types of users.
I think it's about time for a free CA that is recognized by all clients, but you still need to establish a trust chain to exchange a CSR for a signed certificate. This service needs to be server agnostic. The barrier to adoption isn't configuration, and HTTPS isn't the only thing that uses certificates.
Because of the open protocol we also aspire to support users with more complex configurations and requirements, who are absolutely welcome and encouraged to write their own implementations of the protocol and integrate with their own existing certificate management and configuration methods. If you think of other barriers to adoption that we can help with, please let us know and we'll try to address them; if you just want our certs for free, please get them and enjoy!
I do want your certs for free! But I also want/need to trust you and know that you're following best practices, not just with me but with everyone.
Domain validation is done through a challenge (issued by a CA) to sign arbitrary data and put on a URL (covered by the domain) the CA can then query. This seems pretty solid. Better then email.
Generate key, Generate CSR, Send CSR, Receive Certs from CA, Verify ownership, Install certs
Presumably their command line client creates the key, the CSR, sends the CSR, then gets back the certs (at least I'd hope so). I'd be happy to use a vetted command line utility which did that, or even just parts of that process, if I were sure the private key were not transmitted. It's just automating stuff which with current CAs needs to be done manually.
That's a bit more then "giving us a cert"
If you want, the client can just give you the cert at the end instead of installing it. In the common case for a user who's not currently comfortable with the process, the client is automating several things -- generating a private key and CSR, proving control of the domain, and installing the key and cert in the server.
My dream cli tool would just generate key, get certs, and dump them in the dir of my choice. The server config is nice to have but not really essential or the hard part.
Really looking forward to seeing this happen, is there any beta program at present?
Basically, my assumption is they won't want to be providing certs to known bad actors. So I'm curious who is going to own the abuse handling for the CA.
However, it doesn't do anything about the very serious problems with the CA system, which is fundamentally unsound because it requires trust and end users do not meaningfully have the authority to revoke that trust. And there's a bigger problem: if EFF's CA becomes the standard CA, there is now another single point of failure for a huge portion of the web. While I personally have a strong faith in the EFF, in the long term I shouldn't have to.
That said, not having to pay some jerk for sending me an email and having me enter a code is really nice. The current CA system is a pitiful excuse for identity verification, and not having to pay for it will be nice.
I do a lot of custom stuff and want to run my own server. I can set up and run the server in maybe 50-100 lines of code, and it works great.
I know, I should conform and use Apache/nginx/OpenSSL like everyone else. Because they're so much more secure, right? By using professional code like the aforementioned, you won't get exposed to exploits like Heartbleed, Shellshock, etc.
But me, being the stubborn one I am, I want to just code up a site. I can open up a socket, parse a few text lines, and voila. Web server. Now I want to add TLS and what are my options?
OpenSSL, crazy API, issues like Heartbleed.
libtls from LibreSSL, amazing API, not packaged for anything but OpenBSD yet. Little to no real world testing.
Mozilla NSS or GnuTLS, awful APIs, everyone seems to recommend against them.
Obscure software I've never heard of: PolarSSL, MatrixSSL. May be good, but I'm uneasy with it since I don't know anything about them. And I have to hope they play nicely with all my environments (Clang on OS X, Visual C++ on Windows, GCC on Linux and BSD) and package managers.
Write my own. Hahah. Hahahahahahahahah. Yeah. All I have to do is implement AES, Camellia, DES, RC4, RC5, Triple DES, XTEA, Blowfish, MD5, MD2, MD4, SHA-1, SHA-2, RSA, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), Elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH), Elliptic Curve DSA (ECDSA); and all with absolutely no errors (and this is critical!), and I'm good to go!
I'm not saying encryption should be a breeze, but come on. I want this in <socket.h> and available anywhere. I want to be able to ask for socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAMTLS, 0), call setsockcert(certdata, certsize) and be ready to go.
Everything we do in computer science is always about raising the bar in terms of complexity. Writing software requires larger and larger teams, and increasingly there's the attitude that "you can't possibly do that yourself, so don't even try." It's in writing operating systems, writing device drivers, writing web browsers, writing crypto software, etc.
I didn't get into programming to glue other people's code together. I want to learn how things work and write them myself. For once in this world, I'd love it if we could work on reducing complexity instead of adding to it.
nginx started out as a hobby project by Igor Sysoev. Maybe he should have just used Apache too?
> Or at the very least you could let another process to TLS termination and just handle HTTP
A well-designed HTTPS->HTTP proxy package could work. Install proxy, and requests to it on 443 fetch localhost:80 (which you could firewall off externally if you wanted) and feed it back as HTTPS. Definitely not optimal, especially if it ends up eating a lot of RAM or limiting active connections, but it would be a quick-and-dirty method that would work for smaller sites.
But it won't handle other uses of TLS, such as if you wanted to use smtp.gmail.com, which requires STARTTLS. Or maybe you want to write an application that uses a new custom protocol, and want to encrypt that.
If you put this stuff into libc, and get it ISO standardized and simplified, and have it present out of the box with your compilers on each OS, then you'll open the door for developers to more easily take advantage of TLS encryption everywhere.
Look at the core API for GnuTLS: http://www.gnutls.org/manual/html_node/Core-TLS-API.html
This is just insane. It would take an average developer months to fully understand that API.
I don't really understand the problem you are having. If your sites are small personal/side projects, why worry about things like your web server? That stuff is so trivial, it's boring. If your sites are so large that the overhead that HTTPS has over HTTP makes that much of a difference (pretty sure that'd be Google, Facebook, Twitter, and nobody else), then why use your own server implementation which you must know contains more bugs than something like nginx which is already blazing fast. All of these things are a solved problem, there is no reason to solve them again unless you are explicitly developing a web server, an email relay, etc. If so, that's awesome, but in 2014 if you develop a web server that doesn't work with HTTPS, it's pretty much dead on arrival.
Having said that, check out http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man3/.... This sounds like exactly what you need.
What's Cisco's role in this? I'm quite worried about that. It has been reported multiple times that Cisco's routers have NSA backdoors in them, from multiple angles (from TAO intercepting the routers to law enforcement having access to "legal intercept" in them).
So I hope they are not securing their certificates with Cisco's routers...
It just happens that every ISP/telco in the US needs this capability to comply with CALEA so it's manufacturers responding to market forces. Juniper supports it, A Latvian router manufacturer supports it (http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/CALEA), there's even open source code to do it (https://code.google.com/p/opencalea/) if you're building your own routers.
There's a place to focus your ire over wiretapping. The manufacturers aren't it.
What you're talking about is being introduced alongside DNSSEC, and it's called DANE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...
1. I really hope this is hosted in a non-FVEY territory.
2. Why can't we set a date (say, 5 years?) when all browsers default to https, or some other encrypted protocol, and force you to type "http://" to access old, unencrypted servers?
>Put a CA-provided challenge at a specific place on the web server
or
> Put a CA-provided challenge at a DNS location corresponding to the target domain.
Since the server will presumably be plaintext at that point and DNS is UDP, couldn't an attacker like NSA just mitm the proof-of-site-ownership functionality of lets-encrypt to capture ownership at TOFU and then silently re-use it, e.g. via Akamai's infrastructure?
[0] https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-spec/blob/master/draft-b...
(1) You can do the attack you describe today with existing CAs that are issuing DV certs because posting a file on the web server is an existing DV validation method that's in routine use.
(2) There is another validation method we've developed called dvsni which is stronger in some respects (but yes, it still trusts DNS).
(3) We're expecting to do multipath testing of the proof of site ownership to make MITM attacks harder. (But as with much existing DV in general, someone who can completely compromise DNS can cause misissuance.)
(4) If the community finds solutions that make any step of this process stronger, Let's Encrypt will presumably adopt them.
Periodically poll DNS for the list from that database to obtain the NS records for pretty much all of the web, and also A records for all the actively used hosts you find in the crawl. Keep this cache as a trace of how DNS records change.
Now, do the DNS polling from several different geographic locations. Now you've got a history of DNS from different viewpoints.
When you get a request for a certificate for, say, "microsoft.com", look up the domain name in the way described on the Lets Encrypt description. But also check that this IP address appears in the history, either from multiple locations for a few days, or from one location for a few months.
If this test fails, check if the historic IP addresses for this domain from the polled cache are already running TLS, signed by a regular CA. If so, reject the application.
Otherwise continue with validation in the way described on the Lets Encrypt web page.
leveraging other (potentially-insecure) paths to establish trust might help further enhance confidence in authenticity; e.g. verification using something like the broad-based strategy of moxie's perspectives (except via plaintext) or maybe through additional verification of plaintext on the site as fetched via tor or retrieving a cached copy of the site securely from the internet archive or search engines.
dvsni and multipath testing sound quite interesting, and i think defense in depth is the right approach.
having been at akamai's recent edge conference, i didn't hear much from them on this. does anyone have any additional details of their interest in the project?
Publish your TLSA records. Sign your zone. Done.
While we're at it, let's get a non-profit domain registrar going.
domain squatters are already an issue. imaging if you could register domains for free. I think having to pay $10 for a year is pretty fair. That's one reason I don't mind paying ~$70 for .io domain. it keeps most squatters away.
The problem is the horrible user experience of registrars like Godaddy. I'd rather give my money to a nonprofit that isn't confusing non-technical website owners into buying products they don't need.
The registrar landscape is better now with Gandi, but still I'd rather pay a fully transparent nonprofit registrar if one existed.
Also, I really wish AOL would have donated their root certs to y'all[2] so you didn't have to set up a whole new CA.
[1]: https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/technology/
[2]: https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000618....
- Obtain a browser-trusted certificate and set it up on your web serve
IdenTrust is listed as a sponsor and is the CA for the letsencrypt.org certificate so I'm guessing they're doing some sort of partnership.
https://github.com/letsencrypt/lets-encrypt-preview/issues
or e-mail me about them. So far this has only been tested on a handful of configurations and will clearly need to be tested on many more over the next few months.
Please be careful when running it on your live server: if it does manage to get a cert right now, that cert won't be accepted by clients and will produce cert warnings (and if you use the "Secure" option at the end, you'll also be generating redirects from the HTTP site to the cert-warning-generating HTTPS version).
Now, if there was a project in Iceland or Seychelles that was doing something similar, I would be much more apt to participate.
I can't profess to understanding all the details of encryption infrastructure, but I learned very quickly in kindergarten, you can't trust anyone you don't know. It doesn't matter who they are, who they know or what they know. Half the time, you can't even trust "cold hard facts", the facts are frequently misinterpreted, fabricated or eventually proven to be wrong - once it was a fact that the earth was flat, then we were the centre of the universe, now the universe as we know it is held together by a God particle. Science claims facts that invalidate there being a God... all facts are a matter of our fallable understanding of this scientific instrument we are building. Even people you do trust can be coerced into doing things that compromise your ability to trust them or their motives.
If you want to automate trust, then you're eventually going to have to realize that you can't. All you can do is mitigate the cost of being wrong.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely - the CA (or whoever controls that CA) has absolute power in this scenario. If you have the director's family hostage, everyone else's security just went down the pan.
Chain of trust is like putting all your eggs in one basket. You just don't do it. Web of trust is a marginal step up, but it's more of a pain in the ass and can also be overcome by a group with malicious intent.
Certificate Transparency may help to alert people, it's certainly a step in the right direction, but it doesn't fix the problem in my mind. I honestly don't think the problem can be fixed. All we can do is try and mitigate the risk of our trust being broken.
Also, have they built this system with a completely scalable distributed architecture? For it to be practical it needs to be performant.
Also, does the NSA have access to the core of this system?
Is there any reason why I would want to use https for this use case?
Or what does "entire web" mean?
If you use HTTPS you prevent alterations to that traffic and people receive exactly what you expect they should receive.
Examples of recent ISP misbehaving on non-https websites just 25 days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8500131
Note that the Verizon issue isn't anything entirely content altering but someone who lives in a country with strict monitoring of traffic could easily change the wording of your website to match their propaganda if you aren't using HTTPS.
So yes, your content is publicly available free stuff and no one is probably sending you user login credentials or credit cards but it still matters.
Over http it could conceivably have malicious or tracking content introduced without your knowledge.
Yes it can help you stop:
ISPs inserting adverts into your content (this has happened)
Governments censoring your content or rewriting it
Governments putting people in jail for reading your publicly available (in your country) content, which is illegal in theirs
People impersonating your website
But if you don't want to use it, that's cool too. I suspect all websites will be encrypted at some point soon though, the disadvantages are getting less and less important.
HTTPS will also make an attacker unable to change your content.
Like you, I don't host any private or remotely sensitive information. I'm encrypting my site because I think it's the right thing to do, even though there's little personal return on investment.
'Automatically?'
So we're replacing owning people by snooping on their HTTP traffic with owning people by directing them to fake websites digitally signed by "m1crosoft.com"?
... actually, yes, that is kind of an improvement.
Apache only or also Nginx?
Who is the CA?
No way I am running something like this on a production machine.
I like the idea but I would rather have the client just output the certificate and key in a dir so I can put the files where I need them and I can configure the changes to my webserver.
Also this does not solve the issue of a CA issuing certificates for your domain and doing MITM.
Our Apache code is a developer preview, we'll be working on Nginx next.
ISRG will be operating a new root CA for this project. Although if you think that your choice of CA makes you more or less secure, you may not have understood how PKIX works -- you can buy a cert from whichever CA you like, but your adversary can always pick the weakest one to try to impersonate you.
If you're comfortable editing your own Apache configs, then you'll only need to use the client to obtain the cert and not to manage its installation long-term. (The client does need to reconfigure the web server while obtaining the cert as part of the CA validation process.)
The protocol is openly published, so you can write your own client too, or follow the protocol steps manually -- or any web server developer or hosting platform can develop their own alternative client.
There does need to be some client to speak the protocol, but there's no attempt to force you to use it to manage your certs and configs if that's not what you want. The convenience is aimed at people who don't understand how to install a cert, or who think that process is too time-consuming.
They are creating a new CA for this purpose.
I can't imagine this will replace the manual learn-pay-experiment-error-success process we have at the moment, so experts will still be able to control the process manually.
It doesn't address CA MITM attacks but it does significantly reduce non-CA MITM attacks by remove the two primary objections to deploying SSL: cost and complexity. Bravo EFF - this could be the most significant step in SSL adoption ever.
> I would rather have the client just output the certificate and key in a dir
Could not agree more.
What we can do: - Change the http protocol to be encrypted? - create an apache module that automatically does this and needs no setup time (generate private keys automatically?)
Of course there shouldn't be any indicator of this encryption in the adress bar of the browser.
Maybe it's too late.
With an "Extended Validation" cert, the CA additionally verifies that they are who they say they are on the cert (not just that they control the (web)sites the cert was issued for). I'm not sure if Let's Encrypt plans on issuing EV certs, but if they are, they will have to comply with whatever verification standards are standard, in order for vendors not to revoke them from trusted stores. Same as anyone else.
Beside, as an European, I'm not so excited that such initiative is under control of American Law. I suspect that American interests will prevail.
I agree that there are several possible effects of jurisdiction on CAs that people could reasonably be concerned with (whether as would-be certificate requestors or would-be relying parties), but I'm wondering which ones are concerning you most.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/janus-proxy-c...
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/data-compression-p...
ECDSA certs are much cheaper to decrypt, and there's still some places (especially mobile) where TLS is a noticeable overhead - it'd be great to have a CA that provides them.
Comodo definitely has an ECC root available now, a cross-signed ECDSA root with secp384r1, signing a secp256r1 intermediate. (I had heard there were 3 others deployed out there, although off the top of my head I'm not clear about which they are, perhaps they're also cross-signed?)
Why is ECC so poorly deployed in TLS? I've heard indications Certicom had formerly aggressively asserted patents, hence the lack of ECC-supporting CAs; but I don't know which ones. I highly doubt they're still extant, however: many have since expired.
Do be aware however that ECDSA can present a huge hazard if the k value needed for every signature is even partially predictable and varies. Officially, it should be random, and very strongly random (even the first two bits being consistently predictable is cumulatively disastrous; using the exact same k to sign two different things is absolutely catastrophic and is how the Sony PS3 root keys were calculated!). If you have a strong PRF for your RNG, you should be fine (e.g. LibreSSL uses ChaCha20); if you want some insurance just in case, you can use a more-auditable and less fragile deterministic process with a strong PRF so the same signature always gets the same, unpredictable k (see RFC 6979), or a combination of the two approaches (e.g. BoringSSL). DSA also had this issue. If you haven't audited your RNG and know it's strong, maybe you should check it before you deploy ECDSA: if your system's headless, its entropy is running on empty and your idea of a mixing function is RC4, it might not be such a hot idea.
It'd be fantastic to have the option available to have an ECC root around, and let us have RSA or ECC certs. (Yes, you can cross-sign across algorithms.) Perhaps have ECDSA off by default for a while in light of the above, but it can provide very good performance for people who use modern software and turn it on!
I'd suggest using secp256r1 (aka NIST P-256). It's already deployed and 256-bit curves lie at about RSA-3072 strength (stronger than most deployed CAs now, which typically use RSA-2048). A few others have deployed secp384r1, but that was following the NSA's Suite B lead; I'm not sold on that being relevant at all. secp256r1 is also fairly fast, with some very well-optimised constant-time routines available in OpenSSL if you enable a flag or even faster ones if you're using 1.2 beta (expect something like a 200%-250% performance boost over the generic elliptic curve routines); it's not quite Curve25519 speed, but it isn't bad.
I do however acknowledge the extreme murkiness surrounding the generation of the NIST/SECG/X9.62 curves. That does present some concern to me. I tried to get to the bottom of that (see my posts on CFRG) and I can summarise what I found out as basically (now-expired/irrelevant) patent-related shenanigans. I'm not super-comfortable with that degree of opacity in my curves - however, I also don't know of any actual security problems with secp256r1 (or secp384r1) as they stand, providing they are properly implemented (very big proviso!). I don't think they're backdoored, but make sure you check the hinges on the front door, and I'd prefer a house with better foundations!
More transparently-produced curves (such as the Brainpool curves) do exist, but Brainpool is sadly very slow in software (less than half the speed than a good P256 routine, and no scope for optimisations).
So looking forward, CFRG (at IRTF) were asked by the TLS Working Group to recommend even better new curves: most probably Curve25519 in my opinion as that seems to admirably satisfy all the criteria for a fast strong mainstream curve, and probably one larger "extra paranoid" curve will be recommended which I really don't know what it'll be at this stage. These hopefully will be/are even faster, strong, and rigidly-explained, without murky origins. And hopefully there will be better algorithms than ECDSA (perhaps a Schnorr-based algorithm such as Ed25519, now the patent expired?). I very much doubt if all the supporting infrastructure for that like HSMs and widely-deployed software support will all be "ready" for this project, however, in the timeframe we'd like, however, so in the meantime, P256 or RSA-2048 I guess is OK.
In general: This is absolutely wonderful news. It, and the efficiency of TLS 1.2 (and later, TLS 1.3) will enable people to run TLS everywhere. I am very probably going to use it myself.
While the Israel-based CA StartCom do already offer free TLS certificates and I have previously lauded them for that, they pulled an absolutely unforgivable move detrimental to internet security as a whole in refusing to revoke and rekey certificates for free even exceptionally in the immediate wake of Heartbleed (and I do think they should have their CA status reviewed very harshly as a result or revoked, because I do not think that is compliant with CA/B guidelines: they definitely still have live signatures on compromised keys that have not been revoked, which is totally unacceptable). If this initiative means we can replace and dump bad CAs, it's even better news.
There are CAs that issue them, uh... someone managed to get one issued during the TLS WG meeting at IETF last week. I'd have to listen to the audio to find out what CA they used.
ssl_certificate /path/to/file.crt;
I just don't know about the automatic configuration tool. Like webpanels for managing a server, it has never worked for me.
(StartSSL do even for paying customers... stay away)
Like StartCom selling Class 2/3, running a CA is very expensive and I wonder how they plan on recouping the fees for this.
Is it? Seems like it should be dirt cheap to me. It's basically just an API for generating and revoking certs.
Thanks :)
btw if you want to donate too, here is the link: https://supporters.eff.org/donate
Looks neat.
The certificate isn't saying "this website won't infect your computer", it's saying "you're talking to the real owner of this domain".
At some point down the chain, you have to rely on trust to some degree. Either disappear in to the wilderness and completely disconnect from the grid or - at some point - you have to trust someone.
Kudos also for creating the second CA to issue free certificates (the first being StartSSL).
The next step needs to be to man-in-the-middle (MITM) proof these certs. We still have to address that problem. We'll be talking about how the blockchain can be used to solve this problem tonight at the SF Bitcoin Meetup, if that interests you, you're welcome to come:
http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin-Social/events/18...
A primer can be found here: https://vimeo.com/100433057
Sorry agwa.
We've been working with CloudFlare to drive HTTPS adoption, and plan to work with them further on integration.