PKI Consortium blog

Fighting the Good Fight for Online Trust
April 2, 2015 by CA Security Council Apple CAA CASC Google HSM Mis-issued MITM Mozilla Policy Root Program SSL/TLS WebTrust

Once again Browsers and Certificate Authorities are in the news over the reported mis-issuance of an SSL server certificate to a google.com domain. Discovered by Google most likely via technology known as key pinning and discussed by Google’s Adam Langley in this blog, a Chinese certificate authority, CNNIC (Chinese Internet Network Information Center), apparently issued an intermediate certificate to an Egyptian company called MCS Holdings. Because the CNNIC root certificate is included in the root store of most major browsers, users would not see any warnings on sites that have certificates issued by CNNIC or MCS Holdings. When MCS installed their intermediate into a Man in the Middle (MITM) proxy device, that device could then issue certificates for sites which users connected to that proxy would visit. (MITM is described in more detail in our previous blog here: https://casecurity.org/2015/01/08/gogo-found-spoofing-google-ssl-certificates/)

2015 – Looking Back, Moving Forward
January 6, 2015 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Apple Attack CA/Browser Forum CAA Chrome Code Signing EV Firefox Forward Secrecy Google IETF Malware Microsoft MITM Mozilla OpenSSL PKI Policy RSA SHA1 SSL 3.0 SSL/TLS TLS 1.0 TLS 1.2 TLS 1.3 Vulnerability

Looking Back at 2014

End of 1024-Bit Security

In 2014, the SSL industry moved to issuing a minimum security of 2048-bit RSA certificates. Keys smaller than 2048 are no longer allowed in server certificates. In addition, Microsoft and Mozilla started to remove 1024-bit roots from their certificate stores. Hopefully, the key size change will support users through to 2030.

A Follow-up on POODLE and SSL 3.0
November 21, 2014 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack Encryption Google IETF Mozilla OpenSSL SSL 3.0 SSL/TLS TLS 1.0 TLS 1.1 TLS 1.3 Vulnerability

In October 2014, Google announced POODLE, an SSL 3.0 protocol attack.

To bring you up to speed, the SSL/TLS protocol is the most important and popular security protocol on the Internet. The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol was developed by Netscape. They quickly moved from SSL 1.0 to 2.0 and finalized with SSL 3.0 in 1996.

This protocol was then picked up by the IETF, who released it under the name of Transport Layer Security (TLS). The IETF released TLS 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2. They are currently working on TLS 1.3.

Who Sets the Rules Governing Certification Authorities?
August 19, 2014 by Kirk Hall (Entrust) CA/Browser Forum Code Signing DV Encryption ETSI EV Google Hash Function Identity IETF Microsoft Mozilla OCSP Policy Revocation Root Program SSL/TLS WebTrust

Every time something positive is published about SSL and encryption,such as Google’s recent decision making use of https encryption a favorable rating factor for a website, or negative, such as the Heartbleed issue – bloggers and others always post questions about public Certification Authorities (CAs), including general questions on who sets the rules that govern CAs. Some bloggers seem to assume there are no rules or standards, and that CAs can operate without any requirements or limitations at all — that’s incorrect.

In the Wake of Unauthorized Certificate Issuance by the Indian CA NIC, can Government CAs Still be Considered “Trusted Third Parties”?
July 24, 2014 by Ben Wilson CA/Browser Forum CAA CASC Chrome ETSI Firefox Google Microsoft Mis-issued Mozilla OCSP PKI Policy Revocation SSL/TLS Trust List WebTrust

Short answer: Government CAs can still be considered “trusted third parties,” provided that they follow the rules applicable to commercial CAs.

Introduction

On July 8 Google announced that it had discovered several unauthorized Google certificates issued by the National Informatics Centre of India. It noted that the Indian government CA’s certificates were in the Microsoft Root Store and used by programs on the Windows platform. The Firefox browser on Windows uses its own root store and didn’t have these CA certificates. Other platforms, such as Chrome OS, Android, iOS, and OS X, were not affected. See http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/07/maintaining-digital-certificate-security.html

2014 – Looking Back, Moving Forward
January 6, 2014 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack BEAST CA/Browser Forum CAA Code Signing ECC Encryption Forward Secrecy HSTS ICANN IETF Microsoft MITM Mozilla PKI Policy RC4 RSA SHA1 SSL/TLS TLS 1.2

Looking Back at 2013

Protocol Attacks

The year started with a couple of SSL/TLS protocol attacks: Lucky Thirteen and RC4 attack. Lucky Thirteen allows the decryption of sensitive information, such as passwords and cookies, when using the CBC-mode cipher suite. Lucky Thirteen can be mitigated by implementing software patches or preferring the cipher suite RC4.

ICANN’s Accelerated gTLD Delegation Process and How This Impacts Your Organization
December 18, 2013 by Jeremy Rowley Announcement CA/Browser Forum CASC ICANN MITM Mozilla PKI Policy Qualified Revocation SSL/TLS Vulnerability

After the CASC’s previous letter addressing ICANN’s proposal to delegate nearly 2000 new gTLDs for use on the public Internet, ICANN identified and initiated an extensive study on two significant security issues. Now, based on the conclusions of the studies, ICANN is moving forward quickly with the delegation process, delegating more than 30 in the last two months alone. With ICANN ramping up the delegation process, nearly all 2000 will be delegated under the new rules, with only .corp and .home reserved as high risk gTLDs. This post serves as an advisory for interested network administrator on how the newest ICANN decisions may affect their networks and certificates.

Firefox 23 Blocks Mixed Content
August 13, 2013 by Wayne Thayer Chrome Encryption EV Firefox Google Malware Mixed Content Mozilla SSL/TLS

The latest version of the Firefox Web browser from Mozilla was released on August 6th with a great new security feature called a “mixed content blocker”. In a nutshell, this feature ensures that all of the parts of a secure Website are indeed encrypted via SSL certificates. All of the data on the website is prevented from being intercepted, and it becomes more difficult to add malware into the site’s content.