PKI Consortium blog

2018 – Looking Back, Moving Forward
January 6, 2018 by Bruce Morton (Entrust) Attack CA/Browser Forum CAA Certificate Expiry Chrome ECC Encryption Google Microsoft Mis-issued OV PDF PKI ROCA RSA SSL/TLS TLS 1.3 Vulnerability

Looking Back at 2017

2017 saw the end of SHA-1 in public trust SSL/TLS certificates and the start of Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) allowing domain owners to authorize their CA. A “Not secure” browser indication was propagated to push more websites to support HTTPS. There was also a change in the certification authority (CA) ownership with DigiCert acquiring Symantec’s SSL and related PKI business and Francisco Partners buying Comodo’s CA.

How Does the ROCA Attack Work?
November 9, 2017 by Tim Hollebeek Attack PKI ROCA RSA Web PKI

On October 17th, a group of Czech researchers announced they had found a way to factor the moduli of many RSA public keys generated by hardware produced by Infineon Technologies AG.  The technical details were presented in a paper at the 2017 Computer and Communications Security conference, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery on November 2nd.

The technique only works against the key pairs produced by Infineon’s library, because it exploits the unique method they use to generate RSA primes.  Key pairs produced by other methods and libraries are unaffected.  However, Infineon’s library is very popular, and used in many scenarios, especially for smart cards.  RSA keys for public websites are generally much less likely to have been generated by such hardware, although some cases are known to exist, and certificate authorities are working to inform customers and get the vulnerable keys replaced.