Entries Tagged "certificates"

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E-Mailing Private HTTPS Keys

I don’t know what to make of this story:

The email was sent on Tuesday by the CEO of Trustico, a UK-based reseller of TLS certificates issued by the browser-trusted certificate authorities Comodo and, until recently, Symantec. It was sent to Jeremy Rowley, an executive vice president at DigiCert, a certificate authority that acquired Symantec’s certificate issuance business after Symantec was caught flouting binding industry rules, prompting Google to distrust Symantec certificates in its Chrome browser. In communications earlier this month, Trustico notified DigiCert that 50,000 Symantec-issued certificates Trustico had resold should be mass revoked because of security concerns.

When Rowley asked for proof the certificates were compromised, the Trustico CEO emailed the private keys of 23,000 certificates, according to an account posted to a Mozilla security policy forum. The report produced a collective gasp among many security practitioners who said it demonstrated a shockingly cavalier treatment of the digital certificates that form one of the most basic foundations of website security.

Generally speaking, private keys for TLS certificates should never be archived by resellers, and, even in the rare cases where such storage is permissible, they should be tightly safeguarded. A CEO being able to attach the keys for 23,000 certificates to an email raises troubling concerns that those types of best practices weren’t followed.

I am croggled by the multiple layers of insecurity here.

BoingBoing post.

Posted on March 13, 2018 at 6:31 AM • View Comments

Signed Malware

Stuxnet famously used legitimate digital certificates to sign its malware. A research paper from last year found that the practice is much more common than previously thought.

Now, researchers have presented proof that digitally signed malware is much more common than previously believed. What’s more, it predated Stuxnet, with the first known instance occurring in 2003. The researchers said they found 189 malware samples bearing valid digital signatures that were created using compromised certificates issued by recognized certificate authorities and used to sign legitimate software. In total, 109 of those abused certificates remain valid. The researchers, who presented their findings Wednesday at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, found another 136 malware samples signed by legitimate CA-issued certificates, although the signatures were malformed.

The results are significant because digitally signed software is often able to bypass User Account Control and other Windows measures designed to prevent malicious code from being installed. Forged signatures also represent a significant breach of trust because certificates provide what’s supposed to be an unassailable assurance to end users that the software was developed by the company named in the certificate and hasn’t been modified by anyone else. The forgeries also allow malware to evade antivirus protections. Surprisingly, weaknesses in the majority of available AV programs prevented them from detecting known malware that was digitally signed even though the signatures weren’t valid.

Posted on February 2, 2018 at 6:38 AM • View Comments

Security Vulnerabilities in Certificate Pinning

New research found that many banks offer certificate pinning as a security feature, but fail to authenticate the hostname. This leaves the systems open to man-in-the-middle attacks.

From the paper:

Abstract: Certificate verification is a crucial stage in the establishment of a TLS connection. A common security flaw in TLS implementations is the lack of certificate hostname verification but, in general, this is easy to detect. In security-sensitive applications, the usage of certificate pinning is on the rise. This paper shows that certificate pinning can (and often does) hide the lack of proper hostname verification, enabling MITM attacks. Dynamic (black-box) detection of this vulnerability would typically require the tester to own a high security certificate from the same issuer (and often same intermediate CA) as the one used by the app. We present Spinner, a new tool for black-box testing for this vulnerability at scale that does not require purchasing any certificates. By redirecting traffic to websites which use the relevant certificates and then analysing the (encrypted) network traffic we are able to determine whether the hostname check is correctly done, even in the presence of certificate pinning. We use Spinner to analyse 400 security-sensitive Android and iPhone apps. We found that 9 apps had this flaw, including two of the largest banks in the world: Bank of America and HSBC. We also found that TunnelBear, one of the most popular VPN apps was also vulnerable. These apps have a joint user base of tens of millions of users.

News article.

Posted on December 8, 2017 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

Let's Encrypt Is Making Web Encryption Easier

That’s the conclusion of a research paper:

Once [costs and complexity] are eliminated, it enables big hosting providers to issue and deploy certificates for their customers in bulk, thus quickly and automatically enable encryption across a large number of domains. For example, we have shown that currently, 47% of LE certified domains are hosted at three large hosting companies (Automattic/wordpress.com, Shopify, and OVH).

Paper: “No domain left behind: is Let’s Encrypt democratizing encryption?”

Abstract: The 2013 National Security Agency revelations of pervasive monitoring have lead to an “encryption rush” across the computer and Internet industry. To push back against massive surveillance and protect users privacy, vendors, hosting and cloud providers have widely deployed encryption on their hardware, communication links, and applications. As a consequence, the most of web traffic nowadays is encrypted. However, there is still a significant part of Internet traffic that is not encrypted. It has been argued that both costs and complexity associated with obtaining and deploying X.509 certificates are major barriers for widespread encryption, since these certificates are required to established encrypted connections. To address these issues, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and the University of Michigan have set up Let’s Encrypt (LE), a certificate authority that provides both free X.509 certificates and software that automates the deployment of these certificates. In this paper, we investigate if LE has been successful in democratizing encryption: we analyze certificate issuance in the first year of LE and show from various perspectives that LE adoption has an upward trend and it is in fact being successful in covering the lower-cost end of the hosting market.

Reddit thread.

Posted on December 14, 2016 at 6:46 AM • View Comments

Suckfly

Suckfly seems to be another Chinese nation-state espionage tool, first stealing South Korean certificates and now attacking Indian networks.

Symantec has done a good job of explaining how Suckfly works, and there’s a lot of good detail in the blog posts. My only complaint is its reluctance to disclose who the targets are. It doesn’t name the South Korean companies whose certificates were stolen, and it doesn’t name the Indian companies that were hacked:

Many of the targets we identified were well known commercial organizations located in India. These organizations included:

  • One of India’s largest financial organizations
  • A large e-commerce company
  • The e-commerce company’s primary shipping vendor
  • One of India’s top five IT firms
  • A United States healthcare provider’s Indian business unit
  • Two government organizations

Suckfly spent more time attacking the government networks compared to all but one of the commercial targets. Additionally, one of the two government organizations had the highest infection rate of the Indian targets.

My guess is that Symantec can’t disclose those names, because those are all customers and Symantec has confidentiality obligations towards them. But by leaving this information out, Symantec is harming us all. We have to make decisions on the Internet all the time about who to trust and who to rely on. The more information we have, the better we can make those decisions. And the more companies are publicly called out when their security fails, the more they will try to make security better.

Symantec’s motivation in releasing information about Suckfly is marketing, and that’s fine. There, its interests and the interests of the research community are aligned. But here, the interests diverge, and this is the value of mandatory disclosure laws.

Posted on May 26, 2016 at 6:31 AM • View Comments

Economic Failures of HTTPS Encryption

Interesting paper: “Security Collapse of the HTTPS Market.” From the conclusion:

Recent breaches at CAs have exposed several systemic vulnerabilities and market failures inherent in the current HTTPS authentication model: the security of the entire ecosystem suffers if any of the hundreds of CAs is compromised (weakest link); browsers are unable to revoke trust in major CAs (“too big to fail”); CAs manage to conceal security incidents (information asymmetry); and ultimately customers and end users bear the liability and damages of security incidents (negative externalities).

Understanding the market and value chain for HTTPS is essential to address these systemic vulnerabilities. The market is highly concentrated, with very large price differences among suppliers and limited price competition. Paradoxically, the current vulnerabilities benefit rather than hurt the dominant CAs, because among others, they are too big to fail.

Posted on November 28, 2014 at 6:26 AM • View Comments

A New Free CA

Announcing Let’s Encrypt, a new free certificate authority. This is a joint project of EFF, Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, and the University of Michigan.

This is an absolutely fantastic idea.

The anchor for any TLS-protected communication is a public-key certificate which demonstrates that the server you’re actually talking to is the server you intended to talk to. For many server operators, getting even a basic server certificate is just too much of a hassle. The application process can be confusing. It usually costs money. It’s tricky to install correctly. It’s a pain to update.

Let’s Encrypt is a new free certificate authority, built on a foundation of cooperation and openness, that lets everyone be up and running with basic server certificates for their domains through a simple one-click process.

[…]

The key principles behind Let’s Encrypt are:

  • Free: Anyone who owns a domain can get a certificate validated for that domain at zero cost.
  • Automatic: The entire enrollment process for certificates occurs painlessly during the server’s native installation or configuration process, while renewal occurs automatically in the background.
  • Secure: Let’s Encrypt will serve as a platform for implementing modern security techniques and best practices.
  • Transparent: All records of certificate issuance and revocation will be available to anyone who wishes to inspect them.
  • Open: The automated issuance and renewal protocol will be an open standard and as much of the software as possible will be open source.
  • Cooperative: Much like the underlying Internet protocols themselves, Let’s Encrypt is a joint effort to benefit the entire community, beyond the control of any one organization.

Slashdot thread. Hacker News thread.

EDITED TO ADD (11/19): Good post. And EFF’s blog post.

Posted on November 18, 2014 at 12:38 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.