The EU is poised to pass a sweeping new regulation, eIDAS 2.0. Buried deep in the text is Article 45, which returns us to the dark ages of 2011, when certificate authorities (CAs) could collaborate with governments to spy on encrypted traffic—and get away with it. Article 45 forbids browsers from...
Yeah, except you aren’t supposed to TOFU.
Literally everybody does SSH wrong. The point of host keys is to exchange them out-of-band so you know you have the right host on the first connection.
And guess what certificates are.
Also keep in mind that although MS and Apple both publish trusted root lists, Mozilla is also one of, if not the, biggest player. They maintain the list of what ultimately gets distributed as
ca-certificatesin pretty much every Linux distro. It’s also the source of the Pythoncertifitrusted root bundle, that required by requests, and probably makes its way into every API script/bot/tool using Python (which is probably most of them).And there’s literally nothing stopping you from curating your own bundle or asking people to install your cert. And that takes care of the issue of TOFU. The idea being that somebody that accepts your certificate trusts you to verify that any entity using a certificate you attach your name to was properly vetted by you or your agents.
You are also welcome to submit your CA to Mozilla for consideration on including it on their master list. They are very transparent about the process.
Hell, there’s also nothing stopping you from rolling a CA and using certificates for host and client verification on SSH. Thats actually preferable at-scale.
A lot of major companies also use their own internal CA and bundle their own trusted root into their app or hardware (Sony does this with PlayStation, Amazon does this a lot of AWS Apps like workspaces, etc)
In fact, what you are essentially suggesting is functionally the exact same thibg as self-signed certificates. And there’s absolutely (technically) nothing wrong with them. They are perfectly fine, and probably preferable for certain applications (like machine-to-machine communication or a closed environment) because they expire much longer than the 1yr max you can get from most public CAs. But you still aren’t supposed to TOFU them. That smacks right in the face of a zero-trust philosophy.
The whole point of certificates is to make up for the issue of TOFU by you instead agreeing that you trust whoever maintains your root store, which is ultimately going to be either your OS or App developer. If you trust them to maintain your OS or essential app, then you should also trust them to maintain a list of companies they trust to properly vet their clientele.
And that whole process is probably the number one most perfect example of properly working, applied, capitalism. The top-level CAs are literally selling honesty. Fucking that up has huge business ramifications.
Not to mention, if you don’t trust Bob’s House of Certificate’s, there’s no reason you can’t entrust it from your system. And if you trust Jimbo’s Certificate Authority, you are welcome to tell your system to accept certificates they issue.
A better solution would be to have both at the same time.
Browser says: x number of CAs say that this site is authentic (click here for a list). Do you trust this site? Certificate fingerprint: … Certificate randomart: …
And then there would be options to trust it once, trust it temporarily, trust it and save the cert. The first 2 could also block JS if wanted.
I can see this would annoy the mainstream users, so probably this should be opt-in, asked at browser installation or something like that.
But you only really need one to say it’s authentic. There are levels of validation that require different levels of effort. Domain Validation (DV) is the most simple and requires that you prove you own the domain, which means making a special domain record for them to validate (usually a long string that they provide over their HTTPS site), or by sending an email to the registered domain owner from their WHOIS record. Organization Validation (OV) and extended verification (EV) are the higher tiers, and usually require proof of business ownership and an in-person interview, respectively.
Now, if you want to know if the site was compromised or malicious, that’s a different problem entirely. Certificates do not and cannot serve that function, and it’s wrong to place that role on CAs. That is a security and threat mitigation problem and is better solved by client-based applications, web filtering services, and next-gen firewalls, that use their own reputation databases for that.
A CA is not expected to prevent me from hosting rootkits. Doesn’t matter if my domain is rootkits-are.us or totallylegitandsafe.net. It’s their job to make sure I own those domains. Nothing more. For a DV cert at least.
Public key cryptography, and certificates in particular, are an amazing system. They don’t need to be scrapped because there’s a ton of misunderstanding as to its role and responsibilities.
Oh, yes, sorry, I had a brainfart. Certs don’t usually (or at all?) have more than one root cert.
I thought that was the goal. Not to make sure that the website is secure, but that the connection is secure, and that I’ve connected to the server that I expected.
I don’t really care if a site is who they say they are, I’m the one connecting to the site, if the site does what I expect, they are serving their purpose. The only thing I use SSH/HTTPS for is to make sure that whatever communication between me and the site can’t be snooped. A CA allows a third party to snoop that traffic, and I have no indication they are doing it.
You are missing half the purpose of PKI. Identity is equally, if not more, as important as encryption.
Who gives a shit if your password is encrypted if somebody intercepts DNS and sends yourbank.com and makes it go to their own server that’s hosting a carbon-copy of the homepage to collect passwords?
And DNS isn’t the only attack vector for this. It can be done at the IP level by attacks that spoof BGP. It can be done by sticking a single-board computer in a trashcan at a subway stop. Have it broadcast a ton of well-known SSIDs and a ton of phones in the area will auto connect to it and can intercept traffic. Hell, if not for trusted CAs, it’d be very easy to just MITM all the HTTPS traffic anyway.
In reality, you would tofu the first website you went to and not know if it got intercepted or if they just rotated keys (which is also a common security practice and is handled by renewing certificates and part of the reason why publicly-issued CAs are trending down the life of certificates and it’s not a big deal for admins because of easy automation technology. HSTS and cert pinning is more of a PITA but really barely any effort when you consider the benefits of those).
Now, what certificates don’t protect, nor claim to protect, is typosquatting. If you instead go to yorbank.com, that’s on you, and protecting you from a malicious site that happened to buy it is the job for host-based security, web filters, and NGFWs.