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Free Certificate Authority Unveiled by Aussies
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Jul 02, 2004 12:21 AM
from the good-things-from-down-under dept.
from the good-things-from-down-under dept.
SonOfGates writes "Well, the Aussies have invaded Boston but at least they're not throwing tea into the harbor. AU-based nonprofit CAcert Inc has spent the last few days at USENIX '04 registering new users by the truckload. They bill themselves as a 'Community-Based CA.' Could this be the begining of a true 'open' certificate authority? See the O'Reilly story and press release."
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who else remmbers (Score:5, Insightful)
But, we might be surprised. Opinions anyone?
ps. Maybe they should patch the browser first
Re:who else remmbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:who else remmbers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:who else remmbers (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft doesn't like the GPL, but the GPL is not the be all and the end all of Free Software. Microsoft has no problems with other open licenses.
Parent
Root certificate for Redhat, Opera, Mozilla (Score:5, Informative)
Quote from the article:
He goes on to describe the process of getting the root cert, hopefully, included into the Mozilla project through a Bugzilla feature enhancement request. From what I read from the article, the discussion about this is still going on.
Parent
Re:who else remmbers (Score:4, Funny)
You are obviously one of those
Parent
Re:who else remmbers (Score:5, Informative)
Sad as it may be, IE is still used by something like 85% of the world.
Parent
Re:who else remmbers (Score:5, Funny)
For that matter, just tell people to click "yes" to accept your uncertified cert...they'll do that too.
Parent
Re:who else remmbers (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple for people like you and me. Unfortunately, get your average end-user on the phone and ask them to go to https://www.cacert.org/ and install their certificate:
"What? What's a certificate? What's this error message (about not having this certificate installed)? Ah, hell. An error. Time to reboot."
Re:who else remmbers (Score:4, Funny)
illustrative anecdote: Today, at my girlfriend's house, she was trying to use IE to check her webmail. Every time a new page loaded, a message popped up saying she needed activex (or something, she was so used to the messages that she clicked the close box really fast), and then another box popped up with something to the effect of "are you sure?".
Anyway, I installed firefox for her before letting her finish checking her mail, but the point is that people get quite tolerant of popup crap.
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But what browsers will support (Score:3, Insightful)
The more non IE browsers have the better (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:But what browsers will support (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: You still use Microsoft Internet Explorer.
People who use MSIE obviously are not concerned about privacy or security, so CAs are irrelevant to them.
Consequently, people who still use MSIE are irrelevant to those of us who are concerned about privacy and security. People who are concerned about privacy and security are a small minority of Internet users. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get the privacy and security we want.
Parent
Sounds like... (Score:4, Interesting)
Too bad this cert isn't defaultly trusted by IE/FireFox.
Interesting side note: when I recieved the registration email from them, Outlook 2003 (yeah, I know...) marked it as "junk mail".
Re:Sounds like... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Sounds like... (Score:5, Informative)
I use a Thawte p.cert to sign my email - there's a good writeup on configuring it to work with OSX's Mail.app here [joar.com] -- also a good example on how to provide visually appealing technical documentation that I can talk non-technically inclined people into reading.
-- YLFIParent
Good for them (Score:5, Informative)
The only reason the big companies charge so much (their claim, not mine) is the insurance they provide, and the fact that they are "trusted" by the various vendors.
Any new group wanting to be a trusted CA will face the liability issue -- if one of your customers sues you, even if you try to disclaim all liability up front, you will still face massive court fees. Even if you won in court, you would lose financially if not insured.
There is no technical or logistical problem with setting up a Free (and free) common-geek's CA, the problems are entirely legal ones. I know because I looked into it right after SSL came out. It looks like a good business plan, right up until someone takes you to court.
Re:Good for them (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless you win the case, and the losing party pays for your court fees. This is common in countries employing civil law [wikipedia.org], as opposed to (mostly) former members of the Commonwealth that employ common law [wikipedia.org].
Australia might not have been the best place to found this organization.
Re:Good for them (Score:3, Insightful)
Although they certainly do make for litigation-happiness, overall the non-loser-pays system is healthier for democratic participation in the
Where's the government for a change? (Score:5, Interesting)
Alternatively... (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a summary of a proposal I wrote for canadian provinces...
The Governor General's office acts as the root CA for Government Ministries & Crown Corporations and Professional Associations.
Any professional association (Bar Association, College of Physicians & Surgeons, Engineers, etc) acts as a CA for it's members and corporations working in their field (Law firms (lawyers, paralegals, legal secretaries), Medical Clinics (Doctors, Nurses, X-Ray Techs, Appointment Clerks), etc)
Certified Accountants act as a CA for Corporations, Societies, Partnerships, etc.
The Notaries public act as a CA for individuals.
Parent
Denmark has this... (Score:5, Informative)
URLs:
- http://www.digitalsignatur.dk/ [digitalsignatur.dk]
- http://privat.tdc.dk/digital/ [privat.tdc.dk]
(both in Danish, though...)
The technicalities are run by the largest phone company/ISP, TDC, but otherwise it's fully a government thing.
Parent
Re:Where's the government for a change? (Score:5, Interesting)
In addition, an X.509 certificate can bind any number of attributes to that name, and it's up to the CA-- not you-- to decide what those are. Once they're in the certificate, *you cannot decide not to provide them*. Kinda takes away your control over your private information.
Look up the work of Carl Ellison & Ron Rivest and others on X.509 and privacy, particularly in contrast to how SPKI handles things.
Parent
Re:Where's the government for a change? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Verisign/Thawte = mafia (Score:5, Interesting)
The Cert authorities are a joke. We registered one CA with Verisign with virtually no documentation, and another time, when renewing an existing, different cert, they demanded everything short of a blood test for "authentication." It's nothing short of criminal considering they charge $200+ for something that takes 10ms to generate that they make people wait weeks for, and in no way guarantees superior security, and they'll make certs for anyone with money so the identity checking is BS and moot.
I'm all for a free certifying agency, but you can also roll-your-own with OpenSSL.
Re:Verisign/Thawte = mafia (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with rolling your own is when a browser hits it, it burps up an error saying it can't verify the validity of the cert. Depending on what you are using the cert for, who cares.
I have my webmail server forced through https with a self signed cert. If someone that uses my webmail server doesn't like it it's no skin off my butt (I provide free mail to a few friends).
For any business sites that I setup I suggest InstantSSL [instatntssl.com], they are cheap, fast and trusted by pretty much any browser around. And that is the important part when selling to the public, that they don't get some warning. Most of them will never even look to see if the page is encrypted but if they get some funky warning odds are they will leave.
Parent
Note to users (from their website) (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe. (Score:3, Insightful)
Stumbling blocks would be that Verisign would still be the expensive 'gold standard' for quite a while because its always been compatible from the earlydays in the most number of browsers, and another would be getting enough funding to pay for the identity check and other redtape that it takes to really be a 'trusted' cert authority.
I wonder what the cheaper CA's like thawte and geotrust think...
--
Re:Maybe. (Score:3, Informative)
Let's qualify this for people who may not understand.
This new certifying authority will be just as compatible as any other cert. It will still offer as much encryption protection as any cert provided by any authority.
The difference is that the browser may not be "pre programmed" to recognize the authority, and will th
Re:Maybe. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
That slashdotting didn't take long (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That slashdotting didn't take long (Score:3, Informative)
Finally! :-) (Score:3, Insightful)
Invalid XHTMl, Invalid CSS, Default Index (Score:5, Interesting)
Even more oddly, for a brief instant when I went to their homepage, I got a default Apache index listing, rather than their homepage. It included links to things such as their PHP MyAdmin directory [cacert.org], a number of PHP files, and three zipfiles named Bruce-someversionnumbers.zip.
Cry cry cry, certs aren't free. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just anyone can get a CA cert. You have to be a business, I know verisign wants a copy of your business license, ect before they even issue you a cert.
Now we got this "open CA". Who is going to check if these are legitimate businesses? Will there be any checks done at all, or will it just be "by the truckload" as the headline said?
I'm all for saving a buck as much as the next guy, but when I shop online, knowing that the cert came from a trusted source that actually checks if it's issuing a cert to a legitimate business like verisign or thawte puts my mind, as well as the minds of a lot of others.
Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a big deal. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't offer more security ultimately.
The majority of e-commerce sites on the Internet are NOT operating under their own certs. Many sites that offer hosted shopping carts use a central SSL server operating under an umbrella cert. Nobody really seems to have noticed, so what Verisign/Thawte are selling is not something consumers really seem to care about.
Parent
Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free. (Score:5, Insightful)
First and foremost, the Fair Credit Billing Act of 1976 protects consumers against most credit card fraud, so the whole notion of fraud being a major issue is essentially blown out of preportion. If someone charges something to your credit card, you charge it back and the burden is on the merchant to prove the legitimacy of the transaction or they lose, so there's never been much of a threat for consumers anyway.
Second, the way things have been going, customers are likely to get better products and services from smaller companies, many of whom may not be that technically inclined but instead tend to spend their energy on providing their core products and services and not running their own web servers.
Our ISP handles more than US$5M/month in online transactions for many companies much larger than ourselves, and we operate most sites under our umbrella SSL Cert. Never had any complaints.
The issue is not unlike Paypal. People accept Paypal on their web sites. When you go to complete the transaction, you're switched to Paypal's servers - there's no easy way around that. Consumers are used to this and companies like mine go out of our way to establish our reputation as a trusted provider of solid, secure e-commerce. Clients that use our services benefit from our reputation and performance. Everything works fine.
Parent
Re:Cry cry cry, certs aren't free. (Score:5, Interesting)
It prevents man-in-the-middle attacks. That's the most important reason for me to use a trusted CA.
Parent
is it something different than wildid? (Score:4, Interesting)
Caveat: what does it cost to be "trusted?" (Score:4, Insightful)
We know this ultimately comes down to how much Microsoft would charge for this certification. Does anyone have any idea what the costs are? I imagine it would be some sort of subscription arrangement where you have to pay in perpetuity to Microsoft in order to not have your trusted status revoked. But how much? And would Microsoft let an open CA even exist in the first place?
Most commercial certs are worthless (Score:5, Informative)
For example, see the TrueSite Relying Party Agreement. [geotrust.com] "The Service is provided on an as-is basis without warranties of any kind".
Even Verisign's Relying Party Agreement [verisign.com], while it does offer some warranties, has a complicated scheme for weaseling out of Verisign's obligation to verify the certificate holder's identity. The relying party agreement refers you to the CPS Section 11 [verisign.com], says "Issuing authorities (and VeriSign, to the extent specified in the referenced CPS sections) warrant and promise to ... perform the application validation procedures for the indicated class of certificate as set forth in CPS Section 5, Validation of Certificate Applications [verisign.com]." There, Verisign says "The IA shall confirm that ... the information to be listed in the certificate is accurate, except for nonverified subscriber information (NSI). [verisign.com]" The linked definition of "nonverified subscriber information" is "Information supplied to a certification authority as part of a certificate application". So Verisign doesn't actually stand behind any of the information in their certificates.
This is much weaker than a signature guarantee by a commercial bank, where the bank guarantees to other parties that the person was properly identified. But it costs more.
I'd like to see banks belonging to Visa International and MasterCard issue digital certificates, and require that their certificates had to be on a page that accepted their credit cards. Certificates from banks would actually be worth something.
There are two kinds of certs... (Score:4, Insightful)
Kjella
Parent
We want to believe in CACert... but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
But we have to be careful that we don't let our "wish to believe" blind us to the need for some caution here. Take at look at CACert's site. You'll find carelessness, spelling mistakes, pieces that have not been thought out. Running a CA properly requires meticulous attention to detail, and their site shows the opposite. On the very first page when you sign up, it asks for your name, date of birth, and "country". Is that country of citizenship, or country of residence?
Then there's the reliance on "government ID". If somebody presents Nigerian ID, or Dominican Republic ID, what exactly is that worth? It's not worth anything, you can bribe officials in those countries (and many others) to issue whatever official document you want. Does that mean that citizens of Nigeria can never be trusted? That's well over 100 million people in just that one country, most of whom are honest and trustworthy. It's ridiculous to exclude so many people from receiving certificates just because their bureaucrats are corrupt, and it's completely contrary to the transnational spirit of the Internet.
In conclusion, the idea behind CACert is a good one, but the people running it don't seem to be doing a good job. I hope that somebody else takes up the idea and does it better. There is no reason why there should not be more than one volunteer-based CA.
X.509 is the wrong technology. (Score:5, Interesting)
X.500 naming, however, presumes a single, global namespace. The X.500 directory was intended to be a single directory for the entire planet providing unique, inescapable names for everyone.
Yeah, right. Like that's going to happen.
As a result, X.509 is carved into literally hundreds of local namespaces. But since we're stuck with the *name* as the principal, we have to use that X.509 name *globally*. There are multiple ugly kludges to get around the name problems as a result.
This makes X.509 complex, fragile, and difficult to deploy correctly.
But everyone (potentially) has a globally unique identifier-- the public part of an RSA key. Randomly generated, 2^42 512-bit RSA keys have a probability of colliding on the order of 2^(-429); even the SHA-1 hashes have a collision chance of 2^(-77). Keep in mind that we use 1024-bits as the default nowadays.
So if you use the public key as a name, it solves a whole raft of problems.
This is what SPKI/SDSI does. SPKI is key-centric; names are a local convenience; keys are bound to names instead of the other way around, and all names are local to that key. Every participant has a key pair. The public part is the identifier for the keyholder, and the keyholder authenticates himself simply by proving that he has the private part.
Keep in mind that the whole issue of binding keys to actual people can't be addressed by a PKI, it has to be addressed by strong key storage and access controls and is the same across for X.509 and PGP/GPG as it is for SPKI.
This is similar to the web of trust, but I don't need introducers (well-connected keys) to make it work right.
SPKI goes on to recognize that since authentication is simple, what we really need from SPKI is authorization. The whole of SPKI is intended to define a flexible method of allowing authorization *and authorization delegation* in a simple, distributed fashion. SPKI defines an authorization *language* so that authorizations can be chained *without the SPKI library knowing what the tokens actually mean*. This means that a single library can handle the permission sets of all applications. In addition, the language rules prevent all entities in the chain of delegations from being able to exceed the permissions he was granted.
Achieving the same under X.509 (using attribute certificates, for example) is next to impossible. ACs don't delegate (well, the standard itself says technically you can but you *shouldn't*); aren't truly distributed (i.e., the AC acts as a single choke point in granting permissions, which SPKI avoids), and doesn't model the way trust naturally flows in an organization of people (whereas SPKI allows you to source and pass around trusts in more natural ways).
Very cool stuff. SPKI shows up in all kinds of places. Carl Ellison's homepage provides the best jumping-off point if you want to learn more:
http://world.std.com/~cme/html/spki.html
Re:About time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Without CA's and revocation information, SSL-style (RSA) public key infrastructures are useless. That means every client needs access to recently updated and TRUSTED revocation lists to make sure that no cert's have been forged or stolen. Every meaningful SSL client should periodically verify that any server certificates it uses are and remain valid. Using the CA's public key is absolutely NOT sufficient.
Parent
Re:About time... (Score:5, Insightful)
-Mind
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Re:About time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're forgetting the part about actually verifying the authenticity of what they're signing.
IE, If I send them a certificate signing request with my public key and a name of George W Bush on the CSR, are they just gonna go ahead and sign it and give me a certificate stating that I'm George W Bush?
Certficate authorities usually require you to provide them with proof of your identity, like faxing you a driver's license, birth certificate, buisness license, trying to contact you at the stated address and phone number, etc... if they didn't do this, they wouldn't be very useful CAs... the certificates they issue would be meaningless.
Of course, this is not to say that the expensive commercial CAs are trustworthy simply because they charge money... not at all. But to be an useful CA you need to have the manpower to verify the stuff people ask you to sign. I wonder how this free CA will accomplish that.
Parent
Re:About time... (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is, a email / personal cert from Verisign etc. comes with no guarantees that the signer is actually who they say they are. You could impersonate someone quite easily just by typing in bogus details.
Verisign doesn't audit you or vouch for you, so the cert is essentially worthless. It's a few bits that say Verisign touched it but that's about all you get for your ten dollars or whatever it is these days. If you want Verisign to actually vouch for you, you're looking at paying hundreds or thousands for a cert.
And after a 6 months, a year or two the cert expires and you have to start the process all over again.
A free CA is a good thing, but again it says nothing about the authenticity of the site / person who obtained it. I think that in itself would be an extremely valid reason for Microsoft to refuse to acknowledge them for anything but email. i.e. recognize the cert for email addresses, but not for SSL or signed executables.
On the small scale, PGP is a much better model. Anyone can make a key and start passing it around. You can get other people to sign the key if you want, but it's perfectly usable for crypto from the get go. Not only usable but faster too - as anyone who's tried to encrypt something large with RSA already knows. In fact extensions such as Enigmail for Mozilla are arguably easier to use than the built-in S/MIME.
On the signing front, I really wish Mozilla / Firefox would use PGP certs too to sign their XPI files. At present no one signs XPI files (reason: they're too expensive). If an XPI file were signed with a PGP key, you could drill down through the signers and reasonablly gauge the trustworthiness of the author. Hell, PGP doesn't even preclude CAs from doing business since they can sign keys just as well as the next person and charge for it.
Parent
Re:About time... (Score:4, Interesting)