Thawte Protects The World From Crypto 179
nutsaq writes: "Thawte.com, a South African Certificate Authority, in a move of astonishing wrong-headedness, has inexplicably changed it's developer certificate policy. To quote from the site: 'Due to current world circumstances developer certificates can no longer be issued to individuals.'Sucks to be working with crypto these days. Apparently I'll get no help from Thawte to encrypt stuff, oh wait, I didn't need it, the browsers did."
corporations (Score:1, Insightful)
You are surprised? (Score:2)
Something else will come along... if that doesn't work, just form a Limited Partnership or some other 'legal' low risk corp....
Re:You are surprised? (Score:1)
Any half decent accountant should be able to do this for about 150 - 200 UKP
Re:You are surprised? (Score:2)
Having to form a corporation (or some other business structure) raises the bar for getting a digital certificate from these clowns slightly, but not by much. It's probably not a bad idea anyway...if $MEGACORP decides it doesn't like your software/website/whatever, they go after your corporation instead of you personally. If you defeat them on their terms, great. If not, at least you aren't wiped out.
Individuals testing before corporations buy. (Score:1)
Re:Individuals testing before corporations buy. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Individuals testing before corporations buy. (Score:2)
Read before you reply.
The original poster wasn't talking about experimenting with the technology. He/she/it wanted to test the service. You can't do that without using the service.
Duh.
Re:Individuals testing before corporations buy. (Score:2)
It doesn't emulate the uptime of their servers, or their customer service, or any of that. Jeez.
Its only a matter of time (Score:1)
its only the first step...
Well, first of all (Score:3, Interesting)
Due to current world circumstances developer certificates can no longer be issued to individuals." Or am I totally missing the point here (probably too late here on Pacific Time)
Re:Well, first of all (Score:1)
This assumes that Thawte's background checks (if any) are more rigorous for corporations than individuals which I have no idea if they are. If so, it would probably make more sense for them to increase the checking for an individual requesting a certificate (if this is possible) than blocking them completely.
Or what they are not telling us is (Score:2)
Example: Trust code from "Microsoft Corporation"? (Score:2, Informative)
I'm no crypto expert, but my guess is that they would want to minimize the risk of an individual acquiring a certificate in a bogus name, creating a virus or something and then signing the virus code with the cert - thus making it appear more valid
In other words, you claim Thawte has restricted granting code signing certificates to avoid another debacle like this [slashdot.org] where Verisign granted a certificate to "Microsoft Corporation".
Re:Well, first of all (Score:2, Insightful)
People tend to believe that if they trust Thawte, they can trust code signed with a Thawte-certified key. This is of course not true, because trust is not transitive.
My guess is that Thawte wants to ensure only trustworthy people/companies get Thawte certificates, and apparently they think that companies are always trustworthy, while individuals are not.
Re:Well, first of all (Score:1)
Thawte : "What, really?"
Person : "Yeah, really!"
Thawte : " Oh my GAWD! Can't even trust companies now!!!"
Thawte : "We've close dofr business. Goodbye!"
Re:Well, first of all (Score:1)
Trust "is" not transitive? Surely the definition of trust differs from person to person? Its like that old chestnut "my enemies enemy is my friend" which gets treated as if it was passed down from God himself, rather than just being a bunch of crap.
Thawte are still .za... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thawte are still .za... (Score:1)
Re:Thawte are still .za... (Score:2)
There is an open hub of sorts.... (Score:3, Informative)
You sign your own certificates (verifying them over the phone or through some other means) and then you in turn publish your keys to open key servers around the world.
The more places your identity exists the harder it is for someone to steal it - that is why Slashdot allows you to put your public key into your account (you can see the box for it just below the signature box)
The key servers are run mostly by institutions around the world (I think Stanford is a main hub here in the US) - they basically hold a bunch of public keys that have been signed.
So this story isn't a big deal for jo shmoe because if you need to securely transfer something from yourself to someone else you can do that for free using GPG.
So let the companies have their closed ring of trust and you can create your own.
Derek
Re:Thawte are still .za... (Score:2)
I guess now Verisign thinks everyone has forgotten, so they are pulling Thawte's certificates off the market, to force people to pay the higher price for Verisign.
Wait a second... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thawte is not Microsoft. They cannot strongarm other businesses, let alone individuals, into working just how they see fit. There's no chance for Thawte to rule the world.
So before everyone gets all up in arms realize that all you have to do to correct the situation is not use Thawte for anything until they reverse their stance or simply use another certificate provider. Write a nice email and let them know why you don't agree with them and move on. This isn't a crisis...
Re:Wait a second... (Score:1)
DUH... what's at MSN.com? (Score:2)
Re:Wait a second... (Score:5, Insightful)
This applet is signed using a certificate that was issued by an untrusted certificate authority. Run anyway?
As a developer, you can't afford that.
Thawte is one of the few certificate authorities that are in the default installation of all popular browsers. VeriSign is another, and in fact I can't recall any other common CA that's catering to the general public.
The upshot is that VeriSign, which now owns Thawte, has a monopoly on code signing certificates for browsers. They're giving the appearance of competition by selling "lucrative" certs under the VeriSign brand and "economy" certs under the Thawte brand, but technically it's the same product. This is why they can charge $200 for 1-year Thawte certificate, and more for a VeriSign cert, even though effort involved is trivial. It's just like things used to be with domain registration and Network Solutions (which VeriSign also owns now). I don't believe potential liability issues would prevent this price from dropping significantly in the presence of other players.
Given this, the change in Thawte's policy is quite disturbing.
Re:Wait a second... (Score:2, Informative)
True. IE 5.5 contains a list of 100 root CAs. Of these, 3 have certificates that had expired before IE 5.5 was even released. 93 of the others do not have an Issuer Statement, so we just have to trust them blindly. Of the 4 root CAs that have an Issuer Statement, 3 give 404 errors. The remaining one takes you to a page where you can download a potentially virus carrying MS Word document in Italian.
Re:Wait a second... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wait a second... (Score:2)
Wasn't Thawte bought by Verisign [slashdot.org]?
Sure, it has been challenged subsequently [slashdot.org], but still....
Shame... (Score:5, Insightful)
How do they plan on catering for the self-employed? What about small companies where the corporate and technical contacts are the same person? Why should an individual have any less right to certifying their code than a corporate?
Of course it is up to Thawte who they sell their product to, but given the mind-set of people they are selling to (technical staff), this is not going to do them any favours.
Generally Thawte are very forward thinking... Their "Web of Trust" model brings free X.509 email certificates to the masses by using a PGP-like trust model (extended through face-to-face authentication) on top of the CA signing model.
Developer cert... (Score:1)
Doesn't appear to have a damn thing to do with web browsers (SSL Certs). Besides, you can always do a "make certificate" in the OpenSSL directory and make a "self-signed" certificate anyhow. They work just as well as the CA signed certs and they cost a whole lot less.
Code signing is flawed (Score:3, Insightful)
I my opinion, the concept of code signing is flawed. The user is tempted to think "this piece of code just loaded by my web browser is signed, so I can trust it."
In fact, the signature only proves that the code really comes from a specific developer and has not been tampered with during transmission. It says absolutely nothing about the trustworthiness of the developer. So, as long as I don't know if I can trust the developer, the signature doesn't help.
Re:Code signing is flawed (Score:1)
1) Verifying that the person who wrote it is really who you think they are.
2) verifying that the code you're getting is really what they wrote.
3) verifying that you actually trust this person.
certs can help with #2. The other steps are left as an exercise for the reader.
Re:Code signing is flawed (Score:1)
The problem is that many people seem to think that code signing does all three for them. They don't realise that trust is not a technical, but a social concept, so no technical solution (like cryptography) can establish trust.
In fact, it has happened to me more than once that someone was claiming "this is signed, so it cannot possibly do anything bad to my computer."
Re:Code signing is flawed (Score:1)
Unsigned code gives you none of this.
Re:Code signing is flawed (Score:2)
How you personaly handle code you get from the net is your own problem, but without the cert. you have NO way of telling where the code came from
Get the story out! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are some first thoughts, if you end up talking to the media:
- The strongest form of cryptography was invented in the 19th century and does not require a computer (XOR against one-time-pad), though computers certainly make it faster.
- Cryptography technology that is available for free to the general public is very sophisticated. Weakening the cryptography available to shoppers on the Internet will not prevent the best and strongest software being used by "bad guys".
- Stunting the public's ability to encrypt will hurt everyone from dissedents in oppressive countries to Internet retail companies to international corporations.
It's time to fight back in the war of words. Make this "Internet shopper" vs. "public ignorance". Make it "my credit card for sale". Public opinion is carried on sound bites, so let's get some!Re:Get the story out! (Score:1)
Wrong. The Vernam cipher was developed in the 20th century.
Re:Get the story out! (Score:2, Interesting)
To pick some nits, the One-Time Pad (OTP) cryptosystem has perfect secrecy. So in that sense, it's at least as strong as any other cryptosystem. However, it lacks features that are found in more sophisticated systems, such as protection from a known-plaintext attack or even authentication.
Those facts, plus its requirement that a key the maximum length of a future message be sent ahead of time via secure channels, means that it is not necessarily the best cryptosystem.
So saying that it's the strongest is true only in a limited sense. From the perspective of the public, they might prefer it if "terrorists" went back to hand-encoding/decoding messages, since investigative agencies have a better chance of breaking the key distribution than breaking some of the modern ciphers.
Re:Get the story out! (Score:1)
It is a requirement of the technique that the
key is used ONCE only. If you know the plaintext and the ciphertext you can obviously work out the key, but it won't be any use to you because the key will never be used again...
Re:Get the story out! (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's not a truely random key, it's not a one-time pad (in the standard sense) but rather some type of stream cipher.
A stream cipher uses a keyed mathematical algorithm to generate a stream of data that "looks random" but of course is completely deterministic. This keystream is then XOR-ed with the plaintext, as in the OTP.
I find it helps to think of the one-time pad as "secret splitting" - you take the original plaintext, and divide it into two halves (the random keystream, and the keystream XOR the plaintext). Neither half by itself tells you anything about the plaintext, but when you have both of them you can recover the plaintext. (This can be extended to N > 2 as well)
Another way to think of it: For a given ciphertext, there exists a keystream corresponding to EVERY POSSIBLE plaintext of that length. If you don't have the keystream, you have no knowledge about which plaintext was actually used.
A stream cipher does not have this property. For a given ciphertext, there are at most 2^(keysize) possible plaintexts that could have produced it. However that can still be a very large number, and you have the advantage that the key is much smaller than the plaintext (therefore easier to store and distribute).
ok, let's try to write down some strategies (Score:4, Insightful)
1. letters to newspapers. this can be the first, lowest-effort thing to do. the net is full of good examples of how crypto is good, first of all the writings of Phil Zimmermann, that could be at least inspiring. here's the link [mit.edu] and a quote:
"You don't have to distrust the government to want to use cryptography. Your business can be wiretapped by business rivals, organized crime, or foreign governments. Several foreign governments, for example, admit to using their signals intelligence against companies from other countries to give their own corporations a competitive edge. Ironically, the United States government's restrictions on cryptography in the 1990's have weakened U.S. corporate defenses against foreign intelligence and organized crime."
.2Euros :)
2. for those of you who have good capabilities/reputation, start spreading the word. Not only among your friends (no matter how commputer-illiterate they are, public opinion is independent from tech skills, unfortunately), but also at work.
3. the main goal is to make the idea of 'banning crypto can make more damage to your business than give benefits to the country' reach the higher levels. letters to newspapers will perhaps lighten a few minds, but enlighten a CEO of a multinational or a big company will help things better. It may seem unreal, but if you think that anyone in the world is just seven hops away, why don't try it? Never underestimate the power of coffee-break gossiping.
4. all the 'geeks' and technician all over the world have a great power over "regular user". When a techie or a sysadmin talks, everybody is listening. Make good use of it. Be responsible, and be clear. Make people think. 5. talk to newspaper writers, friends working for the media, whoever you think can spread the world.
6. wait
7. repeat
8. listen to other ideas and possibly invite your "opponent" to post it somewhere, to publish it, basically don't treat who does not agree with you as a stupid.
that's what I'm doing with my friends, parents, et cetera. I'm posting opinions on public forums in newspapers, and although I cannot see an immediate feedback, I'm positive about it.
Just my
errata corrige [some addons] (Score:1)
...any other idea?
Re:Get the story out! (Score:1)
Who said anything about weakening cryptography? Thawte cannot weaken X.509. They only sell certificates. (or not)
Stunting the public's ability to encrypt will hurt everyone from dissedents in oppressive countries to Internet retail companies to international corporations.
Again, this is not what's happening here. Alarmist reactions will only serve to to add to the massive amount confusion surrounding crypto.
This is about a corporation protecting it's assets, and, quite likely, reducing it's insurance payment. Thats all.
I would like to see an Free Software authority, however.
Re:Get the story out! (Score:2)
I don't know if it's a good idea to use that argument unless that mediacontact is totally clueless. The one-time-pad is in itself close to useless for most application, because of the logistic problem of sharing a common one-time-pad without third parties getting their hands on it. So unless you want to mail millions of one-time-pad CDs (or whatever) through a trusted mail service, this form of cryptography in itself won't help you a bit.
What difference does this make in the long run? (Score:1)
Right now, strong crypto is either a pipe dream or a false promise. It isn't worth getting upset over changes to crypto laws yet, because cryptography is still in its infancy, and has a long way to go before we can consider our data to be secure.
Re:What difference does this make in the long run? (Score:5, Informative)
1)
Script kiddies do not break ciphers. They do not find exploits. They do not reverse engineer systems. If they could do any of these things, they would not fall under the derogatory category, "script kiddie".
2)
Pick any of the following algorithms and break it: IDEA, 3DES, RSA, DH. I guarantee you will be famous, at least within security/cryptography circles. These are algorithms that have been scrutinized for decades by professors and professionals. I don't think a 12 year old could break these, except in a movie.
3)
SDMI (I assume this is what you mean by SDMA), was a copyright protection system not an encryption system. Anyone who believes they can create a secure, stand-alone, software copyright protection scheme is either ignorant or a genius. Given the ratio of ignorance to genius in the world, I know how I'll bet.
4)
The reason so many crypto systems are broken usually falls into one of two categories
a) The developers think they can design a system just as strong as the professionals who have devoted their lives to making and breaking ciphers.
b) The designers were forced to use limited strength crippto due to stupid crypto laws.
Incidentally, the DVD CSS system was broken by the combination of government-mandated 40 bit key length, and a home-made algorithm that reduced the effective keylength to around 30 bits. This makes it possible for an attack to be completed in seconds. FWIW, a 40 bit key search takes 1024 times longer than a 30 bit key search.
Re:What difference does this make in the long run? (Score:2)
At the moment, the only evidence we have that asymmetric cryptography techniques is that it hasn't been compromised by 'better minds than mine'.
However, that is not to say that it will always remain like this; it is possible that in the future we can prove mathematically that an algorithm is unbreakable (or at least only breakable by an exponential complexity brute force attack. Of course this relies on proving that P!=NP This trivial proof is left for the reader)
This is directed at the post claiming that encryption will *always* be broken; one day we may have provably secure asymmetric encryption.
Quantum computers counter my argument nicely as they don't care whether they are working on a problem in P or NP. As such I shall ignore them and hope they go away.
Re:What difference does this make in the long run? (Score:2)
You could get 5 years per count.
Sklyarov is facing a 25 year prison sentence (total of 5 years times 5 counts)
Re:What difference does this make in the long run? (Score:2)
All of the algroithms are 'broken' in one sense, that we know how to decode something encoded in it. However, it will take a lot of CPU cycles to do so.
Certificate Authorities (Score:2)
Why not just have a non-profit organization that issues certificates to anyone that wants one for a nominal fee?
Re:Certificate Authorities (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Certificate Authorities (Score:1)
In any case, this is not about SSL certs. Only codesigning. (And they cost more, if I recall) Thawte is certainly within reason to discontinue certifying individual codesigners in this day and age...
Re:Certificate Authorities (Score:2)
Except you don't. There are oodles of SSL sites which only run 40 bits, which isn't good crypto.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Certificate Authorities (Score:3, Informative)
This is no longer the case. Microsoft has changed their policy [microsoft.com] on this for the time being. CAs pay nothing...
On the other hand, CAs must pass a WebTrust CA audit in order to get on the list. WebTrust audits are extremely expensive. Of course, they serve a useful purpose. They serve to give the end user some sense of confidence that the CA does due dilligence in determining that "you are who you say you are" before issuing a certificate. There is a very small group of companies that have passed WebTrust Audits... (according to WebTrust press releases, Verisign [verisign.com], Entrust [entrust.com], Digital Signature Trust [trustdst.com]).
Setting up a non-profit to issue certs sounds like a nice idea, but isn't a realistic option when one must spend lots of money to audit ones practices to assure the public. The commercial CAs are even having troubles making money...
Determining that "I am who I claim to be" really is a difficult task.
Re:Certificate Authorities (Score:1)
Yea, but who'd wanna run it? My PGP key got signed by USENIX years ago, but I doubt they do it anymore.
Its a big hassle, being an issuer of trust. Even when your corporation is located in South Africa, it seems.
I'd love to see FSF or one of the other big players try it, but everyone would still whine about the restricitions and policies, I bet. A CA by nature needs to make money to pay for it's insurance, otherwise no real corporation would trust it. But for Free Software, I'd probably trust FSF for my own machines.
Re:Certificate Authorities (Score:2)
Still, the identifying-business seems like something government is reasonably good at doing. It's a naturally bureaucratic process, and private companies don't seem to be all that much better than governments at such things (except they are much more expensive).
Re:Certificate Authorities (Score:2)
Ultimately, the government is a political system, where private companies are commercial systems. I think political systems can be superior in some circumstances -- particularly where a there's a central authority, universal accessibility, and long-term reliability (i.e., not reliant on economic factors). Or, at least, where there's a need for all those things.
We already mostly have this, because Verisign is a monopoly. And it's not clear that a non-monopolistic situation would actually work all that well -- at least, it certainly doesn't work well for reliability, since everyone but Verisign has dropped out (was there ever any other serious CAs?)
Some things the private sector is really horrible at providing, like health care and transportation infrastructure. I think certificates might be one of them.
Re: Internal Certificate Authorities (Score:2)
This solves a *lot* of problems, since you can assume all authorized users have a valid cert. If someone is fired, leaves school, whatever, you can revoke their cert immediately. Some resources might not check the CRL, but others definitely will.
But this, of course, requires installing your own cert. Oh, to be sure, you can outsource this operation to a commercial CA and be covered by their root cert. At a modest cost of something like $20-$100 per employee per year. (It's been a while since I checked the prices.) A lot of organizations won't mind that cost, but others will. It's not like this system is hard to maintain, once installed.
Re:Certificate Authorities (Score:3, Informative)
Well, you can generate your own certificate, it's straightforward enough. The issue is trust. When you (a shopper, say) go to a site secured by Verisign, you are in effect saying that you trust Verisign not to issue a certificate to anyone who isn't trustworthy. Of course, for most people, it's "I trust Netscape/Microsoft/Whoever, who trust Verisign, who trust this merchant". If you generate your own certificate, there is no "trusted third party" to confirm you are who you say you are. The reason certificates cost money is because for a certificate to be trustworthy, the issuer has to perform due-diligence checks (for example, company registration documents) to ensure that they are granting it to a legitimate organization.
Logically, this could and perhaps should, be a function of Companies House (or the US equivalent), the body responsible for keeping track of company registrations, filing accounts and so forth. But any company with a strong enough brand (a hardware vendor, a major bank or law firm, a telco) could act as a trusted third party, so long as that TTP is itself trusted by the public. The only problem there is, how to get the browser vendors to distribute their certificates along with the browser.
Re:Certificate Authorities (Score:2)
But it wasn't that long ago that Verisign issued some certs in Microsoft's name to an unknown perpetrator. The bottom line is, Verisign runs a con game which exploits people's ignorance about the service really being provided, which is basically a cozy relationship with the biggest browser maker, i.e. Microsoft.
Re:Certificate Authorities (Score:2, Interesting)
That's about as cheap as it gets for an SSL cert from a CA with it's root cert in most browsers. [tucows.com]
Disclaimer: I work for Entrust.
Hey, wasn't this in a science fiction short story? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I know that it was, because I wrote it for the Wipout [wipout.net] competition, which is spookily enough another /. story of the day.
I wrote this story [wipout.net] in early September, pre-11th. It postulates a society where knowledge of crypto is so strongly controlled that... well, read the story [wipout.net].
At the time that I wrote it, it was science fiction. It now looks like I was way too conservative, and events are already on the way towards overtaking my predictions. Hey ho.
Fiction is an optimistic view of world. (Score:1)
One of my personal mottos has been for quite a while this:
"Humans are by nature optimists. Try to think the absolute worst thing that other human beings could come up with. Wait a few years. Note how optimistic you really are."
closed source is having issues (Score:2)
While everyone else is adding restrictions, we should be in a mad dash to catch up where the closed source versions are leaving off, increasing public acceptance of how convenient and useful open source products are compared to the rest of the software industry.
CSS people are actually giving OSS people the opportunity to be BETTER, not just feature-equal! Yaaaay
Good to stop those induhviduals! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not a completely un-sensible decision (Score:3, Insightful)
I really doubt that much signed code is distributed with authority from certificates issued to individuals. Chill out. They will lose some money, and I'm sure Thawte doesn't like that, but crypto is not going away.
The Big Picture (Score:2)
This is not only about trust; it is about economics. Small development studios representing a single owner, or a partnership, produce a vast amount of software for the Internet. OpenSource development teams likewise have no corporate presence, and rely on the identities of individuals.
This may sound like an innocuous move now, but consider the general direction of the intellectual property movement. The only way to truely secure digital content is to tie it to an identified user. That means hardware capable of decrypting content on the fly using a user-specific key. It is unreasonably difficult to reencrypt each piece of content for different hardware, so a license certificate is used to associate the content key securely with the user's identity.
CPUs already exist to do this for secure computing applications, and its hardly improbably that Intel and/or MS have considered this as a route for development. Whether it is the hardware or the OS that enforces it doesn't matter awfully much: at some point a corporation is responsible for issuing a license certificate which will marshall the association between your software certificate and a user's identity certificate.
In other words, someone has the power to determine if your software is allowed to run on their hardware, or not. By denying you a developer certificate, they can prevent your software from running.
Right now that's not a reality. Unsigned code isn't prevented from running, it just causes a miriad of warning and threats which most users will back away from.
So the moral of the story is be a big corporate, pay lots of money, and your product will be used. Otherwise you're sleeping in the sewer, my friend.
Twylite
Thawte responds: (Score:5, Informative)
Dear Marius
Thank you for emailing me with regard to your concern. Due to the current
international threat of terrorism we have been advised by
our parent company VeriSign to refrain from issuing developer certs to
individuals, for the mean while.
As you will be aware, there is a need right now for companies like ourselves to be
extremely cautious in all aspects that concern
security and encryption.
Developer certs are issued to individuals based on verification of passports and
drivers licenses. These documents are however easily
forged and we have therefore had to take the executive decision of not issuing
certs where the verification process may be
questionable.
We are positive that we will be able to resume this service in the near future. I
do apologize for any inconvenience that this may have
caused you.
Regards
Jeanne
As can be seen it seems to be Verisign who requested this....
Hmm...
Re:Thawte responds: (Score:1)
--
From: Jeanne Fourie "jeannef@thawte.com"
To: Michael E. C. Gauthier "gauthier@LICKDEEZNUTZ.mindless.com"
Subject: Re: No longer be issued to individuals???
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 14:33:53 +0200
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U)
Hi Mike
Thank you for emailing me with regard to your concern. Due to the
current international threat of terrorism we have been advised by our
parent company VeriSign to refrain from issuing developer certs to
individuals, for the mean while.
As you will be aware, there is a need right now for companies like
ourselves to be extremely cautious in all aspects that concern security
and encryption.
Developer certs are issued to individuals based on verification of
passports and drivers licenses. These documents are however easily
forged and we have therefore had to take the executive decision of not
issuing certs where the verification process may be questionable.
We are positive that we will be able to resume this service in the near
future. I do apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused
you.
Regards
Jeanne
Re:Thawte responds: (Score:2)
HI Marius
I am sorry that my response seemed automated. I was more concerned with giving you a
clear reason for the move.
Nonetheless, thanks for bringing the discussion to my attention, I have tried to keep
the wording as simple as possible on our web site, and am responding to queries as they
arise.
Thanks again!
Jeanne
So, it's not an automated response, but only a re-defined one for the genre of question.
:)
They have good PR at least.
Me.
Re:Thawte responds: (Score:1)
If goverments and legal institutions trust these documents, for far more important things than software, why cannot they?
Marko.
Re:Thawte responds: (Score:2)
But I don't see what terrorism has to do with that. As mentioned, terrorists are unlikely to use signed web server certs to do much in the way of loss of life. And the unreliability of driver's licenses won't go away if/when the terrorist threat does.
So why even bring up terrorism?
Re:Thawte responds: (Score:2)
Pity various "authorities", including the state governments of various US states have yet to catch on to. Let alone such utter daftness as making these the prefered ID for purchase of intoxicants.
But I don't see what terrorism has to do with that.
Very little, but the people making the decisions just arn't clued up on the subject.
As mentioned, terrorists are unlikely to use signed web server certs to do much in the way of loss of life.
Even assuming a terrorist organisation were to set up an https website they'd probably prefer a cetificate signed by someone they trusted.
Re:Thawte responds: (Score:2)
Hmmm ... I must be missing something. Thawte does not require developers to present their passport or drivers' license in person. They get the details and check with the records of the appropriate authority; there is no physical interview, no cross-check that you aren't quoting someone elses details. If you have their name and numbers, you can masquerade as them.
Companies? Pah. Give me R250 and I can buy a close corporation with a name, registration and CK number (this is in South Africa, btw). It doesn't take a genius to get a corp. certificate from there. If you have the $200 for the certificate, it shouldn't be stretching finances to find the additional $30 for the corp.
Oh ... there's still no-one who is going to check that the company represents the people it claims to...
eh? (Score:2)
So all they are doing is removing the convienience of the extra dialog box that the certificate was not from a trusted source.
I don't get the paying money for Certificates in the first place...
Re:eh? (Score:1)
Re:eh? (Score:1)
Nothing however stops the CA from changing the data, except that there is nothing in it for them and a lot for them to lose... Should a CA become corrupt and this become known, their business is going to become a lot smaller. Think banks, lawyers etc... Nothing stops them from stealing money, becoming unfairly biased, etc. except the threat of bad press and subsequent loss of income.
Man in the middle and self-certs (Score:2)
But OpenSSL allows you to create a CA cert as well. Just preload your clients' browsers with your CA's public key cert and then you are every bit as safe against man in the middle attacks as you would be if Verisign or Thawte had signed your server's cert, SO LONG AS you keep your private CA key safe on your servers.
Which you have to do in the presence of a Verisign or Thawte-signed server cert anyway. All that having Verisign or Thawte sign your cert gets you is convenience (so you don't have to distribute your public cert keys to your browsers) and the ability to provide data to a wider audience.
The big hole that I wonder about is that most browsers have cert keys for a whole lot of CA's.. do they cross-check with each other to ensure that more than one Cert Authority among them are issuing keys for a given host or domain? If my web servers' keys are signed with Verisign and someone else can get a cert for the same domain signed by Joe Fourth Party CA, then new visitors to the fake site would be none the wiser.
verisign always charged double... (Score:2, Insightful)
Something else they've done wrong. (Score:1)
I just hope that when the company I work for goes to renew their wildcard certificate that they don't try to switch us to the new wildcarding system.
Make your own developer certs (Score:5, Informative)
Make your homebrew CA private key:
openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 1024
Create your CA self-signed public key:
openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -key ca.key -out ca.crt
OK, you're set up as a homebrew Certificate Authority (CA) and ready to start signing your own home-brew certs:
First, create a homebrew private key:
openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024
Create the unsigned public key (AKA certificate signing request) At one point in the process, it asks for "Your Name" - if this is for personal identification, then put in your name. However, if this is for a development web server, then put in the web site address "dev.www.wherever.com" when it asks for "Your Name"
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
Get the sign.sh script from the Apache mod_ssl distribution, use this to sign the certificate:
There you go, you now have the private (server.key) and public (server.crt) keys. Install them on your webserver.
They will work, but your browser will whine about them being signed by an untrusted source. No problem there, give a copy of CA.crt (NOT CA.key!!) to any developers using your web server and have them install it on their machine, from then on, their browser will consider any certs signed by your homebrew CA key to be valid. To install the cert on IE browsers, a hint: you do not use your browser to do it, even though there is an "Install Cert" button on the window that pops up to let you know that the cert is signed by an unknown CA. Instead, you give them CA.crt, have them save it to their hard drive, then open up Windows Explorer, right click on CA.crt, and pick Install Cert from the menu, a Certificate Wizard will pop up, go with the defaults, then your machine will trust the homebrew certs.
The root certificate game has always been just a money scam, especially for dev certs.
Re:Make your own developer certs (Score:2)
Re:Make your own developer certs (Score:4, Informative)
You just have to use the little CGI that follows...
#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw use strict; $|++; open(FP, "); close(FP); my $len = length($cert); print "Content-type: application/x-x509-ca-cert\r\n"; print "Content-length: $len\r\n"; print "\r\n"; print $cert;
A link to that CGI with the mention "install the certificate into my Netscape" and you're done. (I don't know if it works with MSIE... I never use it !!!)
That's what I did (Score:2)
Re:That's what I did (Score:2)
In some situations, you just want your data encrypted as it goes across the net. I'd think there should be two separate things, one for enabling encryption, the other for identifying the other party.
But then again, typically if you are actually going to go to the "trouble" of encrypting your data, you probably want to make sure of who is receiving that data.
But, the current CA scheme really leaves a lot to be desired, I certainly don't feel a lot of trust just because something is signed by Verisign, ever work with those people??
Encryption and Identification (Score:2)
You can build a reputation around your identity, and insure that no one would be able to tear that down using the authentication aspects of the encryption. I think in the long run, the authentication aspects will be more important than the data hiding aspects.
Those are server certs, not devel. certs (Score:3, Informative)
What developer certs let you down is put ActiveX controls on your web pages that the user can download without going through a scary dialog saying "the browser can't tell who created this file". You do get a dialog saying "This file was created by so-and-so, click 'yes' if you trust them" but that dialog is designed to not be scary, and encourage the user to download whatever crap is about to take over his computer.
There are also developer certs for signed objects in Netscape browsers, but not too many people care about those any more. :(
Re:Those are server certs, not devel. certs (Score:2)
So Verisign, Thwate, and the other CAs, are deciding not just who is who, but who's code I should allow to run on my computer without a dialog? The sad part about all this is that so many people have blind trust in the system. If a cert was issued to someone, they must have good intentions, right? The problem is too many people assume this. The "scary dialog" should always be present for the first time for every identity. Once the user states his trust in that certificate, then no more "scary dialog" for that one until it expires, unless it is re-issued with the same identity (what is stored in the user trust DB is the identity itself).
Re:Those are server certs, not devel. certs (Score:2)
To say the wording should always be scary (i.e. that Netscape did the right thing) is right from a security standpoint, wrong from a user acceptance standpoint. We know perfectly well by now which side Microsoft is on. From a developer's point of view the Netscape approach is a pain in the neck because you have to put in an extra screen telling the user to click "yes" to permit the download (but if you tell them to click yes, then they do so, which means the scary words don't really add security).
Trusting a CORPORATION? (Score:2)
Do you actually trust ALL corporations because they are a corporation? There are many corporations I do not trust. For me, Verisign and Thawte are slipping over the edge now, and might find themselves in the heap with Microsoft, Intel, and Dell.
Re:I may be horribly confused... (Score:2)
If Usama bin Laden were to apply for a certificate, and proved he was who he said he was, would they issue one? Remember, this is all about identity, which is trusting the CA. It's not about making judgements about sexual prowess, or whatever else the person may represent. As for whether this enables Usama bin Laden to engage in cryptographic traffic, I can assure you that the lack of a certificate is not going to prevent him from hiding messages from authorities.
Become a company... (Score:2)
To become a registered company in Germany, you need to get a license. In the smallest case, that's going to cost you all of 15 DM ($7.50).
What a stupid and useless move at the side of Thawte...
Signature, not encryption (Score:2)
The only use for a code signing certificate is to tell a user that a piece of code is safe to use.
Nobody uses them anyway (Score:2, Interesting)
Half the time I try to download an application/plugin I get the message 'this code was not signed'. This happens so often that the average user will simply click 'run anyway'.
This will only affect companies that have actually taken the time to set the system security policy to 'never run unsigned software'. Which nobody on this planet has done, because all the really useful software has not been signed. *sigh*
Code signing is rather useless anyway, it's a good concept. However, the certificate issuers only certify that a company writes software (which you knew anyway, you just downloaded a piece of their work), they do *explicitly* not certify 'this is software written by a company that will not copy all files from your harddrive and publish them on IRC'.
In it's current implementation it makes software somewhat tamper proof. Which is nice...
Existing certificates? (Score:2)
In any case, PKI is inherently broken in a number of ways, including that the signer doesn't specify what about the key is being certified. So there's no way for Thawte to certify that they checked a passport and you look like the photo. There's no way for them to say, "This person is who he says he is, unless he accidentally emailed his private key to a total stranger or duped the Portugese passport authority."
Won't help anything (Score:2, Interesting)
If the visitor is another terrorist looking to download encrypted content, all he has to do is click OK to the browser box that says it's not trusted and then the encrypted stream of content will begin.
All thawte is doing is removing the part where the cert is trusted. I doubt a terrorist would care.
It's about code-signing, not crypto (Score:2)
This is related to Microsoft's concept of blaming others for security problems. Since they demonstrably can't make their OS secure, and chose a fundamentally insecure technology (Active-X) for their browser, their answer is to require that all code run on their systems be signed by somebody who can be blamed for problems. Microsoft may also use this to obstruct free software from running on Microsoft boxes. Remember that Windows XP can be configured to run signed code only.
Here's the reply I sent to developers@thawte.com (Score:2)