[SSL Observatory] SSL CA compromise in the wild

[Ludwig Nussel]

Peter Gutmann wrote:
> Jacob Appelbaum <jacob at appelbaum.net> writes:
> 
> >I wanted to start a thread about this blog post I just finished writing:
> >https://blog.torproject.org/blog/detecting-certificate-authority-compromises-and-web-browser-collusion
> 
> Interesting bit of detective work!  The discussion shows up (yet again) one of
> the killer problems of CRL/OCSP-style blacklisting, since you can only
> blacklist certs that you know the CA has issued, there could be arbitrary
> numbers of further certs out there that can't be revoked because the CA
> doesn't know that it issued them.

The global validity of certificates issued by the root CAs is what
scares me most. There is no "natural confinement" of a CA
compromise. If each CA would only be allowed to issue certificates for
a certain domain a compromise would also only affect that domain.
Of course a compromise of e.g. the .com CA would still be
catastrophic then but I could at least safely continue to log into
mybank.de.

cu
Ludwig

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