[SSL Observatory] SSL CA compromise in the wild

[Chris Palmer]

On 03/23/2011 10:49 AM, Steve Schultze wrote:

> "By standard security theory, bits are cheap, so if you have a
> hundred TLS accelerators, you should never move one private key into
> all of them.  Instead, you should make a hundred different keys, and
> sign them all with the same Certificate Authority."

By standard security theory, identities are expensive. If you have 500
identities, you don't have an identity. (This is The Citibank Problem,
as discussed in my slides. Not all banks have this problem.)

> Supposedly there are some prominent examples of this on banking
> sites.  Supposedly the hardware actually makes it hard or impossible
> to import your own private key.

I wouldn't buy that hardware, because it's broken. As Adam Langley
explains, you don't really need accelerators — even for a deployment as
large as Gmail, anyway.


-- 
Chris Palmer
Technology Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/code