[SSL Observatory] Diginotar broken arrow as a tour-de-force of PKI fail

[Gervase Markham]

On 05/09/11 11:21, Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
> An interesting problem here is that even if OCSP worked... it doesn't
> appear that browsers want people to use this feature generally.
> 
> In Firefox, I see:
> security.OCSP.enabled and it is set to 1.
> security.OCSP.require and it is set to false.
> 
> So it's on but it's not a hard fail?

That is correct. We are not yet confident enough in the general OCSP
infrastructure to enable hard fail. (Some CAs are doubtless much better
than others.) Large website owners have also told us (and, I believe, at
least one is on record in public as saying) that if we enable hard fail
for OCSP, they would seriously have to consider requesting certificates
without OCSP responder information. This is because it then becomes
possible to DOS the site by DOSing its CA - and there are very few or no
CAs whose OCSP infrastructure is currently up to repelling the level of
DOS which major sites on the net are constantly under. If the bad guys
were just to re-point their botnets...

> Ironically, I also see:
> services.sync.prefs.sync.security.OCSP.enabled and it is set to true.
> services.sync.prefs.sync.security.OCSP.require and it is set to true.
> 
> It looks like the CA that runs Mozilla's OCSP server probably gets a
> record of all people that use sync unless you guys use OCSP stapling.

s/all people/all IP addresses/, but yes, I suppose so.

Firefox does not yet implement OCSP stapling :-(
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360420

In general, I would say that a very good way to make things better in
Firefox is for more people to join us in working on NSS.

Gerv