One major difficulty in preserving the Federal Web presence is finding it. The idea that all Federal websites live under .gov or .mil, or even that somewhere in the Federal government is a complete, accurate and up-to-date list of them is just wrong. How does a Web crawler know that some random site in .com, .org or .us is actually part of the Federal Web presence?
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| Connecting to GeoTrust |
- www.geotrust.com is certified by:
- GeoTrust Extended Validation SHA256 SSL CA, which is certified by:
- GeoTrust Primary Certification Authority G3, which is a CA browsers trust.
- The browser trusts all of them equally.
- The browser trusts CAs that the CAs on the list delegate trust to. Back in 2010, the EFF found more than 650 organizations that Internet Explorer and Firefox trusted.
- Commercial CAs on the list, and CAs they delegate to, have regularly been found to be issuing false or insecure certificates.
I assumed that the US government would be on the list too. My obvious idea was that government websites outside .gov and .mil could be found by crawling other domains looking for HTTPS sites whose certificate's signature chain ended at the US government root CA. This would solve a big problem for collecting and preserving Federal government information. Alas, I under-estimated the mania for outsourcing government functions to for-profit companies.
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| Connecting to the LoC website |
- *.loc.gov is certified by:
- Entrust Certification Authority - L1K, which is certified by:
- Entrust Root Certification Authority G2, which is on the browser's trusted CA list.
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| Connecting to the DHS website |
- The images in the page are delivered via HTTP, so:
Your connection to this site is private, but someone on the network might be able to change the look of the page.
- The browser doesn't like the HTTPS connection because:
Your connection to www.dhs.gov is encrypted using an obsolete cipher suite.
- www.dhs.gov is certified by:
- GeoTrust SSL CA - G3, which is certified by:
- GeoTrust Global CA, which is on the browser's trusted CA list.
Why is this? Is it because the Library of Congress believes that Entrust is more trustworthy than the US Government? I hope not, Entrust is one of the CAs whose delegated CAs have been caught issuing bogus certificates. It is because, as far as I can tell, the list of 188 CAs that browsers trust contains no US Government controlled CA.
So, your browser trusts the government of the People's Republic of China but not the government of the United States of America!
It isn't that the Federal government doesn't trust itself to run a secure root CA. There is a Federal root CA, the Common Policy Root CA, which is clearly regarded as secure since it is used to control access to Federal systems. But it isn't in the browser's list of trusted CAs, so it isn't any use for outward-facing services such as websites. If it was Federal websites could be Federally certified as GeoTrust websites are GeoTrust certified.
In what world does this make sense? One in which there's money to be made selling services to the Federal government. By failing to follow the example of other governments by putting a root CA that they control into the list, the government arranges for funds to flow to for-profit companies who can protect the cash flow by lobbying, and arranging a warm welcome on the other side of the revolving door for the decision makers. All the for-profit CAs need to do is to make sure they stay in GSA's list of approved vendors, like DigiCert.
So, apart from the waste of taxpayer money, and the failure of my idea for finding government websites, what is the downside of this situation? CAs sometimes misbehave, as DigiNotar and StartSSL did. The result is a dispute between the guilty CAs and the browser vendors, resolved by removing them from the list, as StartSSL was, or by explicitly distrusting their root certificates, as DigiNotar's were. If this happened to one of the CAs Federal websites use, the dispute to which the Feds were not a party would result in the websites using the guilty CA becoming unavailable until the affected certificates could be replaced with new ones from a different CA in GSA's list. The browser vendors control the trusted CA list, so among other things they control citizens' access to government information. Since they're all based in the US, there would be good reasons why they'd be reluctant to remove a US government CA from the list.
I'm naturally reluctant to trust the Federal government, but I'm a whole lot more reluctant to trust for-profit CAs. It looks like I'm out of luck; the policy about public access to the Federal root CA is up on the Web:
Does the US government operate a publicly trusted certificate authority?
No, not as of early 2016, and this is unlikely to change in the near future.
The Federal PKI root is trusted by some browsers and operating systems, but is not contained in the Mozilla Trusted Root Program. The Mozilla Trusted Root Program is used by Firefox, as well as a wide variety of devices and operating systems. This means that the Federal PKI is not able to issue certificates for use in TLS/HTTPS that are trusted widely enough to secure a web service used by the general public.
The Federal PKI has an open application to the Mozilla Trusted Root Program. However, even if the Federal PKI’s application is accepted, it will take a significant amount of time for the Federal PKI’s root certificate to actually be shipped onto devices and propagate widely around the world.
10 comments:
Speaking of all-powerful Chinese hackers.
Yet more CA malfeasance has been detected. WoSign gave sub-domain owners certificates for the top-level domain.
Dan Goodin at Ars Technica reports that Already on probation, Symantec issues more illegit HTTPS certificates:
"One of the most fundamental requirements Google and other major browser developers impose on CAs is that they issue certificates only to people who verify the rightful control of an affected domain name or company name. On multiple occasions last year and earlier this month, the Symantec-owned CAs issued 108 credentials that violated these strict industry guidelines, according to research published Thursday by Andrew Ayer, a security researcher and founder of a CA reseller known as SSLMate. These guidelines were put in place to ensure the integrity of the entire encrypted Web. Nine of the certificates were issued without the permission or knowledge of the affected domain owners. The remaining 99 certificates were issued without proper validation of the company information in the certificate."
Commentor fazalmajid has it right:
"Symantec has attained Too Big To Fail status. Symantec issues such a huge number of certificates that if a browser manufacturer blacklisted them, the browser would become unusable, and for this reason they are not able to hold Symantec (or Comodo) to account for blatant disregard of the rules."
Google has become irritated enough with the incompetence (or worse) of CAs such as Symantec to set up its own root certificate authority.
Google has revealed that Symantec's mis-behavior has been MUCH worse than previously known:
"Google's investigation revealed that over a span of years, Symantec CAs have improperly issued more than 30,000 certificates. Such mis-issued certificates represent a potentially critical threat to virtually the entire Internet population because they make it possible for the holders to cryptographically impersonate the affected sites and monitor communications sent to and from the legitimate servers. They are a major violation of the so-called baseline requirements that major browser makers impose of CAs as a condition of being trusted by major browsers."
Google is starting a gradual process of untrusting Symantec certificates. Of course, what they should have done back when Symantec was initially caught issuing bogus certificates (including for google.com) was to immediately remove Symantec as a trusted CA, since they were obviously untrustworthy. But they are "too big to fail":
"Symantec's repeated violations underscore one of the problems Google and others have in enforcing terms of the baseline requirements. When violations are carried out by issuers with a big enough market share they're considered too big to fail. If Google were to nullify all of the Symantec-issued certificates overnight, it might cause widespread outages. The penalties outlined by Sleevi seem to be aimed at minimizing such disruptions while still exacting a meaningful punishment."
The reluctance of browser makers to pull the plug on a rogue CA has led to years of insecurity for their users. A temporary inconvenience while sites replaced their certificates with less untrustworthy ones would have been much better, and since it would have put Symantec out of the CA business, it would have been a wake-up call for the others. But no, like the US Fed, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft were too chicken. They're still too chicken, letting an obviously untrustworthy CA be the basis for trust in much of the Internet.
At Slate, Joshua Oliver's Google Is Making Sweeping Changes to How We Keep the Internet Safe is an informative, non-technical overview of Google's push for Certificate Transparency. They'll make it mandatory in Chrome by October.
Among the governments that your browser trusts is the Dutch government which, on January 1, will acquire new powers to subvert the Certificate Authority system to enable their spooks to mount Man-in-the-Middle attacks:
"Article 45 1.b, explicitly authorizes the use of "false keys" in third party systems to obtain access to systems and data."
Of course, there is no way any of the other CAs that your browser trusts would be doing this, with or without legal authority. Hat tip to Lauren Weinstein.
Certificates that sign code can be bought on the dark web and are being abused to sign malware to avoid detection by virus scans:
"Certificate compromise appears to have been common in the wild before Stuxnet, and not restricted to advanced threats developed by nation-states. We also found 27 certificates issued to malicious actors impersonating legitimate companies that do not develop software and have no need for code-signing certificates, like a Korean delivery service."
"In a letter [PDF] sent by US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) to the DoD's CIO Dana Deasy, Wyden points out that HTTPS and HSTS (to direct browsers to the HTTPS site if they request the unencrypted version) are required of all American federal civilian agency websites under a 2015 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directive." writes Richard Chirgwin at The Register:
"Wyden is frustrated that those agencies are taking their own sweet time. So far, the letter states, only “a small number of DoD websites” (including the Army, Air Force, and NSA) are encrypted.
The DoD is also self-signing certificates, something once fiercely defended as a right by Internet utopians, but which now looks anachronistic at best.
“Unfortunately, many other sites, including the Navy, Marines, and your own office's website at dodcio.defense.gov, either do not secure connections with encryption or only prove their authenticity with a certificate issued by the DoD Root Authority”.
The DoD Root Authority isn't a CA listed as trusted by (for example) the Chrome browser, visitors get security warnings"
trump's partial government shutdown is revealing one of the risks of the Federal government outsourcing trust to commercial CAs:
"A Thursday report from Netcraft estimates that the .gov websites are using 80 or more expired TLS certificates. ... Funding to renew the certificates is on hold while the shutdown continues.
Any of the government websites with an expired cert becomes newly vulnerable to any number of internet-based assaults, including man-in the-middle (MITM) attacks that enable third-party bad guys to intercept what passes between an internet user and a web application on the affected site. Bad guys can eavesdrop on traffic, assume the identity of the government website, and siphon off data input by the user.
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