Google Play (Android App Store) does not work at all unless you enable Equifax

https://twitter.com/php_austin/status/349751588090421250

by pjbrunet • 13 years ago

4 8 13 years ago

twitter.com

I'm using ICS. Go and disable the certificates yourself and see if you can confirm it.

wmf• 13 years ago

So? Is that a problem?

pjbrunet4• 13 years ago

I'm no expert, but seems like a big deal for all Android phones to report to a major credit bureau that determines whether you can rent an apartment, buy a house, get a job, a promotion, etc.

Not only that

a) It's mandatory, not something you can turn off. Unless you want no apps on your phone.

b) There is no error message saying "Could not connect to Equifax." It just asks if you want to "Retry" starting the app.

d4n3• 13 years ago

Their server certificate is from Equifax Secure Certificate Authority, disabling it will make the https connection fail.

To my knowledge, verifying the server certificate from a local CA store does not send data to the CA itself, do you have any reason to think otherwise?

morkfromork• 13 years ago

Is there another tweet that explains this tweet?

pjbrunet4• 13 years ago

No, I just discovered this moments ago and posted it. I had disabled a lot of my security certificates the other day and then realized I couldn't get into Play. So I added just about all the certificates back except the creepy ones like "Japanese Government". Well, Google Play still didn't work.

So I was just watching a movie at home and this was my process:

1. Enable creepy certificate. 2. Try Play. 3. Play doesn't work? Re-disable creepy certificate. Go to #1 (Try next creepy certificate.)

That's not to say Equifax is the ONLY certificate you MUST have to use Play. But it appears it's at least ONE of the required certificates. If I was really bored and had several hours to blow I suppose I could figure out which certificates are mandatory.

The annoying thing is, Google makes you tick a checkbox, then scroll, then Enable, then Confirm (four steps) for each certificate. So it's very time-consuming. Maybe easier to toy with the certificates if you have root access to your phone, which I haven't bothered to do yet.

GaryGapinski• 13 years ago

Pull up https://play.google.com/store in a browser and look at the TLS certificate chain.

Equifax Secure CA is the root CA for the certificate chain.

The intermediate CA (Google Internet Authority) issues the certificate for the end entity. Its CRL distribution point is http://crl.geotrust.com/crls/secureca.crl. There is no OCSP resource.

The end-entity certificate is wild-carded for a number of Google sites. Its CRL distribution point is http://www.gstatic.com/GoogleInternetAuthority/GoogleInterne.... There is no OCSP resource.

The relying party would validate the end-entity and intermediate CA certificates using CRLs (as no OCSP is available). These requests would be the only "data" sent as part of the certificate validation.

As the root CA is explicitly trusted (since it is present in the trust anchor compilation), it (Equifax Secure CA) is not contacted.

Explicitly removing trust for arbitrary root CAs (which can be prudent) will of course remove trust for end-entity certificates traceable to those CAs. Thus, if one removes trust for Equifax Secure Certificate Authority, one will no longer trust certificates issued by Google Internet Authority, such as the one used by https://play.google.com/store.

Trust via contemporary CA compilations and relying party PKI implementations is quite coarse. One essentially trusts all all CAs and subordinate certificates for a variety of purposes. Implementations vary in precision (or even presence) of revocation and constraint checking.

pjbrunet4• 13 years ago

I don't think it's just a coincidence or necessarily a secret:

"Equifax Inc. (EFX), EBay Inc.'s (EBAY) PayPal and Intuit Inc. (INTU) have beguntrials to see whether social posts can help prove identities,and, in some cases, detect whether customers are lying abouttheir finances." http://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-posts-help-credit-bur...

Actually I remember blogging about this years ago, back when Myspace was at its peak. So it's not news. I'm just wondering if Google has revealed what data it reports to Equifax, if any. And if that's the case, I think the next question is: What sort of app activity will help improve your credit?

pjbrunet4• 13 years ago

Also I'd like to see a "Certificate Cleaner" app that could just erase all the non-mandatory certificates. Or even better, show app-certificate associations so people could better decide which certificates they need/want/don't want. For my phone to "trust" 99 entities I've never heard of, without knowing what those certificates are for, that seems a little unsafe and irresponsible. If I didn't want choice or involvement I'd just buy an iPhone. At least I can see and disable the certificates and install another app store like F-Droid.

Google Play (Android App Store) does not work at all unless you enable Equifax

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