Most StartSSL certs will stay compromised

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=994033

by aroch • 12 years ago

84 99 12 years ago

bugzilla.mozilla.org

Now this seems like something that StartSSL would want to be in front of rather than risk everything by having compromised certs out there with their name on them. I would think that kind of behavior would put their CA status at risk...

makomk3• 12 years ago

They are in front of it, they've intentionally decided to continue charging for revoking these certificates.

sigzero• 12 years ago

Which they are 100% in the right to do by the way. StartSSL is a business.

revelation2• 12 years ago

Their CA status is not at risk, was never at risk and will not be at risk in the future. Mozilla has made their stance clear that once you are in, you will never be removed (unless you were compromised, at which point they'll happily add your new CA).

I'll certainly not claim that we can magically make TLS work by starting to enforce the requirements we put on CAs. But we should call Mozilla out for their strongly worded letters and other nonsense to get some momentum for better solutions. The first step is admitting you have a problem.

klapinat0r2• 12 years ago

Incorrect. DigiNotar[1] was permanently removed.

Quoting Mozilla[2]: "This is not a temporary suspension, it is a complete removal from our trusted root program."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar#Issuance_of_fraudule...

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2011/09/02/diginotar-remov...

mike-cardwell• 12 years ago

They should have taken this as a marketting opportunity and offered up free revocations for a week.

akerl_7• 12 years ago

I think that would have been a successful PR move, but deciding if they're rather have the money or goodwill is their choice to make. They told people upfront what the costs were, I don't fault them for following through with that.

shimon_e2• 12 years ago

If someone stole your certs you are basically screwed until they expire. Currently most browsers don't check if certs are revoked.

sanderjd2• 12 years ago

This is a good point that seems to keep being ignored: do revocations even matter? Are browser makers planning on changing their defaults with regard to revocations? Is somebody planning a widespread consumer education campaign regarding revocation? If not, this whole issue seems like a bunch of noise that doesn't have much real impact.

riquito• 12 years ago

For example at Mozilla there are discussions about it, I suspect it's happening for other browsers too:

https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy

larkinrichards• 12 years ago

As a free SSL provider I think this is entirely valid for them to charge for revocations. Plus, it's entirely possible that not all people using certificates from StartSSL are using OpenSSL.

It's the cert owner's prerogative to ensure their certificate is properly secured. There's no reason for debian/mozilla to remove StartSSL from their CA lists. If you have StartSSL and you used OpenSSL 1.01f or another vulnerable version, pay the $25 and move on-- it's cheaper than if you used godaddy.

steveklabnik6• 12 years ago

It is totally valid for you to be a jerk, and then it is totally valid for other people to call you out on being a jerk.

Yes, maintaining a revocation list costs them time and money. But this is a Big Deal. Extenuating circumstances. They have a social responsibility here, and they're failing at it.

akerl_7• 12 years ago

They do not have a social responsibility.

It is totally valid for people to call them out for not going above and beyond, but that doesn't mean Mozilla/Debian/etc should be popping them out of CAs.

The mob is welcome to mob, but Mozilla and Debian shouldn't be making decisions based on the whims of the mob.

patmcc• 12 years ago

This is roughly equivalent to expecting a locksmith to re-key your lock because you left your keys sitting in public for a couple years. Why would a locksmith have a responsibility to do that? His lock and key were fine, you (or people/processes you trust) were the issue.

makomk3• 12 years ago

It's also three times the annual price of a certificate from PositiveSSL, plus StartSSL's "free" certificates have various annoying restrictions intended to encourage you to move to the premium product (fixed expiry period of one year, can't renew until a fortnight before it expires, various limitations on what you can issue, ...)

ridruejo• 12 years ago

What are good alternatives to StartSSL? Either free or moderately priced

sliverstorm2• 12 years ago

I've been using PositiveSSL. I am paying less than $10 a year for a basic cert, revocation is free.

I don't know anyone else who uses it, but there's nothing not to like so far, unless you are the sort who expects to pay nothing at all for your certs.

yebyen• 12 years ago

This is the SSL cert provider used by Namecheap, I just got my first SSL cert signed here, the experience was smooth.

The longest delay in the whole process was from my own mailserver at the verifying site listed in the WHOIS record, which does greylisting (so it usually takes about 30 minutes to start exchanging mail with anyone you haven't received mail from before, since the server has to wait for them to retry...)

The whole process was smooth as butter, $9 later I have SSL support on my site.

PaulBurke2• 12 years ago

Today I was searching for PositiveSSL Certificate for my website.

I Googled and found many online store offers PositiveSSL Certificate, but there were major difference on price. I've found some stores offers PositiveSSL at $49/Year, $19.95/Year, $12/Year, $9/Year & $5.99/Year.

I want that PositiveSSL certificate for 5 Years. SO I've bought it from CheapSSLSEcurity at only $4.80/Year. I loved their service. The certificate was issued minute and its now live on my website.

Thanks and Regards Paul Burke

notdonspaulding2• 12 years ago

Let me see if I have this straight:

    Alice's Lemonade Stand charges $0.25 for a cup of ice-cold lemonade,
    and has a recycling bin that her customers can use for free.

meanwhile, down the street:

    Bob's Lemonade Stand gives out free lemonade,
    and charges $0.25 to use their recycling bin.

The message here is basically "boycott Bob for his anti-recycling business practices", right?

Seems like a distinction without a difference to me.

aegiso• 12 years ago

Except the cups must be recycled where you bought them, and when they accidentally turn out to be super toxic Bob insists the recycling fee was clearly posted.

I don't know who's right here, but it's definitely not that simple.

akerl_7• 12 years ago

It really is that simple. Bob didn't know the cups were toxic, there's no way he could have know, every lemonade stand had toxic cups, and he didn't raise the price of recycling in response. Bob isn't responsible for letting people off the hook due to circumstances outside of his control.

oakwhiz5• 12 years ago

Personally, I think it's more like this:

    Alice's Lemonade Stand charges $0.25 for a cup of lemonade,
    gives out free refills, and will give you a new cup each time.

    Bob's Lemonade Stand gives out free lemonade with free refills,
    and gives you one free paper cup to start with,
    but you must use the same cup each time.
    Bob charges $0.25 to replace a lost, damaged, or dirty cup.

So basically people who go to Bob's Lemonade Stand are incentivized to continue drinking from the same cup even if it's dirty (its integrity is compromised.)

Of course it's not a perfect analogy since certificates eventually expire, but you get the idea.

akerl_7• 12 years ago

This is akin to saying Amazon Glacier should be boycotted for having a low cost of entry and high cost on the other end.

Their business strategy isn't a secret. If there were a vulnerability found in btrfs and a wave of people had their filesystems go belly up, I'd not expect Amazon to change the price of restorations.

marcosdumay• 12 years ago

To be fair, I don't like Bob's business and wouldn't be his client. If you want me to pay for something, you'd better ask up front.

But then, StartSSL does not have a mandatory hidden cost. It just charges if you do something wrong.

The problem that everybody did something wrong and not by our fault is not exactly StartSSL's problem. I'd be impressed if they revoked the keys for free, but I don't see anything wrong on they not doing it.

mapgrep• 12 years ago

Are there any cert providers who have particularly solid reputations?

I get basic certs via my domain provider Gandi, they run ~$17 year (12 euros), or $160 for wildcard which seems steep.

dm23• 12 years ago

Comodo PositiveSSL for $9 / year and $99 for wildcard.

Multi-domain (100 domains or subdomains) for $30.

https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates/comodo.a...

PaulBurke2• 12 years ago

Comodo Positive SSL for $9/Year offered by namecheap is really very much cheap in price, but there is one more SSL certificate vendor "CheapSSLSecurity" that offers comodo Positive SSL at only $5.99/Year and if you are purchasing it for 5 year then the price is most cheapest at $4.80.

For Wildcard SSL Certificate I've found that "CheapSSLSecurity" offers it at $72.95/Year and $58.36 for 5 Year.

I bet no one can beat CheapSSLSecurity's price.

oijaf888• 12 years ago

http://ipxcore.com/ssl/ has GlobalSign certs for $15/year or $42/year for a wildcard

madsushi2• 12 years ago

If it was a StartSSL security leak, then I would expect them to give away revocations for free. But if YOU, the customer, leaked your own private key by running some bad software? That's simply not their fault, nor their problem.

oakwhiz5• 12 years ago

StartSSL is actually causing a problem, though.

With a regular CA, you pay upfront, and you can revoke and reissue with no problems. If you trust a CA that does this, you can count on the fact that anybody buying a cert from that CA has the ability to grab a brand new certificate whenever they want until the expiration period.

But with a CA like StartSSL, they give out certificates without guaranteeing that websites using those certificates have the ability to regenerate their certificate. If a website gets compromised, since they haven't paid upfront, you don't know if they will pay to reissue. They might just keep quiet and pretend there was no security breach, instead of doing the proper thing and renewing the certificate. If you know they paid upfront, you can be more sure that they will take advantage of the free renew upon a security breach.

I find this issue to be vaguely similar to the difference between socialist healthcare systems and privatized healthcare systems. If everyone is guaranteed to have healthcare because it must be paid through their taxes, then people are generally healthier since they are encouraged to go to the doctor. But if you must pay a bill whenever you receive healthcare, people might be encouraged to forego treatment or checkups that could catch deadly diseases in an early phase before they become life-threatening. I don't really think this is a good analogy though because the other pros and cons of both healthcare systems don't map well to this problem.

ampersandy• 12 years ago

StartSSL's denying free cert revocation does not make them untrustworthy from a technical perspective. The onus remains on the site owner to implement their site security properly and pay any fees necessary to do that. So the only issue here is a moral one and whether you believe they have a responsibility to revoke these certificates for free.

I think that given the extenuating circumstances, they probably should revoke the certificates if requested, but I have no right to demand that they do so.

madsushi2• 12 years ago

They might just keep quiet and pretend there was no security breach, instead of doing the proper thing and renewing the certificate. If you know they paid upfront, you can be more sure that they will take advantage of the free renew upon a security breach.

This is the point that I'm not so sure about. I know there are plenty of people running SSL certs (from any company) that have no idea what Heartbleed is, let alone what 'certificate revocation' means or why they'd ever do it.

serge2k2• 12 years ago

Why should revocations cost money?

epsylon3• 12 years ago

Why shouldn't they?

patio11• 12 years ago

Pathological customers: when you give them free stuff, they will demand more free stuff, and if you refuse them more free stuff, they will do their darndest to destroy your business.

Meanwhile, look at all the nonsense that e.g. GoDaddy (who also charges for revocations) is not getting right now. Because the folks with altered understandings of reality got scared away by the $20 or whatever it costs on year 1, and are plaguing StartSSL instead.

cpach4• 12 years ago

Business owners, beware. Try to find a business model that doesn’t attract patological customers.

notdonspaulding2• 12 years ago

I wonder what percentage of StartSSL's customers are actually pathological though?

I mean, are there cases where the pathological customer is a justifiable cost of doing business? Is StartSSL one of those cases?

lucb1e• 12 years ago

Pathological customers: when you give them free stuff, they will demand more free stuff, and if you refuse them more free stuff, they will do their darndest to destroy your business.

I guess you caught me. On the other hand, at the time I started using StartSSL, the cheapest non-free certificate provider I could find charged something like €70 a year, which was more than it was worth to me. Just two days ago I happened to look for cheap certificates again and found one for €9, and I'd totally pay that as long as my real name can stay anonymous (like now with StartSSL, my name isn't included in the certificate).

So it also has much to do with how much you charge. Free is a special price and may make people ask for unreasonable things, but if the choice is between nothing or more than it was worth, that choice is very easy. Then when shit hits then fan...

makomk3• 12 years ago

If you read the linked thread, some of their paying customers are apparently unhappy about being charged $25 per certificate to revoke them. (In some cases, this could cost substantially more than they paid for the certificates in the first place.)

dan1234• 12 years ago

Meanwhile, look at all the nonsense that e.g. GoDaddy (who also charges for revocations) is not getting right now. Because the folks with altered understandings of reality got scared away by the $20 or whatever it costs on year 1, and are plaguing StartSSL instead.

FWIW, GoDaddy didn't charge me anything to rekey my certificate.

I also have a certificate with StartSSL, but on finding it would cost $25 to revoke, I purchased a new one from namecheap for $10. I know this leaves the StartSSL cert potentially floating about but it's only for a personal site (no real valuable data) so que sera sera…

gbl08ma2• 12 years ago

I'm worried that StartSSL free certs will stop being trusted. I run a service (tny.im) where HTTPS is not essential, but I like to provide it, to secure logins if not for anything else. However, I make little to no money from that website, and so I rather not invest much money in it. By the price SSL certs go, if StartSSL became untrusted, I'd have no choice but remove SSL support, or issue my own certificate which is as bad as not having HTTPS.

StartSSL plays an important role in ensuring that all websites, no matter how small, can provide https access. I recommend it to people that are just launching a service; their reaction often is like "SSL? You know how much that costs? I can barely pay for the server!" but they happily go through the trouble of installing a StartSSL cert when they understand that it will only cost them the effort. Without StartSSL these people would never implement https, if for some reason they didn't want to spend money with their project as is often the case with things done in their spare time.

Personally this is even more disgusting, because I know for sure that my certificate has not been compromised: two days ago my service was hosted on a server with OpenSSL 0.9.8, and today I was forced to migrate to a new server due to issues unrelated to Heartbleed, and the certificate was not installed before updating OpenSSL to a patched version. And as some users have said, other people may be using StartSSL free certs on systems that don't even use OpenSSL.

There's also something we should not forget: free StartSSL certificates are only valid for one year. That means that any cert will only be compromised for, at most, a year. My cert will expire in June, and then I'll be able to issue a new one, which (even if I wasn't sure the current one isn't) definitely isn't compromised.

driverdan• 12 years ago

You can't afford $20 a year for a cert? Drink a few less coffees during the year.

gbl08ma2• 12 years ago

Things add up, you know... $20 for a cert, plus $10 for a domain, and not even taking into account the server, it's $30. Now imagine you have five or six side-projects, you may not be willing to spend $150 per year to maintain them, especially when you get little to nothing in return.

It's not like every website must have a profitable business plan just to be online and secure...

azov• 12 years ago

As an end-user I couldn't care less about CAs, their business models, and the way they handle revocations. All I care about is that if I see a lock icon in my address bar I can be sure that the page I'm looking at comes from whom I think it comes from.

This is what should be driving Mozilla's decisions, not the moral aspects of charging for revocations.

Perceptes• 12 years ago

Very well stated. You should consider submitting this to their mailing list discussion on the topic.

digitalabyss• 12 years ago

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.6 is still supported and ships with OpenSSL 0.9.8e which is not vulnerable. I am sure there are other examples as well. If I had a StartSSL certificate and the browsers started to remove support of them or warn that my site has a StartSSL certificate signed before a certain date and cant be trusted I would be really pissed.

I have always felt there was conflict between system administrators wanting proven and stable versus developers wanting bleeding edge. I have given up the fight when it comes to web development and use Ubuntu 12.04LTS which still is not bleeding edge enough for most of my dev's. For infrastructure components outside of web development though I dont think its a safe assumption that people are on a vulnerable version.

This is a prime example of why I would never give anything away free. Unrelated to SSL certificates; I rather throw out my old equipment than give it away since the people I give it too will never be happy and don't understand its free for a reason and demand support. The fact that you cant afford something better does not give you rights to it.

res0nat0r• 12 years ago

Shouldn't this post be titled: Most StartSSL certs will stay compromised because their customers are too cheap to pay to fix them?

drdaeman2• 12 years ago

Right, but...

I have about 30 certificates from StartSSL. Four second-level domains, and best security practices recommended having a separate key per service, so web server has its own keys, so is email server, XMPP and so on. The idea was that if one's compromised - others would hopefully remain safe.

Call me names, but I'm not going to shell out $750.

dm23• 12 years ago

How long would it take their staff to revoke a single certificate?

$25 seems expensive for something that can't take more than 5 minutes per certificate, unless there is more to it than I'm aware of.

I guess it doesn't really matter to them if they lose several free customers. https://twitter.com/startssl/status/453631038883758080

They're probably making a ton of money from this, in the long run I'm not sure it'll be worth it though.

cpach4• 12 years ago

5 minutes of their employees’ time probably cost more than that. And of course it would be silly for a business like this to charge for cost instead of value.

dm23• 12 years ago

Automate it and charge $1.

joeyh• 12 years ago

StartSSL revoked one of my certs on request the night Heartbleed came out. I mentioned heartbleed in the form.

However, that was a $24.90 gamble.. They could just has easily billed me. Especially if you have a lot of different certs, that gamble may not be worth it.

Also, I'm a paying customer, having gone through their process to get a wildcard cert. A free customer may have different results.

And then, browsers don't check SSL cert revocations, and the infrastructure to check reovocations is apparently broken too. So this is a gamble with not much of a payoff.

felix• 12 years ago

Is there any actual data anywhere (ANYWHERE) that suggests this is the case? Or statistically more the case than any other CA with a more traditional payment model?

Or is this hand wringing about the stupid people who got the free certificate from the stupid company that likes to give away free certificates but under normal circumstances they might actually charge people for some other part of the service that almost no one ever uses?

Most StartSSL certs will stay compromised

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