SSL: How to Choose a Certificate Authority 72
lessthan0 writes "Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the backbone of e-commerce on the web. It is the protocol used to encrypt communications between a web browser and web server, though it can also be used for other applications. To use SSL on your own web server, you often need to deal with an external company called a certificate authority (CA). Three major considerations come into play when choosing a CA: trust, audience, and cost."
the community? (Score:5, Informative)
Do they even check? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Do they even check? (Score:2)
The problem is this free to use CA has to check the key really does belong to whatever it's supposed to belong to, or what's the point? Tieing a key do
Re:Do they even check? (Score:2)
They mail root. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They mail root. (Score:2)
Who actually has mail delivered to the root user, rather than aliased/forwarded to some other address?
Re:They mail root. (Score:3, Informative)
Since those addresses are administrative addresses, you shouldn't be forwarding them to a user or mail system you don't trust. You shoul
Thanks! (Score:1)
Re:They mail root. (Score:2)
Now that we have a new set of DNSSEC RFCs, hopefully secure DNS will actually happen in the next few years. That would make things an awful lot easier (although I suspect that .com will be the *la
Re:They mail root. (Score:2)
In order to get the domain name in the CN of a certificate, CAcert requires the person requesting the certificate to be personally verified by the web of trust (meeting at least 2 people f
Re:Do they even check? (Score:5, Informative)
To get more details in the cert, like organization, you have to take additional steps to get your identity verified, like meeting someone in person.
Apart from that, no CA "checks the validity" of any site. All a CA does is bind a key to a common name, that is a name that has some specific semantics a web browser can verify, AKA a fully-qualified domain name.
If there is a ligitimate site www.onlinebank.com and you manage to register a phishing domain online-bank.com, then any CA will most likely give you a cert for it, since they only verify that online-bank.com belongs to you. Whether that site is in conflict with another site is totally out of the scope of a CA. I think this "problem" is mostly unknown to people. They assume "cert == legitimate site" and automatically trust the site itself.
There was an article on
To say it again: All a CA does is bind a key to a name, making sure that the person presenting the key in fact controls the name.
I found the course at http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cs
Re:Do they even check? (Score:2)
You have to be "in control" of the domain you want a cert for, that is you have to be able to receive mail at root@domain or what the username was. This reflects in the cert that you get, i.e. the only field that is going to be filled is the common name, as that is the only piece that CAcert can verify (sans DNS spoofing to take over a domain for a short time to intercept mail to root@domain).
So all I have to do is to poison the DNS MX records, and I can get an SSL cert, apparently.
Not that cacert.org
Re:Do they even check? (Score:2)
As said, there are certs which include more information but which you have to provide to some trusted party in person. There are assurers in several countries which perform this task for CAcert.
The reverse is that one shouldn't place much trust
Mac certificate configuration (Score:5, Informative)
Better yet -- go to Applications, go to Utilities, and double-click on Keychain Access. From here, you control what certificates (et al) are used by the operating system, not just the web browser. OSX moves SSL into shared primitives, meaning that Safari, Mail, iChat, and anything else you might have installed all follow the same rules. For instance, if you want to trust CAcert, you load it into your keychain once, and everything knows about it. Try that under IE or Firefox.
This makes a lot more sense than making SSL the responsibility of the individual applications. Saying that unqualified would make me a Mac fanboy, and -1 Offtopic, so I should also point out that this approach is used by KDE as well: there exists one master repository of certificates that everything else talks to, and it's not the web browser. "So much for ease of use", indeed.
Re:Mac certificate configuration (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like a lot of FUD to me.
Re:Mac certificate configuration (Score:1)
Re:Mac certificate configuration (Score:2)
However, if you think Apple is building a machine that will give anyone the machine will accept an SSL cert from unfettered access to the machine, then yes, I'm going to classify that as FUD. The fact that your research is unable to turn up any evidence isn't evidence that Apple's planning to build a m
Re:Mac certificate configuration (Score:1)
Your reply indicates fully that you fail to understand the implications of Transitive Trusts, TPM or their inherent properties as specified. Please refer to http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/D/6/5D6EA F2B-7DDF-476B-93DC-7CF0072878E6/TPM.doc [microsoft.com] for information on how TPM can be used to remotely administer machines via policies and other controls. Your privacy as a consumer could very well be at risk...
Re:Mac certificate configuration (Score:2)
Whoa, come back to Earth please. "Ignore Ownership" for volumes on Mac OS is about honoring UNIX file permissions on removable drives. It doesn't have anything to do with TPM, and that checkbox has been in the "Get Info" window for volumes in the Finder since 10.2 I believe.
For example, you generally don't want to honor filesystem permissions on a C
Re:Mac certificate configuration (Score:2)
Windows ("IE") has an equivalent called the "Certificate Store". I can't remember if it first appeared in Windows 2000 or Windows XP, however.
Firefox is just an application, so a comparison to OS-level functionality is nonsensical.
Re:Mac certificate configuration (Score:2)
(Having said that, the new graphical tool rocks muchly)
Re:Mac certificate configuration (Score:2)
Try that under IE or Firefox.
I'm pretty sure Windows has a centralized CA management system, and I think Firefox (at least on Debian) uses Debian's centralized CA management system as well.
Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Commercial SSL certs are 100% scam. CAs pay browser vendors for the ability to extort money from website owners.
My grandmother doesn't know that Verisign exists, nor AddTrust, nor any other CAs. She particularly doesn't know how or why Verisign checks a certificate before signing it, and she wouldn't understand the differences in the way that any other CA does it either. The one and only one thing that she does know is that the error that pops up if a site tries to use a certificate that hasn't paid Microsoft a fat wad of cash confuses her.
If you just woke up from the early 90s and still have some misplaced faith in the SSL CA system, by all means, read this. If you are a consultant pushing a CA that gives you kickbacks, give this to your customers. If you just want people to be able to click your https links, get the cheapest certificate you can find, no one will ever know the difference.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
I was ready to write the exact same thing you were.
Of course things have gotten a bit better over the years.
When I first started on the Internet, the only way to get a secure certificate was to buy a Netscape server ($5,000) and then to buy a Verisign certificate. I don't even remember how much the certificate was at the time, just that it was expensive.
I remember feeling that crypto people, with their curious obsessions about identity and the like, were creating a world way too complex for anyone but other crypto people to manage, and events seem to have borne me out.
D
(PS Anyone else feel the new format seems to have sapped the vitality out of Slashdot? Maybe because it now looks like every other site on the web. It does load faster but I don't know if this change was really that brainy a scheme.)
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
Oh, good, I'm not hallucinating. I wish there had been some warning, guess I'm just getting old.
I guess there's nothing wrong with the new look, but it just doesn't look like Slashdot anymore.
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
No, no-one knows the the difference between high and low, but a person does actually have to do something.
Yeah, someone has to sit there in front of the fax machine waiting for the ultra-secure signed letterheads to come in.
-matthew
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
I mean, they say they do, but as others point out, citibank.com, citiibank.com, citybank.com, etc, can all get a cert and can claim anything they want on the website once its setup. Certs don't help even one iota in avoiding phishing. And it's trivial to register a domain for someone if you can get access to almost any incoming communication stream. You can do it by redirecting DNS and catching the e
Re:No difference, eh? (Score:3, Informative)
I have, and the post to which you replied was spot on. Once a CA has its root cert distributed with the major browsers, the only risk you assume by using them is that if they screw up, that cert may not be included in the future, and you may need to replace the certificate that you pay them to sign.
Re:No difference, eh? (Score:2)
No, the grandparent is suggesting that you find the cheapest signer that is trusted by browsers. Yo
Exactly (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
>If you just want people to be able to click your https links, get the cheapest certificate you can find, no one will ever know the difference.
Enough people have recognized those problems that a few proposed solutions are rattling around. Ian Griggs is advocating that (among other anti-phishing measures) browsers prominently display the CA name and explain what it's for ("Terraslime asserts that you are really
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
The PGP solution is the best case imaginable, especially when it comes to banks. Just put the fingerprint on a sign at the bank. You probably went there anyway when you opened the account. Also, put it on the monthly statements.
It's also the best case imaginable for other e-commerce too. No, you don't have to call them to get
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
Re:Wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
However, some people drive BMW's, Lexii, or Mercedes for reasons I don't quite fathom, but their major consideration is probably NOT cost, cost and cost. I imagine these people want to be associated with reputable enterprises, and are willing to pay a somewhat meager fee just in case someone happens to follow them out of the business rooms to see what care they actually drive. I don't think the CEO of my co
Re:Wrong (Score:2)
With certs, there really is no difference between an
Re:[OT]: fonts too small (Score:1)
Re:[OT]: fonts too small (Score:2)
Or just sign your own (Score:5, Interesting)
The US military does it. Going to https://www.mol.usmc.mil/ [usmc.mil] in either IE or Firefox asks if you want to trust the cert.
I'm not sure about IIS, but openssl certainly has a mechanism for signing your own ssl certs, as do load balancers with ssl acceleration support. Commercial, "trusted" ssl certs seem to be useful primarily for preventing security warning popups.
From my own experience with Equifax (currently GeoTrust & soon to be Verisign thanks to acquisitions and consolidation) I know that it took them years to get their root certificate added into the Java keystore. Any application using a not-very-current version of the jdk will still generate errors when faced with GeoTrust certs. Buying certs from a smaller CA with less penetration into end-user keystores can be little or no better than signing certs yourself.
From my viewpoint, the only two viable options are paying top dollar for the certs that will work for most people or signing your own. Which option to go with is largely a budget issue.
-DaveU
Re:Or just sign your own (Score:2)
Re:Or just sign your own (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Or just sign your own (Score:2)
Re:Or just sign your own (Score:2)
The point of SSL is to ID a server as a certain server. Let's say you do ecommerce, and your very own pages explain this behavior away. Great idea, until your domain get hijacked (registrar isn't paid, DNS spoof, etc). Lo and behold, users come to expect this behavior, and click away.
This is the key fact, however. You need someone you can trust - a third
Re: (Score:2)
IIS self-signed certificates (Score:1)
IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools [microsoft.com] has an application called SelfSSL.exe that does everything for you to self-sign a certificate in IIS. It does work in IIS 5.1 as well (I used it last week) under WinXP. It was definitely possible before to self-sign a certificate in IIS, but this tool makes it a lot easier.
Wrong (with one slight caveat) (Score:2)
that the CA's public key is seeded into IE and Firefox.
Maybe if you're expecting to do a lot, finding the 'least annoying'
key administration might be worth review.
links? (Score:2)
Re:links? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:links? (Score:1)
Comodo [instantssl.com]
Thawte [verisign.com]
VeriSign [verisign.com]
Re:links? (Score:1)
Re:links? (Score:1)
Re:links? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:links? (Score:2)
I'd have to agree with this one. Since no one looks at the goddamn cert any way, why not go for the cheapest.
RegisterFly.com has cheap certs that are compatible with Firefox, IE, Safari, Konqerer, Opera, etc.
I even use this cert for my mail server and the cert is recognized by Outlook, Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail and others. Much more convenient than using self signed certs, and issued very quickly.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
cost alone (Score:2, Insightful)
a certified page represents just that, and nothing more. you should look at the cost aspect of it alone.
if you can dish-out the dough to get a certificate, by all means, go for it. if you can't then you can go for a cheaper certificate, or even your own certificate. you can ask your clients
DNS spoofing? (Score:2)
you can ask your clients to trust your certificates
Through which medium? How do your clients know that their DNS isn't being spoofed when you give them your root certificate to install?
We like to choose our University as the authority (Score:3, Interesting)
If you don't trust us, why are you sharing data with us?
That's the question we ask.
Now, if you're going commercial, I think you need to use one of the standard SSL authorities, even though it is more expensive.
I trust you but not the network (Score:2, Insightful)
If you don't trust us, why are you sharing data with us?
It's not that I don't trust you as a business entity; it's that I don't trust the network between us. When I visit www.washington.edu to download University of Washington's root certificate, how do I know that, say, the DNS isn't being spoofed and there isn't a transparent proxy acting as a man in the middle?
Check your audience! (Score:2)
SSL certs can be used for IMAP/SMTP, and clients such as the SnapperMail for the Palm only support verisign/thawte as a CA. I couldn't install a different CA. There is an option to trust anyway, but then this opens an attack vector: anyone could create a self-signed cert and claim it as the original server. This was a year or so ago, it may have changed by now.
I'm pretty sure the web client on the Treos are the same way.
When considering a certificate (Score:2)
In most cases you can actually do a lot with a self-signed certificate. Especially if your aim actually is just to provide encrypted web pages and handle secure emails within your organization.
And even if you are providing public services you actually don't need a commercial certificate - you can run your own CA, as l
Man in the middle (Score:1)
And even if you are providing public services you actually don't need a commercial certificate - you can run your own CA, as long as you provide sufficient information to your customers about what the situation is and how they can add your services to their list of trusted services.
What is this "sufficient information"? I can imagine that it would include at least a root certificate. So how do you get it to the client without a man in the middle interfering?
CA system broken (Score:2)
Re:CA system broken (Score:2)
No, it's not. One of the most important aspects of SSL/TLS is that it makes man-in-the-middle attacks harder. Self-signed certificates provide little or no assurance that you are actually are visiting the domain that you think that you are visiting. CAs provide a minimum level of assurance that the page you are seeing is served by a server under the control of the entity that owns the domain you are visiting.
two words (Score:2)
Only one solution.... (Score:2, Insightful)