10 ms·

A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

482 points by sanqui 2y ago

danpalmer 2y ago
This is a bad look. I expected the result would be Chrome and Firefox dropping trust for this CA, but they already don't trust this CA. Arguably, Microsoft/Windows trusting a CA that the other big players choose not to trust is an even worse look for Microsoft.
- jsheard 2y ago
  What is even the point of a web CA that isn't trusted by all of the major players? Is there one?
  - beeflet 2y ago
    I suppose it allows you to enable third party control and censorship. If you look at microsoft's censorship of bing in china for example, they are more than willing to bend the knee if it means they can get ahead.
    - alganet 2y ago
      As a brazillian, I find this very unlikely. In 2013, when the same party was in power, SERPRO was tasked with replacing Microsoft in key aspects, such as government email (which was handled by Outlook Server at that time) and operating systems. The main reason was fear of espionage. So, in reality, we are more afraid of the US spying on us than random internet dissidents.
      - serial_dev 2y ago
        As a non Brazilian, sometimes when a government says a company is spying on its citizens, they mean that they want access, too, to the spying and censoring apparatus.
        alganet 2y ago
        I see your point. Maybe if I was in government I would think the same. Catch criminals before they act, stuff like that (I'm just being the devil's advocate here). This is a dillema, and the worst kind. The kind citizens know nothing about, so the only possible way to talk about it is to speculate. I am, however, too old to speculate about these things anymore.
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    These are generally government CAs, so, typically the situation is Microsoft sold the government Windows, and as part of that deal (at least tacitly) agreed to the CA being trusted, and so every system that's trusting these certificates is a Windows PC anyway, running Edge because the whole point was the government will only use Windows and pays Microsoft $$$. Why bake it into everybody else's Windows? If you make say a Brazil Government-only Windows which trusts this CA instead, I guarantee somebody crucial in Brazil will buy a 3rd party Windows laptop independently and it doesn't work with this CA's certificates and that ends up as Microsoft's problem to fix, so, easier to just have every Windows device trust the CA. They'll have an assurance from the CA that it won't do this sort of crap, and that's enough, plausible deniability. Microsoft will say they take this "very seriously" and do nothing and it'll blow over. After all this stuff happened before and it'll happen again, and Windows will remain very popular.
    - sneak 2y ago
      Windows is less popular every year.
      - notimetorelax 2y ago
        I looked at the graphs at Statista. I don’t think it’s so clear cut. Mobile OSs have pushed it down, but it seem to dominate PC market. Do you have a graph that shows its decline on computers, not mobile phones? Or in absolute unit counts?
        flir 2y ago
        I think that might be a bit of an unfair caveat. People do real work on mobile OSes. They shop and communicate on mobile OSes, and occasionally organise revolutions. (Although I'm not sure why "Netraft confirms, Windows is dying" is a useful comment here anyway. Windows is a behemoth.)
        lysace 2y ago
        https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202410 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide... There's a clear but slow trend on desktop. Jan 2009: 95.4% Windows Jan 2016: 85.2% Windows Jan 2024: 73.0% Windows In e.g. US it's going down faster, desktop market share now at 62%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america#monthly-200901-202410 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- beeflet 2y ago
  It's not just a bad look, it's bad period.
- move-on-by 2y ago
  Also being issued on a major US holiday- when many are on PTO- does not help with the look.
  - alganet 2y ago
    During carnival we brazillians often take 3 or 4 days leave. Would it be fair during that time if I asked you to hold your PRs, bug tickets and work in general because we're on paid leave? On-call rotation exists for those reasons. Otherwise, all countries would need to respect all other countries holidays. In fact, we're not even aware of most US holidays. It is likely to be a coincidence.
    - lmm 2y ago
      > Would it be fair during that time if I asked you to hold your PRs, bug tickets and work in general because we're on paid leave? Yes. That's completely normal for companies that do business with Brazil.
      - alganet 2y ago
        Sorry, my example was bad. In fact, your example is perfect. We're not talking about business. CAs are different. In security and infrastructure, there's always someone working on holidays. The larger the organization, higher are the chances that some kind of rotation exists.
    - bogota 2y ago
      Have you never worked at a multinational company?
      - alganet 2y ago
        I did, multiple times with multiple countries. All of them had some sort of call rotation. Someone was always at the helm, _specially_ in infrastructure and security. There are whole startups designed to solve this, like PagerDuty. I am now very curious to understand where your question comes from. There must be some misunderstanding here. You never went on-call or seen a friend do it?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lokar 2y ago
  Microsoft is all about bad looks
- raincole 2y ago
  How bad is it? (Genuine question from me who lacks cybersecurity knowledge)
  - retrodaredevil 2y ago
    Let's assume that some malicious third party has control of the certificate that was created by this fishy CA. The main attack that they could carry out is a man in the middle (MitM) attack. This attack requires this malicious third party to be able to intercept and change the contents of requests being sent to google.com and someone's web browser. A MitM attack can be easily carried out by someone in control of an ISP, or someone in control of a WiFi network. So, if you trust your ISP and your WiFi network, realistically you have nothing to worry about. The reason that this issued certificate could allow an attack like this to happen is because all websites nowadays use HTTPS connections, and certificate authorities are the entities that tell your web browser that certain certificates are legit. They confirm that a website is actually that website. If you visit some website and someone tries to do a MitM attack between your web browser and that website, the web page should fail to load because if they try to change the certificate, your web browser should reject it because it is invalid.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    Well now that everyone knows about it, its a whole lot less bad. The bad certificate was caught, and caught quickly. The system works. It is a bit like if airport security catches someone who wanted to bomb a plane. Yes the immediate gut reaction is that is terrible, but if you think about it for a bit its actually reassuring, since its proof the safe guards worked.
- justinclift 2y ago
  > an even worse look for Microsoft. Microsoft have a terrible reputation for security, which they've earned through doing stuff like this. It's not likely to get any better any time soon either, as their trajectory is still pointed downwards.
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    I don’t know enough to comment on that reputation, but this surprises me. They’re known for being great at serving and selling to the enterprise, frequently at the expense of end users, and big enterprises/govts care a lot about security usually. Even if much of that caring is box ticking rather than actually looking into the security (hello ISO27001), you’d expect it to result in generally a security conscious culture.
    - outworlder 2y ago
      It's hit and miss. They have one of the largest cyber security operations worldwide and regularly track and dismantle criminal operations. There's some great people working there. Then there's Azure. Which is used by large organizations and you would expect it to have the utmost care when it comes to security. But it often does badly, in several instances it allowed different tenants to access information from one another, something unheard of on AWS. For example: https://www.securityweek.com/microsoft-patches-azure-cross-tenant-data-access-flaw/ https://www.securityweek.com/microsoft-patches-azure-cross-t... or https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/tenable_azure_flaw/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/tenable_azure_flaw/ or https://borncity.com/win/2023/08/03/microsoft-as-a-security-risk-azure-vulnerability-unpatched-since-march-2023-heavy-criticism-from-tenable-part-2/ https://borncity.com/win/2023/08/03/microsoft-as-a-security-... There are so many cross tenant vulnerabilities that there could be some overlap in those URLs, and it's a bit late at night for me to read those carefully, but you get the idea. They do get the most flak about Windows, which used to be a non networked, single user OS.
    - cassianoleal 2y ago
      > Even if much of that caring is box ticking rather than actually looking into the security (hello ISO27001), you’d expect it to result in generally a security conscious culture. If the whole value is in ticking the box, why would that develop a culture that values anything more than the tick?
- jowea 2y ago
  Funny thing is this is just the latest issue around this CA. For a long time you had to manually add it to certificate store because it was not trusted by default but the Brazilian government insisted in using it on official websites.
sundalia 2y ago
[flagged]
noitpmeder 2y ago
Not clear (to me) in the original post -- was this done accidentally or intentionally?
- fguerraz 2y ago
  Carelessly is the answer
- ruined 2y ago
  does that matter?
  - altairprime 2y ago
    Yes; malice is indefensible no matter the circumstances, mistakes may be defensible under certain circumstances or with certain responses by the mistakee.
    - sabbaticaldev 2y ago
      as a brazilian i’m not sure if I’d prefer it to be malice or incompetence
      - griomnib 2y ago
        As an American…why not both?
      - lazide 2y ago
        There is also the option of malicious incompetence, of course.
      - altairprime 2y ago
        Incompetence: operating a CA is difficult enough that sometimes people fuck up, but if the CA is corrupted, then that’s much worse.
- tptacek 2y ago
  The certificate was registered in CT, so a reasonable assumption would be that this was accidental, because it was guaranteed to be noticed and to generate drama that would threaten the capability they arranged, presumably at some significant expense.
cjalmeida 2y ago
It gets worse. ICP-Brasil, the AC mentioned in the bug reports, the the government run agency responsible for all things related to digital signatures. Digitally signing a contract, a deed, accessing tax returns…
- layer8 2y ago
  Unlike web browsers, digital signature use cases should perform revocation checks, so revoking the google.com certificate should solve that.
  - perching_aix 2y ago
    I think the current "meta" is CAA records? https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-certificate-pinning-is-outdated/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-certificate-pinning-is-outda...
    - 8organicbits 2y ago
      Correct, which Google is using: https://www.nslookup.io/domains/google.com/dns-records/caa/ https://www.nslookup.io/domains/google.com/dns-records/caa/
    - syncsynchalt 2y ago
      CAA records rely on the CAs to respect them, and this is an article about how a CA has issued a cert in violation of a CAA record.
      - perching_aix 2y ago
        Oh right, for some reason I was under the impression that browsers utilize the record too.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    The problem here isn't really that one mis-issued certificate, but rather the general problematic behavior of that CA reported in TFA. If a CA can be convinced to issue a server certificate for google.com, would you feel very comfortable trusting their contract/deed/... signing certificates?
sabbaticaldev 2y ago
Can someone explain what could be done with that and by whom?
- tptacek 2y ago
  Microsoft appears to have arranged with the government of Brazil for one of their national CAs to have the ability to mint arbitrary certificates. Only Microsoft's own WebPKI software cares; Chrome, Safari, and Firefox don't trust this CA.
- 77pt77 2y ago
  Whoever has the private certificate can pretend to be google.com to people using windows. The brower (possibly only edge) and system would show the connection as being secure.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- woofcat 2y ago
  Whomever has this fake certificate can run a server and say it's google.com and windows will say "yep you are" with the little green lock.
  - bufferoverflow 2y ago
    The certificate is for a specific IP address, no? And without DNS pointing google.com to that IP address, it's pretty useless.
    - zer0x4d 2y ago
      Nope, certificates are issued for CNs(Common Name), also known as FQDNs (Fully qualified domain names). Something such as *.google.com, not IP addresses. If they were issued for IP addresses they would have to reissue the certificate every time they spun up a new server. Also it's why if you spin up another server and make DNS point google.com to that server, it would not pass verification since the certificate you will be using on that server is not issued to *.google.com, but rather some other domain you own. The IP address plays no role in certificates.
resters 2y ago
The simple solution would be to have independent entities offer trust assertions about CAs and to allow users to consider multiple entities' views in their decision about whether to trust. It's surprising this doesn't exist yet when the attack vector is so clear.
- tptacek 2y ago
  This is something more akin to a client software bug than a WebPKI issue. Any alternative PKI scheme you could come up with would still be subject to Microsoft cutting deals.
  - silotis 2y ago
    With DNSSEC + DANE Brazil would not have needed to make any deal with MS to be able to issue certs for .br domains and they would not have been able to issue a cert for google.com. Admittedly DNSSEC has issues to put it mildly, but it does serve as a counterexample to your claim.
  - 8organicbits 2y ago
    Can you explain? I think the parent is suggesting that users should be able to tune their trust stores. I'd imagine that trusting only the CAs that are in all the major trust stores (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple) would be a reasonable policy. Few websites would choose a CA that falls outside that group.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Users can tune their own trust stores.
      - 8organicbits 2y ago
        Is there a way to do it that isn't tedious? I'm not familiar with tooling beyond the UI browsers offer, which doesn't match the experience I was trying to describe.
leonidasv 2y ago
ICP-Brasil officially stopped emitting public-facing SSL/TLS certificates in October: https://www.gov.br/iti/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/indice-de-noticias/importante-esclarecimentos-sobre-o-fim-dos-certificados-ssl-tls-pela-icp-brasil https://www.gov.br/iti/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/indice-de-not... This is pretty bad. Someone circunvented the ban on emitting public certificates but also disrespected Google's CAA rules. Hope this CA gets banned on Microsoft OSes for good.
- TheRealPomax 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - semitones 2y ago
    Do you actually understand what's going here?
    - paxys 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - raincole 2y ago
      As someone who doesn't understand what's actually going on: could someone ELI5?
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        CAs are in the business of being a trusted third party that, among other things, verifies the identity of things. In this case someone seems to have scammed/hacked/whatever the CA into issuing a certificate for google.com, which is clearly bogus. So the result is that we should not trust this CA anymore.
        raincole 2y ago
        But why would someone hacked a CA to just... issue a certificate for google.com? How does it benifit them? I'd imagine they issue a certficate for some phishing sites or something.
8organicbits 2y ago
Microsoft seems to be casual about trusting CAs, isn't transparent in their inclusion decisions, and their trust store is quite large. Any reasonable website would only use a certificate trusted by a quorum of browsers (especially Chrome), so the benefit of the extraneous CAs seems low. I'm not a Windows user, but I have to wonder if there's a way to use the Chrome trust store on Windows/Edge. I can't imagine trusting Microsoft's list.
- lokar 2y ago
  They are not transparent because it is based on enabling sales.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > Microsoft seems to be casual about trusting CAs Woah, that is a bold statement. Classic HN overreach. I am not here to shill for MSFT, but, in terms of OS sales to gov'ts, no one else has nearly the same level of experience. I am sure that MSFT carefully vets all CA additions. Are you aware of the big hack on Netherlands govt-approved CA? Read about: DigiNotar. My point: That was a widely trusted CA that was hacked after the root CA cert was added to most browsers / OSes trust stores. So would you say that MSFT was "casual" about trusting DigiNotar root CA? How about Mozilla Firefox? I doubt it.
  - 8organicbits 2y ago
    I'm very aware of DigiNotar, I wrote a blog post last year that discusses DigiNotar and even mentions Brazil/ITI [1]. A challenge for Microsoft is that they aren't transparent in their inclusion decisions, so we can only speculate why they chose to trust this CA. What gives you confidence that Microsoft is doing careful vetting? In stark contrast, Mozilla publicly and extensively documented why they didn't trust this CA [2]. [1] https://alexsci.com/blog/ca-trust/ https://alexsci.com/blog/ca-trust/ [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438825 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438825
    - eschatology 2y ago
knowitnone 2y ago
"Windows users deserve better!" As if Microsoft cares about their users. But this is clearly negligent behavior and open to lawsuits..hopefully.
connor11528 2y ago
this is an issue with companies being too big
xyst 2y ago
So an incompetent CA is trusted by an even more incompetent company, Microsoft? Is anybody else surprised at this point?
- ed_mercer 2y ago
  Microsoft is many things but not incompetent.
  - tylerchilds 2y ago
    wealthy and strategic can cover up a lot of incompetence
  - cookiengineer 2y ago
    From a security standpoint that's debatable. Multiple RCEs and critical CVEs cannot be fixed because Microsoft "lost" the source code. So they disclosed those RCEs but without any solution or fix. (Not kidding, sadly, look it up, there also have been occasional binary patches because of the same reason) [1] https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide
    - echoangle 2y ago
      Do you have a link for the „lost sourcecode so we won’t patch“ claim? The link you gave just gives me a long list of patches.
      - cookiengineer 2y ago
        CVE-2017-11882 and the NTLM relay attack come to mind, for example. Down the line they weren't actually fixed, and are continuously being used by a lot of ransomware / malware campaigns. I remember some Windows Fax Service related CVEs and some Wi-Fi drivers that couldn't be fixed directly, too, but don't remember the CVE or whether that was related to the Broadcom driver/module sideloading fuckup. > The link you gave just gives me a long list of patches. The link I gave you is the only disclosure/advisory page that Microsoft offers, don't blame me for them not offering a better UI. Ask them to do better. - https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-11882 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-11882 - https://blog.0patch.com/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-patch-their.html https://blog.0patch.com/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-... - https://cert.europa.eu/publications/security-advisories/2022-034/ https://cert.europa.eu/publications/security-advisories/2022...
coretx 2y ago
Does anyone have a list of state ( associated ) CA's so that I can ditch them all ?
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  I built a partial list last year [1]. It's challenging to decide which CAs are government operated or controlled: the names don't always make it clear, private companies may operate under government direction, law may require CAs to follow government requests. These were all very clearly government/military organizations running CAs. The Brazilian CA referenced here is number two on the list. [1] https://alexsci.com/blog/ca-trust/#government-control-of-cas https://alexsci.com/blog/ca-trust/#government-control-of-cas
II2II 2y ago
Tangentially related: The system is deeply flawed, which is something I realized fifteen years ago when I was put into a situation where I had to use online banking. (Had to being the nearest branch of any bank was an hour long flight away, though there was an ice road you could use in the winter.) One of my first questions of the bank was: who issued their certificate. They didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I suppose I could have pushed the question until I found someone who did know, but I also realized that a random person asking about security would be flagged as suspicious. The whole process was based upon blind trust. Not just trust in the browser vendors to limit themselves to reputable CA, but of the CAs themselves and their procedures/policies, and who knows what else.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > One of my first questions of the bank was: who issued their certificate …what did the certificate say? > whole process was based upon blind trust If I offer someone a ride and they start quizzing me on what differential I’m driving, I’m going to ignore them. That isn’t requiring blind trust, it’s just the wrong place and way to get the information you’re asking for.
  - salawat 2y ago
    The problem with that analogy is that the cert issuer isn't a mere component of the car, but the entire car in this instance. That cert being trustworthy is the entire point. When I was in schooling getting filled in on Web of Trust, I about ground that particular day's class to a halt because I couldn't imagine the world was that cavalier on such a thing. Lo and behold, I realized shortly afterward it absolutely was the case, and there was nada I could do to change it except figure out how to get normal people universally fluent and invested in basic cryptography so they could manage their own trust networks. You can imagine how well that's gone.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
mattfields 2y ago
Speculative guess, but it sounds like intentional collusion/coercion between government and big corporations. ie: Brazilian government demands Microsoft to grant them MITM access from Windows machines, in order for the right to do business in the country.
- bawolff 2y ago
  That seems very unlikely to me. Governments are usually sneaky with their evil plans. It is simply too hard to get away with something like that to make it a viable. Case in point, the fact you are reading about it on hn.
notorandit 2y ago
It's not Microsoft being careless about CAs. That's been made on purpose by them to comply with some request in order to keep a slice of their market.
ikekkdcjkfke 2y ago
How do i remove this CA from windows and Edge?
b800h 2y ago
Can anyone tell me which CA is used by Open Banking in Brazil? The infrastructure is heavily based on PKI. I assume it's not this one?
- meiraleal 2y ago
  Yes, ICP-Brasil is responsible for that too.
ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
@dang Can we update the link to the original source? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934361 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934361
motbus3 2y ago
You care about google? Look at those links, they are loaded with critical government stuff. Omg
MattPalmer1086 2y ago
Things like this make me wonder why certificates are not also signed by the certificate owner. Right now, a CA can issue a certificate for any public key and domain they like. A rogue trusted CA can intercept all traffic. If a certificate also included a signature by the owner of the public key signed by the CA (using their private key, signed over the CA signature), then a CA would no longer have this ability. What am I missing?
- 3np 2y ago
  > What am I missing? Infrastructure and processes for key distribution and revocation. Reusing the existing PKI infrastructure used for CA trust roots won't handle it. Perhaps public keys/certs could be distributed over DNS, like for DANE (or maybe even using DANE)? Not saying it can't be done, just to point out how it's not trivial and requires buy-in from incumbents across the ecosystem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na... I like your general idea of improving the status quo by adding decentralized/self-managed trust on top of/alongside the existing centralized PKI. Could be a stepping stone towards something more systematically resilient.
  - MattPalmer1086 2y ago
    Oh sure, any change to X.509 certs would require a lot of change. I'm not sure it would make much difference to most of the existing PKI infrastructure though. CAs wouldn't see any difference. For example, currently this is what happens: 1. Owner: generate CSR and send to CA 2. CA: validates owner identity, signs cert and returns cert to owner. All we would then add is: 3. Owner: signs cert with own private key and uses it. As far as I can see, the only other changes required would be to clients (so they could reject non owner signed certs), and maybe some revocation stuff.
    - bawolff 2y ago
      This doesn't make sense to me. What would you be trying to prove/show with step 3? How would it be different from the status quo?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ellan46 2y ago
[flagged]
ParadisoShlee 2y ago
[flagged]
0xbadcafebee 2y ago
Lol. "This is pretty bad. Someone circunvented the ban on emitting public certificates but also disrespected Google's CAA rules. Hope this CA gets banned on Microsoft OSes for good." Yeah, this is after the certificate was issued, and my guess, used. Also, has anyone tried to look up CT logs lately? I tried. Can get maybe a single FQDN if you look, but trying to do wildcards or name-alikes, nothing worked. Most of the CT searching websites were straight up broken. Clearly nobody is actually looking at CT logs. CAs are a joke. There's a dozen different ways to exploit them, they are exploited, and we only find out after the fact, if it's a famous enough domain. We could fix it but nobody gives a shit. Just apathy and BAU.
- AceJohnny2 2y ago
  > We could fix it but nobody gives a shit. Just apathy and BAU. We really can't fix it. You try and coordinate updates across all major (and most minor, and outdated) OSs, and websites around the world, amateur & professional, from the mom-and-pop store who don't understand any of this, to the big bank that'll take 3 years of procedure. I have friends who work in the CA field (on the OS side). The level of alcoholism and turnover in the field is... higher than average.
  - doubled112 2y ago
    Relative to all professions or relative to just IT/tech?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- numbsafari 2y ago
  Wildcards work on crt.sh: https://crt.sh/?q=%25.ycombinator.com https://crt.sh/?q=%25.ycombinator.com
  - numbsafari 2y ago
    Just wanting to add to my own comment... crt.sh allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed for wildcard searches. We map those into a slack channel for infrastructure advisory alerts. You can also setup more aggressive alerts if something shows up unexpectedly. It's an incredibly handy service.
alwayslikethis 2y ago
I wonder why Brazil has their CA trusted by Microsoft in the first place, while Kazakhstan [1], for example, wasn't. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle_a...
- kurthr 2y ago
  The Brazilian government buys windows licenses in bulk.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

482 points by sanqui 2y ago

This is a bad look. I expected the result would be Chrome and Firefox dropping trust for this CA, but they already don't trust this CA. Arguably, Microsoft/Windows trusting a CA that the other big players choose not to trust is an even worse look for Microsoft.

jsheard 2y ago
What is even the point of a web CA that isn't trusted by all of the major players? Is there one?
- beeflet 2y ago
  I suppose it allows you to enable third party control and censorship. If you look at microsoft's censorship of bing in china for example, they are more than willing to bend the knee if it means they can get ahead.
  - alganet 2y ago
    As a brazillian, I find this very unlikely. In 2013, when the same party was in power, SERPRO was tasked with replacing Microsoft in key aspects, such as government email (which was handled by Outlook Server at that time) and operating systems. The main reason was fear of espionage. So, in reality, we are more afraid of the US spying on us than random internet dissidents.
    - serial_dev 2y ago
      As a non Brazilian, sometimes when a government says a company is spying on its citizens, they mean that they want access, too, to the spying and censoring apparatus.
      - alganet 2y ago
        I see your point. Maybe if I was in government I would think the same. Catch criminals before they act, stuff like that (I'm just being the devil's advocate here). This is a dillema, and the worst kind. The kind citizens know nothing about, so the only possible way to talk about it is to speculate. I am, however, too old to speculate about these things anymore.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  These are generally government CAs, so, typically the situation is Microsoft sold the government Windows, and as part of that deal (at least tacitly) agreed to the CA being trusted, and so every system that's trusting these certificates is a Windows PC anyway, running Edge because the whole point was the government will only use Windows and pays Microsoft $$$. Why bake it into everybody else's Windows? If you make say a Brazil Government-only Windows which trusts this CA instead, I guarantee somebody crucial in Brazil will buy a 3rd party Windows laptop independently and it doesn't work with this CA's certificates and that ends up as Microsoft's problem to fix, so, easier to just have every Windows device trust the CA. They'll have an assurance from the CA that it won't do this sort of crap, and that's enough, plausible deniability. Microsoft will say they take this "very seriously" and do nothing and it'll blow over. After all this stuff happened before and it'll happen again, and Windows will remain very popular.
  - sneak 2y ago
    Windows is less popular every year.
    - notimetorelax 2y ago
      I looked at the graphs at Statista. I don’t think it’s so clear cut. Mobile OSs have pushed it down, but it seem to dominate PC market. Do you have a graph that shows its decline on computers, not mobile phones? Or in absolute unit counts?
      - flir 2y ago
        I think that might be a bit of an unfair caveat. People do real work on mobile OSes. They shop and communicate on mobile OSes, and occasionally organise revolutions. (Although I'm not sure why "Netraft confirms, Windows is dying" is a useful comment here anyway. Windows is a behemoth.)
      - lysace 2y ago
        https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202410 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide... There's a clear but slow trend on desktop. Jan 2009: 95.4% Windows Jan 2016: 85.2% Windows Jan 2024: 73.0% Windows In e.g. US it's going down faster, desktop market share now at 62%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america#monthly-200901-202410 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
beeflet 2y ago
It's not just a bad look, it's bad period.
move-on-by 2y ago
Also being issued on a major US holiday- when many are on PTO- does not help with the look.
- alganet 2y ago
  During carnival we brazillians often take 3 or 4 days leave. Would it be fair during that time if I asked you to hold your PRs, bug tickets and work in general because we're on paid leave? On-call rotation exists for those reasons. Otherwise, all countries would need to respect all other countries holidays. In fact, we're not even aware of most US holidays. It is likely to be a coincidence.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > Would it be fair during that time if I asked you to hold your PRs, bug tickets and work in general because we're on paid leave? Yes. That's completely normal for companies that do business with Brazil.
    - alganet 2y ago
      Sorry, my example was bad. In fact, your example is perfect. We're not talking about business. CAs are different. In security and infrastructure, there's always someone working on holidays. The larger the organization, higher are the chances that some kind of rotation exists.
  - bogota 2y ago
    Have you never worked at a multinational company?
    - alganet 2y ago
      I did, multiple times with multiple countries. All of them had some sort of call rotation. Someone was always at the helm, _specially_ in infrastructure and security. There are whole startups designed to solve this, like PagerDuty. I am now very curious to understand where your question comes from. There must be some misunderstanding here. You never went on-call or seen a friend do it?
deleted 2y ago
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lokar 2y ago
Microsoft is all about bad looks
raincole 2y ago
How bad is it? (Genuine question from me who lacks cybersecurity knowledge)
- retrodaredevil 2y ago
  Let's assume that some malicious third party has control of the certificate that was created by this fishy CA. The main attack that they could carry out is a man in the middle (MitM) attack. This attack requires this malicious third party to be able to intercept and change the contents of requests being sent to google.com and someone's web browser. A MitM attack can be easily carried out by someone in control of an ISP, or someone in control of a WiFi network. So, if you trust your ISP and your WiFi network, realistically you have nothing to worry about. The reason that this issued certificate could allow an attack like this to happen is because all websites nowadays use HTTPS connections, and certificate authorities are the entities that tell your web browser that certain certificates are legit. They confirm that a website is actually that website. If you visit some website and someone tries to do a MitM attack between your web browser and that website, the web page should fail to load because if they try to change the certificate, your web browser should reject it because it is invalid.
- bawolff 2y ago
  Well now that everyone knows about it, its a whole lot less bad. The bad certificate was caught, and caught quickly. The system works. It is a bit like if airport security catches someone who wanted to bomb a plane. Yes the immediate gut reaction is that is terrible, but if you think about it for a bit its actually reassuring, since its proof the safe guards worked.
justinclift 2y ago
> an even worse look for Microsoft. Microsoft have a terrible reputation for security, which they've earned through doing stuff like this. It's not likely to get any better any time soon either, as their trajectory is still pointed downwards.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  I don’t know enough to comment on that reputation, but this surprises me. They’re known for being great at serving and selling to the enterprise, frequently at the expense of end users, and big enterprises/govts care a lot about security usually. Even if much of that caring is box ticking rather than actually looking into the security (hello ISO27001), you’d expect it to result in generally a security conscious culture.
  - outworlder 2y ago
    It's hit and miss. They have one of the largest cyber security operations worldwide and regularly track and dismantle criminal operations. There's some great people working there. Then there's Azure. Which is used by large organizations and you would expect it to have the utmost care when it comes to security. But it often does badly, in several instances it allowed different tenants to access information from one another, something unheard of on AWS. For example: https://www.securityweek.com/microsoft-patches-azure-cross-tenant-data-access-flaw/ https://www.securityweek.com/microsoft-patches-azure-cross-t... or https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/tenable_azure_flaw/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/tenable_azure_flaw/ or https://borncity.com/win/2023/08/03/microsoft-as-a-security-risk-azure-vulnerability-unpatched-since-march-2023-heavy-criticism-from-tenable-part-2/ https://borncity.com/win/2023/08/03/microsoft-as-a-security-... There are so many cross tenant vulnerabilities that there could be some overlap in those URLs, and it's a bit late at night for me to read those carefully, but you get the idea. They do get the most flak about Windows, which used to be a non networked, single user OS.
  - cassianoleal 2y ago
    > Even if much of that caring is box ticking rather than actually looking into the security (hello ISO27001), you’d expect it to result in generally a security conscious culture. If the whole value is in ticking the box, why would that develop a culture that values anything more than the tick?
jowea 2y ago
Funny thing is this is just the latest issue around this CA. For a long time you had to manually add it to certificate store because it was not trusted by default but the Brazilian government insisted in using it on official websites.

sundalia 2y ago

[flagged]

noitpmeder 2y ago

Not clear (to me) in the original post -- was this done accidentally or intentionally?

fguerraz 2y ago
Carelessly is the answer
ruined 2y ago
does that matter?
- altairprime 2y ago
  Yes; malice is indefensible no matter the circumstances, mistakes may be defensible under certain circumstances or with certain responses by the mistakee.
  - sabbaticaldev 2y ago
    as a brazilian i’m not sure if I’d prefer it to be malice or incompetence
    - griomnib 2y ago
      As an American…why not both?
    - lazide 2y ago
      There is also the option of malicious incompetence, of course.
    - altairprime 2y ago
      Incompetence: operating a CA is difficult enough that sometimes people fuck up, but if the CA is corrupted, then that’s much worse.
tptacek 2y ago
The certificate was registered in CT, so a reasonable assumption would be that this was accidental, because it was guaranteed to be noticed and to generate drama that would threaten the capability they arranged, presumably at some significant expense.

cjalmeida 2y ago

It gets worse. ICP-Brasil, the AC mentioned in the bug reports, the the government run agency responsible for all things related to digital signatures. Digitally signing a contract, a deed, accessing tax returns…

layer8 2y ago
Unlike web browsers, digital signature use cases should perform revocation checks, so revoking the google.com certificate should solve that.
- perching_aix 2y ago
  I think the current "meta" is CAA records? https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-certificate-pinning-is-outdated/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-certificate-pinning-is-outda...
  - 8organicbits 2y ago
    Correct, which Google is using: https://www.nslookup.io/domains/google.com/dns-records/caa/ https://www.nslookup.io/domains/google.com/dns-records/caa/
  - syncsynchalt 2y ago
    CAA records rely on the CAs to respect them, and this is an article about how a CA has issued a cert in violation of a CAA record.
    - perching_aix 2y ago
      Oh right, for some reason I was under the impression that browsers utilize the record too.
- lxgr 2y ago
  The problem here isn't really that one mis-issued certificate, but rather the general problematic behavior of that CA reported in TFA. If a CA can be convinced to issue a server certificate for google.com, would you feel very comfortable trusting their contract/deed/... signing certificates?

sabbaticaldev 2y ago

Can someone explain what could be done with that and by whom?

tptacek 2y ago
Microsoft appears to have arranged with the government of Brazil for one of their national CAs to have the ability to mint arbitrary certificates. Only Microsoft's own WebPKI software cares; Chrome, Safari, and Firefox don't trust this CA.
77pt77 2y ago
Whoever has the private certificate can pretend to be google.com to people using windows. The brower (possibly only edge) and system would show the connection as being secure.
- deleted 2y ago
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woofcat 2y ago
Whomever has this fake certificate can run a server and say it's google.com and windows will say "yep you are" with the little green lock.
- bufferoverflow 2y ago
  The certificate is for a specific IP address, no? And without DNS pointing google.com to that IP address, it's pretty useless.
  - zer0x4d 2y ago
    Nope, certificates are issued for CNs(Common Name), also known as FQDNs (Fully qualified domain names). Something such as *.google.com, not IP addresses. If they were issued for IP addresses they would have to reissue the certificate every time they spun up a new server. Also it's why if you spin up another server and make DNS point google.com to that server, it would not pass verification since the certificate you will be using on that server is not issued to *.google.com, but rather some other domain you own. The IP address plays no role in certificates.

resters 2y ago

The simple solution would be to have independent entities offer trust assertions about CAs and to allow users to consider multiple entities' views in their decision about whether to trust. It's surprising this doesn't exist yet when the attack vector is so clear.

tptacek 2y ago
This is something more akin to a client software bug than a WebPKI issue. Any alternative PKI scheme you could come up with would still be subject to Microsoft cutting deals.
- silotis 2y ago
  With DNSSEC + DANE Brazil would not have needed to make any deal with MS to be able to issue certs for .br domains and they would not have been able to issue a cert for google.com. Admittedly DNSSEC has issues to put it mildly, but it does serve as a counterexample to your claim.
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  Can you explain? I think the parent is suggesting that users should be able to tune their trust stores. I'd imagine that trusting only the CAs that are in all the major trust stores (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple) would be a reasonable policy. Few websites would choose a CA that falls outside that group.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Users can tune their own trust stores.
    - 8organicbits 2y ago
      Is there a way to do it that isn't tedious? I'm not familiar with tooling beyond the UI browsers offer, which doesn't match the experience I was trying to describe.

leonidasv 2y ago

ICP-Brasil officially stopped emitting public-facing SSL/TLS certificates in October: https://www.gov.br/iti/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/indice-de-noticias/importante-esclarecimentos-sobre-o-fim-dos-certificados-ssl-tls-pela-icp-brasil https://www.gov.br/iti/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/indice-de-not... This is pretty bad. Someone circunvented the ban on emitting public certificates but also disrespected Google's CAA rules. Hope this CA gets banned on Microsoft OSes for good.

TheRealPomax 2y ago
[flagged]
- semitones 2y ago
  Do you actually understand what's going here?
  - paxys 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - raincole 2y ago
    As someone who doesn't understand what's actually going on: could someone ELI5?
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      CAs are in the business of being a trusted third party that, among other things, verifies the identity of things. In this case someone seems to have scammed/hacked/whatever the CA into issuing a certificate for google.com, which is clearly bogus. So the result is that we should not trust this CA anymore.
      - raincole 2y ago
        But why would someone hacked a CA to just... issue a certificate for google.com? How does it benifit them? I'd imagine they issue a certficate for some phishing sites or something.

8organicbits 2y ago

Microsoft seems to be casual about trusting CAs, isn't transparent in their inclusion decisions, and their trust store is quite large. Any reasonable website would only use a certificate trusted by a quorum of browsers (especially Chrome), so the benefit of the extraneous CAs seems low. I'm not a Windows user, but I have to wonder if there's a way to use the Chrome trust store on Windows/Edge. I can't imagine trusting Microsoft's list.

lokar 2y ago
They are not transparent because it is based on enabling sales.
throwaway2037 2y ago
> Microsoft seems to be casual about trusting CAs Woah, that is a bold statement. Classic HN overreach. I am not here to shill for MSFT, but, in terms of OS sales to gov'ts, no one else has nearly the same level of experience. I am sure that MSFT carefully vets all CA additions. Are you aware of the big hack on Netherlands govt-approved CA? Read about: DigiNotar. My point: That was a widely trusted CA that was hacked after the root CA cert was added to most browsers / OSes trust stores. So would you say that MSFT was "casual" about trusting DigiNotar root CA? How about Mozilla Firefox? I doubt it.
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  I'm very aware of DigiNotar, I wrote a blog post last year that discusses DigiNotar and even mentions Brazil/ITI [1]. A challenge for Microsoft is that they aren't transparent in their inclusion decisions, so we can only speculate why they chose to trust this CA. What gives you confidence that Microsoft is doing careful vetting? In stark contrast, Mozilla publicly and extensively documented why they didn't trust this CA [2]. [1] https://alexsci.com/blog/ca-trust/ https://alexsci.com/blog/ca-trust/ [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438825 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438825
  - eschatology 2y ago

knowitnone 2y ago

"Windows users deserve better!" As if Microsoft cares about their users. But this is clearly negligent behavior and open to lawsuits..hopefully.

connor11528 2y ago

this is an issue with companies being too big

xyst 2y ago

So an incompetent CA is trusted by an even more incompetent company, Microsoft? Is anybody else surprised at this point?

ed_mercer 2y ago
Microsoft is many things but not incompetent.
- tylerchilds 2y ago
  wealthy and strategic can cover up a lot of incompetence
- cookiengineer 2y ago
  From a security standpoint that's debatable. Multiple RCEs and critical CVEs cannot be fixed because Microsoft "lost" the source code. So they disclosed those RCEs but without any solution or fix. (Not kidding, sadly, look it up, there also have been occasional binary patches because of the same reason) [1] https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide
  - echoangle 2y ago
    Do you have a link for the „lost sourcecode so we won’t patch“ claim? The link you gave just gives me a long list of patches.
    - cookiengineer 2y ago
      CVE-2017-11882 and the NTLM relay attack come to mind, for example. Down the line they weren't actually fixed, and are continuously being used by a lot of ransomware / malware campaigns. I remember some Windows Fax Service related CVEs and some Wi-Fi drivers that couldn't be fixed directly, too, but don't remember the CVE or whether that was related to the Broadcom driver/module sideloading fuckup. > The link you gave just gives me a long list of patches. The link I gave you is the only disclosure/advisory page that Microsoft offers, don't blame me for them not offering a better UI. Ask them to do better. - https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-11882 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-11882 - https://blog.0patch.com/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-patch-their.html https://blog.0patch.com/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-... - https://cert.europa.eu/publications/security-advisories/2022-034/ https://cert.europa.eu/publications/security-advisories/2022...

coretx 2y ago

Does anyone have a list of state ( associated ) CA's so that I can ditch them all ?

8organicbits 2y ago
I built a partial list last year [1]. It's challenging to decide which CAs are government operated or controlled: the names don't always make it clear, private companies may operate under government direction, law may require CAs to follow government requests. These were all very clearly government/military organizations running CAs. The Brazilian CA referenced here is number two on the list. [1] https://alexsci.com/blog/ca-trust/#government-control-of-cas https://alexsci.com/blog/ca-trust/#government-control-of-cas

II2II 2y ago

Tangentially related: The system is deeply flawed, which is something I realized fifteen years ago when I was put into a situation where I had to use online banking. (Had to being the nearest branch of any bank was an hour long flight away, though there was an ice road you could use in the winter.) One of my first questions of the bank was: who issued their certificate. They didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I suppose I could have pushed the question until I found someone who did know, but I also realized that a random person asking about security would be flagged as suspicious. The whole process was based upon blind trust. Not just trust in the browser vendors to limit themselves to reputable CA, but of the CAs themselves and their procedures/policies, and who knows what else.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> One of my first questions of the bank was: who issued their certificate …what did the certificate say? > whole process was based upon blind trust If I offer someone a ride and they start quizzing me on what differential I’m driving, I’m going to ignore them. That isn’t requiring blind trust, it’s just the wrong place and way to get the information you’re asking for.
- salawat 2y ago
  The problem with that analogy is that the cert issuer isn't a mere component of the car, but the entire car in this instance. That cert being trustworthy is the entire point. When I was in schooling getting filled in on Web of Trust, I about ground that particular day's class to a halt because I couldn't imagine the world was that cavalier on such a thing. Lo and behold, I realized shortly afterward it absolutely was the case, and there was nada I could do to change it except figure out how to get normal people universally fluent and invested in basic cryptography so they could manage their own trust networks. You can imagine how well that's gone.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago

mattfields 2y ago

Speculative guess, but it sounds like intentional collusion/coercion between government and big corporations. ie: Brazilian government demands Microsoft to grant them MITM access from Windows machines, in order for the right to do business in the country.

bawolff 2y ago
That seems very unlikely to me. Governments are usually sneaky with their evil plans. It is simply too hard to get away with something like that to make it a viable. Case in point, the fact you are reading about it on hn.

notorandit 2y ago

It's not Microsoft being careless about CAs. That's been made on purpose by them to comply with some request in order to keep a slice of their market.

ikekkdcjkfke 2y ago

How do i remove this CA from windows and Edge?

b800h 2y ago

Can anyone tell me which CA is used by Open Banking in Brazil? The infrastructure is heavily based on PKI. I assume it's not this one?

meiraleal 2y ago
Yes, ICP-Brasil is responsible for that too.

ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago

@dang Can we update the link to the original source? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934361 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934361

motbus3 2y ago

You care about google? Look at those links, they are loaded with critical government stuff. Omg

MattPalmer1086 2y ago

Things like this make me wonder why certificates are not also signed by the certificate owner. Right now, a CA can issue a certificate for any public key and domain they like. A rogue trusted CA can intercept all traffic. If a certificate also included a signature by the owner of the public key signed by the CA (using their private key, signed over the CA signature), then a CA would no longer have this ability. What am I missing?

3np 2y ago
> What am I missing? Infrastructure and processes for key distribution and revocation. Reusing the existing PKI infrastructure used for CA trust roots won't handle it. Perhaps public keys/certs could be distributed over DNS, like for DANE (or maybe even using DANE)? Not saying it can't be done, just to point out how it's not trivial and requires buy-in from incumbents across the ecosystem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na... I like your general idea of improving the status quo by adding decentralized/self-managed trust on top of/alongside the existing centralized PKI. Could be a stepping stone towards something more systematically resilient.
- MattPalmer1086 2y ago
  Oh sure, any change to X.509 certs would require a lot of change. I'm not sure it would make much difference to most of the existing PKI infrastructure though. CAs wouldn't see any difference. For example, currently this is what happens: 1. Owner: generate CSR and send to CA 2. CA: validates owner identity, signs cert and returns cert to owner. All we would then add is: 3. Owner: signs cert with own private key and uses it. As far as I can see, the only other changes required would be to clients (so they could reject non owner signed certs), and maybe some revocation stuff.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    This doesn't make sense to me. What would you be trying to prove/show with step 3? How would it be different from the status quo?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ellan46 2y ago

[flagged]

ParadisoShlee 2y ago

[flagged]

0xbadcafebee 2y ago

Lol. "This is pretty bad. Someone circunvented the ban on emitting public certificates but also disrespected Google's CAA rules. Hope this CA gets banned on Microsoft OSes for good." Yeah, this is after the certificate was issued, and my guess, used. Also, has anyone tried to look up CT logs lately? I tried. Can get maybe a single FQDN if you look, but trying to do wildcards or name-alikes, nothing worked. Most of the CT searching websites were straight up broken. Clearly nobody is actually looking at CT logs. CAs are a joke. There's a dozen different ways to exploit them, they are exploited, and we only find out after the fact, if it's a famous enough domain. We could fix it but nobody gives a shit. Just apathy and BAU.

AceJohnny2 2y ago
> We could fix it but nobody gives a shit. Just apathy and BAU. We really can't fix it. You try and coordinate updates across all major (and most minor, and outdated) OSs, and websites around the world, amateur & professional, from the mom-and-pop store who don't understand any of this, to the big bank that'll take 3 years of procedure. I have friends who work in the CA field (on the OS side). The level of alcoholism and turnover in the field is... higher than average.
- doubled112 2y ago
  Relative to all professions or relative to just IT/tech?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
numbsafari 2y ago
Wildcards work on crt.sh: https://crt.sh/?q=%25.ycombinator.com https://crt.sh/?q=%25.ycombinator.com
- numbsafari 2y ago
  Just wanting to add to my own comment... crt.sh allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed for wildcard searches. We map those into a slack channel for infrastructure advisory alerts. You can also setup more aggressive alerts if something shows up unexpectedly. It's an incredibly handy service.

alwayslikethis 2y ago

I wonder why Brazil has their CA trusted by Microsoft in the first place, while Kazakhstan [1], for example, wasn't. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle_a...

kurthr 2y ago
The Brazilian government buys windows licenses in bulk.

deleted 2y ago

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