Fri Oct 8 13:34:11 PDT 2010
Today I received an interesting call from a well-known Signing CA. One of my SSL certificates was soon to expire, and they called looking for my business. I spoke with them briefly, genuinely interested in their service, and the sales rep hung up on me when I asked a specific question.
You see, certificate authorities (CAs) have “sales spiders” that crawl the web looking for soon-to-expire certificates to renew using a competing CA. There are many out there, and I expressed some of the challenges with Trust on the Internet in my previous post.
When the CA called the first time, I barely missed the call, and immediately called the number back, not knowing who had called. I introduced myself politely and was greeted politely by the the CA sales rep. I could hear the call-center chatter of keyboards and whisper of voices in the background. He explained to me how certificates work, why you would want one from the CA, and I learned something interesting: It is much easier to get a root-signing certificate than I had thought.
There are (depending on who you ask) three “levels” of trust in certificates:
- Domain Validation (DV)
- Organization Validation (OV)
- Extended Validation (EV)
The Padlock: Domain Validation simply verifies that the certificate presented by a server to which you connect. This is the least intensive validation, and also the least expensive. They simply make sure that an email address at that domain (like admin@example.com) can validate that the domain exists, and that the person requesting the SSL certificate actually manages the domain.
The Gold Padlock: Organization Validation is a bit more intense, and you must submit your business entity record (eg, Articles of Incorporation) for verification. The sales rep informed me that some phishing sites have managed to get the “Gold Padlock OV validation” and that one really needs an EV certificate to be trusted on the Internet.
The Green Bar and Padlock: According to the the CA Sales rep, for extended validation, they actually pull a Dunn & Bradstreet report (which costs $45 from D&B) and verify your entities existence, external to the business registration papers that you might submit (depending on the CA) for the OV version of a certificate. This is the certificate the the CA rep wished to sell.
So I asked if the CA issues root-signing certificates, to which he did not understand and began talking about code signing certificates (which are similar, but completely unrelated). When he paused for a moment, I asked again, explaining what I meant: “No”, I said, “I mean—do you offer a root-signing services such that you would offer a signed intermediate ceritificate for large organizations to sign domain names for their organization?”
There was a pause.
He mumbled something to pass time and I heard the clatter of fingers on a keyboard which could only be an uncertain sales rep quickly looking for an answer by posting a question on a sales-rep “IRC” channel for “silently” asking questions of the guys that know the answers when he does not have one himself.
After another moment, he said that intermediate root-signing certificates are available for a $20,000 deposit.
“Great!”, I said, “and what form of validation do you perform to guarantee that the recipient is who they say they are? Is it a more intense validation than the EV validation?” “No, no”, he said: “Intermediate root-signing certificates are only audited at the OV level, perhaps a bit more—but not as intense as the EV”.
So I said: “doesn’t that mean that anyone with $20,000 can get a root-signing certificate and sign what they wish?” He agreed, but said “if they have $20,000 they must be a serious business”. I pushed on: “So, any institution could ‘deposit’ $20,000 for an intermediate signing certificate—that the CA would verify—and that institution could then sign any certificate with any name, effectively enabling a man-in-the-middle attack for any domain?—–
hello?—–hello?—-”
Not even a click. He was gone. I dialed the number back (remember he quickly answered last time) and found some pretty string quartet hold music, but no recording except after 5 minutes, a place to leave your phone number; I did, and I do not expect a call back. Fascinating!
A thought to ponder for the reader: Can EV domains be trusted more than OV domains when an OV-validated intermediate-signed certificate can forge EV certificates? I suspect they can, but I would like to be proven wrong.
-Eric