Skip to main content

New Trust Solutions

With the all of the activity circling around SSL certs and CA trust, there is an inherent trust problem.  Internet users have been taught to trust the PKI scheme that we use for all secure browsing activity.  There are two very valid cases for the destruction of this trust:

1.  Law-enforcement / Government interception.  There are product vendors whose business model is to supply equipment to law enforcement and government clients which can "law-fully" intercept communications without the knowledge of the end-user.  Example is www.packetforensics.com.  Although I do not have a link (can anyone supply a corroborating link?), there are several product pages that are not publicly accessible which would likely confirm this fact.  In order for these products to work, the SSL certs that are used would have to be trusted by the browser software to avoid being detected as un-trusted.  I am theorizing that these certs would be generated by one of the trusted roots within the existing trust-model.

2.  Compromised CAs.  Both Comodo and Diginotar both purport to have been compromised resulting in the generation of certificates that can be used to emulate the trust with popular web properties.  To the end user there is no easy way to differentiate between valid and invalid certs.

The impact here is that a user may think that all information is secured between them and the server, but in reality this traffic may be routed through a very-untrusted 3rd party and intercepted.  We currently have no effective tool to provide information to users that any activity like this has occurred.  So for the mean time we should be very vigilant about who we are communicating with, and the certificates that are used to trust their identities.

I also encourage and hope that we see some innovative solutions created that will allow users to be aware of changes to traffic patterns - indicating potential MITM, and new methods of generating trust in web-services like convergence http://convergence.io/.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

OpenSolaris, ZFS, iSCSI and OSX - Creative Storage - Part II

In part I of this post, I looked at the simple steps required to setup a relatively simple storage solution using OpenSolaris, ZFS, iSCSI and OSX. This was about a month ago, and I've made some significant changes on how this is used for me. At the end of the last post I left off on the part dealing with configuration of the iSCSI initiator side of the solution. I stopped here because there were some issues related to the installation and use of the software. The iSCSI initiator that I was using was Studio Network Solutions GlobalSAN initiator (version 3.3.0.43) which is used to allow for connections to their products. This software will also allow for connections to ANY iSCSI target! After the configuration of the iSCSI target on the ZFS pool, and installation of the client it was trivial to get the connection established with the storage pool, and it showed up in OSX as a raw disk which had not been formatted. I proceeded to format the disk as HFS+ and it then mounted as a lo

Local Classified Penny Auction Scam

While there are a lot of new posts regarding the new ways to exploit people using novel techniques and 0day exploits, there continues to be a rash of tried and true methods of coercion.  I want to just walk through a simple example and reflect on how effective these methods continue to be. Many people turn toward online classified sites to buy and sell items online.  This example starts with kijiji.ca which even I've used on occasion to find used electronics and other items.  Doing a search on the site for a " Samsung Galaxy Note 2 " returns a posting from today with someone selling one for an unreasonably priced unit. $125 for a $500 phone?, but what if it's for real?  No harm in just asking some simple questions.  Email sent with some obvious questions regarding the condition and location. About an hour passes before I get a response from what appears to be a legit seller. Notice no answer to the questions I asked, but a friendly pointer at where th

Edmonton HeartBleed Information Session - April 16th, Royal Glenora Club

Since the latest major OpenSSL vulnerability was publicly disclosed, many people and organizations are scrambling to understand, respond and prepare themselves for the future.  Twitter, vendor support channels and media outlets have been quick to cover different angles of the issue but there has been overwhelming amount  of information released. With all this information, it can be difficult to understand what's relevant.  To help clarify we holding a special ISACA sponsored 2-hour session on Wednesday, April 16th, starting at 12:00pm at the Royal Glenora Club.   Benoit and I will be attempting to explain as much of the issue as we can from a technical and non-technical perspective, discussing the vulnerability, its scope with relation to our personal and professional lives and other related concerns such as our trust in the public PKI system.  The second hour we will be an interactive discussion about how others are dealing with problem, questions about related topics,