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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

I have comodo ssl certificates just because they are cheap but when I see how bad they fuck up anything that has to do with security (like their chromodo browser), I wonder if I shouldn't have bought shorter dated certificates. At this pace it is bound that they lose their root certificate sooner or later.

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If you're comfortable with the tools around it I'd highly recommend looking into LetsEncrypt[1]. Doesn't cost you a thing either.

[1]: https://letsencrypt.org

Yes I believe these are also domain based SSL certs. Not really offering security and I doubt insurance but, they are free.

Just curious, has anyone on HN ever successfully claimed money from SSL certificate insurance?

I doubt these CA can write insurance contracts themselves without being a regulated insurance company so they must legally have an external insurance. I would be curious to know how much they are paying on this contract.

The insurance bit is forced selling of an unwanted product. I am sure that 99% of certificate buyers do not need more insurance from their certificate provider than they need it from their hosting company, or the developers of Apache and OpenSSL.

Insurance is for if someone suffers losses because a valid certificate was issued to someone it shouldn't have been.

They offer the exact level of security any other SSL certificate provider offers.

Thanks to the ridiculousness that is the CAs system, Comodo losing their root cert private key is nuclear meltdown regardless if you are their customer or not. Browsers trust Comodo, if an attacker MITMs a client connecting to your site and presents a cert signed by Comodo, that will be accepted (unless the client previously visited your site and your site uses HKPK, but I think that's discouraged/broken for some reason, since I'm not seeing it on popular sites?).

I think cm2187 was referring to the CA death penalty with the "lose their cert" reference. ie, Browsers decide to reject Comodo CAs from their trust store.

One would hope that losing control of HSM-stored crypto material is improbable, regardless of other questionable security practices.

I believe cheap Comodo SSL certs are domain based and subject to DNS hijack aren't they? If so they shouldn't be considered all that secure for websites that have customers and need to be secure.

The CA system, for better or worse, doesn't work that way. Even if your cert is not from a domain-validating CA, that doesn't prevent the attacker from getting a cert from them. And I'd bet that pretty much all root CAs are domain-validating these days.

If by "DNS hijacking" you mean seizing control over the account with the registrar to change the delegation, or the legitimate DNS servers, I don't think there's a strong reason to worry about that more than someone seizing control of your account with your SSL provider, or your webserver, respectively. (It's possible to secure the former two at least as strongly as the latter two.) If by "DNS hijacking" you mean attacks on the unauthenticated DNS protocol, CAs are sort of supposed to query DNS from multiple locations to defeat that, although I don't think there's a strong rule about this. I'm not sure what Comodo's and Let's Encrypt's specific practices are.

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