The comment by Phill Hallam-Baker at the end of the article was the best part!
> The system we built in the 90s would have protected against this attack.
Is "the system" the human to human EV certificate process? There were so many obvious and awful social and technical engineering holes in that process that I find it hard to believe anyone would defend it?
Certificate expiration was always a danger. There was a single technical contact that could be spoofed or just walk away with the private key. The wider web audience never noticed the EV annotation, and basic human factors tells you they never would. Heck, we can't get people to notice HTTP downgrade attacks. The only protection is TLS everywhere - which never would be possible with slow and expensive authorization methods.
(I suppose it was good business for Verisign though...)
Rather the conclusion should've been that the browser gives the user a warning when attempting to submit information to a website that doesn't have an EV security certificate.
Or at the very least allow websites to use HSTS to prevent downgrading an EV certificate.
Sometimes, the alternative to companies paying hundreds of dollars per year is customers losing millions.
Not every building needs to implement the security measures of Fort Knox. That doesn't mean that the security measures in-place at Fort Knox shouldn't exist.
It's a weird combination of inspiring and humbling at the same time. Inspiring to think that this massive ecosystem of interconnected computers was actually made by real people, and humbling because yeah, I should get off the damn grass.
What I often find most valuable from these kinds of comments is the fact that these risks were acknowledged and either accounted for in the original specs, even if in a flawed manner, or explicitly discounted as being out of scope.
What I take away from the comment on the article is that from a security perspective "we're not there yet" even if the cryptocurrency technology is useful, widely adopted, and frankly not going away.
I don't think his issue is that cryptocurrency exists, or is being used widely on the world-wide web, but rather that underlying technologies (DNS/HTTPS/PKI) are being taken for granted and used in a manner that they weren't originally designed for.
Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, is expensive bits issued by a non-trusted third party.
I don’t see how you can be bullish on the first without being bullish on the second, yet I can see how being bullish on the second can mean bearish on the first. Solutions involving no TTP are better than solutions involving TTP.
I like PHB and he has done great things in the field of cryptography. His belief in centralization of public key systems for security runs counter to the cypherpunks who want to decentralize everything despite the costs.
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*TTP Transactions*
When transactions are brokered through a TTP such as via swiping a credit card at Walmart. The transaction is then brokered by Visa, Mastercard, et. al. who retains the ability to reconcile various types of disputes & fraudulent transactions after the fact with minimal loss of money. At any point the central authority can technically reverse charges without the consent of either originating party.
My non-expert, "educated layman's" understanding is secure online digital communication was designed with the express intent of being used in this kind of scenario. You have a number of transactions of which some non-zero quantity are fradulent, relying on the affected parties to initiate some kind of arbitrage via the trusted third party. Prior to crypto, very few (if any) transactions performed online were irreversible economic transactions requiring *full trust* in the security of the communication channel to mitigate fraudulent transactions. Which brings me to what I believe to be his primary point of contention, putting gripes about specific decisions and technologies aside...
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*Non-TTP Transactions*
Crypto currencies that require zero-trust in a third-party have no(?) mechanism with which to mitigate fraud.
That means your entire chain of communication, from physical layer all the way up to end-user, must be hardened against forms of irrecoverable tampering, that would otherwise be a recoverable nuisance in a TTP model.
As one of the engineers who designed & put into place a large part of the security around the communication channel being used PHB appears to be taking offense to the assertion that this exploit was due to a flaw in "the web's" security.
Simply put, it was never designed to be the first and final layer of defense against fraudulent activity, and if we want crypto currency to be 'the future' we should walk in the path of our predecessors and design a communication stack that explicitly addresses the concerns of being used for non-TTP transactions.
We need to harden the stack at all layers, as many components were not explicitly defined to protect under the zero trust model, especially with the exploitable financial incentives that could not have existed before. Thank you, I feel your insight has helped strengthen my understanding too.