Hacker News Reader

Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

We would still know if certs were issued, though, which is the thing we want to check

How would you know it? If the CA was compromised, why would the attacker publish the fake certificates in CT?

Basically no one outside the major browsers verifies CT logs, so you can still attack a lot of people even without publishing.

The baddies also take a look at the CT logs and look for fresh wordpress instances that haven't yet been configured and will helpfully configure them for you within a few minutes.

We wouldn’t.

CAs publish to CT logs. If an attacker has the private key, nothing stops them from signing certs without the involvement of the CA or CT logs.

Nothing stops them from doing so, but major browsers and possibly other programs won't trust such certificates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency#Manda...

Yes but a lot of non-browser software doesn't check CT logs, so if an attacker were to target such software they could use an unlogged cert and no one would notice.

This is why there are OS trust stores. Electron - if you use the system CA [0] and cURL[1] apps use it, which are you talking about?

[0]: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/45674

[1]: https://curl.se/docs/sslcerts.html

The CT log is a property of the individual leaf certificate not a property of the issuing chain. You could have the same CA in the trust store issue an unlogged certificate and non browsers would trust it.

A CT log isn't super relevant (it's not the CRL, it's just a log), but it's maintained/delivered by the CA not the leaf. Never the leaf.

If you mean CRL/Revocation list, everything but the root [you can't revoke a root] is maintained by the tier above. Leaf -> intermediate (these), [Intermediate -> Intermediate*], Intermediate -> Root.

Not sure why you're mentioning transparency logs, they have nothing to do with this (nor help).

Because the thread: "a lot of non-browser software doesn't check CT logs", you replied saying it's a reason to use the OS trust store, not sure how that fixes things? Maybe it would relieve them of the responsibility of pushing out a distrust update?

That's not what woodruff is talking about (I hope). The CT logs allow us to (later) find who/why it happened. CT Logs in no way help you stop something. (Depends a bit on how software reacts to apparently invalid issuance - but since these have the real keys the issuance will look normal).

Revocation lists allow you to stop/block bad issues. Both are maintained/decided (you could post to another service) by the issuer, not the leaf. CRL records would stop this (but some software has decided that's too slow). In general software uses the OS trust-store first (fragmented on Linux). Firefox and Java have their own independent paths. Chrome ignores CRLs

CT logs only tell you something happened if the certificate was registered in the log. But if you are attacking software that doesn't check if the cert was registered, then you don't need to register the cert, and there won't be anything in the log.

My point is you can forge a cert, without putting it in the log, and a lot of software will still be vulnerable to it.

Curl does not check that certificates have a valid SCT attached. Thus it will accept a certificate that isn't in the CT logs. That's mostly independent of the OS trust stores.

No we wouldn’t.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com