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Comment by dm2 | Hacker News Reader

I do not recommend StartSSL.

Their $25 fee for revocation during the Heartbleed situation left many of their users who could not pay their fee vulnerable to attack. During these extenuating circumstances you would expect them to offer the revocation for a discounted price or even free, but they did not. I did not have any certificates registered with them and am very glad I didn't.

I imagine that there are a huge amount of StartSSL users who cannot pay the $25 per certificate and have no choice but to leave their server vulnerable. This was pure short-sighted greed on the part of StartSSL.

I'd strongly recommend https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates/comodo.a... It's a great price and their support has been excellent in my experience. If you have an open source project then the GlobalSign free certificate is hard to beat.

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just to add to this, as well as not waiving the fee for their freely issued certificates, StartCom (Eddy Nigg) also refused to waive it for his long-term paying customers.

I grudgingly paid the revocation fees, and now they've lost my business now forever, as they essentially held the security of my domains to ransom for a quick buck.

The business model of StartSSL seems to be rather simple:

You pay as soon as a human being's work (or other substantial effort) is necessary.

With regard to revocation, I do not understand the complaints since the deal with StartSSL was pretty clear and revocation does not work in practice anyway. That does, however, NOT mean that a server has to remain vulnerable, just get another certificate …

Is it really fair to call them customers? They didn't want to pay anything.

Sometimes you do say users, but other times you say customers.

Users is definitely the more appropriate word, I was purposely trying to refrain from saying customers because of the specific reason you mentioned.

Converting users into paying customers is very important, and forcing a fee during an emergency is not a recommended way to obtain loyal customers.

The $25 fee is a bad move but if you don't revoke your old (compromised) certificate, new connections would still be secure if you switched certificate, correct?

It's still possible for a MITM to use the old certificate.

No they wouldn't, because the MITM attacker would simply use the old one. And the user wouldn't know. That's why the old one needs to be revoked.

If they cannot afford $25 to revoke and change out their SSL certificate I doubt they are protecting very sensitive information.

I'm using StartSSL just because I hadn't any excuses to answer the question "why not?" and they were the best looking (free, reasonably usable, trusted enough) option on the market.

They offer unlimited free certificates, so, naturally, I've issued one per service (they even encourage that with "web server"/"xmpp server" certificate distinction). I.e., a separate one for mail server, a separate one for HTTP server, a separate one for XMPP server and so on. Naturally, I expected that it's more likely for one service to break (i.e., say, for nginx to have some buffer overflow that'd allow extracting the keys) than all of them, like it was the case with Heartbleed.

That means, revocation would cost me not $25, but $600. Can't afford that.

Luckily, the most sensitive information I protect are my own emails, 99% of which are spam and service notifications.

Using NameCheap above instead would cost you $200/year, instead of $0/year + $600 for a black swan event. "Replace ALL your SSL certificate" events seem to happen less often than once every three years.

Wildcard certs cost $60/year, protect everything on one certificate with free reissues and revocation, and cheap rekeying (which was an option for heartbleed recovery). I would rather pay the "SSL racket" (as StartSSL would put it) to get real service and help than use a free cert from them. StartSSL is permanently removed from all my truststores following heartbleed

this is a reasonable argument, except it's generally considered best practise not to share private keys across servers (most CAs explicitly forbid this in their deeply buried policy files), which also rules out wildcards.

StartCom is appealing as they'll issue as many certificates as you want for a one-off fee.

so I had protected my service against parts of it being compromised, but then I was screwed over completely by heartbleed.

50 certs? that'll be $1250

Most CA's is not true. Globalsign offers free unlimited servers, so does Comodo and Gandi. The only CA that really limits on servers is Symantec.

I think drdaeman meant _certificates_ and not _servers_. One certificate can be used on multiple servers, but you can't create multiple certificates “for free“ on Comodo,Gandi or GlobalSSL. You're charged for every cert.

I'm using StartSSL verified, it costed me 99$ (personal verification) plus 99$ (company certification), and I can create any certificate I want, at any time, valid for two years and wildcard included.

Since my company provides custom subdomains for clients, and every client can have multiple subdomains on his own subdomain, we can't afford the price for every client. (I know we should charge them, but this issue is out of my hand).

The 25$ revocation fee sucks, yeah.. but StartSSL has his advantages too.

(edit: typo.)

Ah. Digicert offers what you want with their wild cards, FYI.

That is a terrible reason not to recommend StartSSL. They were under no obligation to offer revocation for free. If $25 is that much a problem you probably shouldn't be trying to run a secure server anyways.

> If $25 is that much a problem you probably shouldn't be trying to run a secure server anyways.

That is a terrible reason to recommend against SSL.

The parent comment recommended StartSSL, I was simply stating my opinion of the company and informing people that there is a catch when using their service.

If you obtain a free certificate then $25 per certificate probably is an issue, especially since there is no guarantee that this won't happen again in the near future.

Many people probably have several subdomains which needed certificates, $25 per subdomain can add up quickly if you have several.

No, they were not obligated to offer revocation for free, but a significantly discounted price would have allowed a much larger percentage of people to revoke their certificates. It's not too much different than extortion, since many people who obtain free certificates are not aware of the possibility of the need to revoke a certificate, then they are basically screwed when they are forced to either pay up or have their server left insecure.

Hypothetical Situation: If I start a free SSL cert service and put in my terms that there is a $1,000 revocation fee, would that be acceptable? Many people would signup without thinking they would never need to revoke a certificate, then another Heartbleed-like situation occurs and many of your users have servers that are at risk without revocation, would it be acceptable to say, "Oh well, pay up or else someone could hack your servers".

Also its a terrible business model, unless you have a side job finding openssl vulnerabilities. Its just a windfall not predictable revenue.

My main issue was the way they responded to their users: https://twitter.com/startssl/status/453631038883758080

StartSSL exploited their customers during a time of crisis (yes, servers leaking private information is a crisis) and they deserve the negative PR they are receiving from it.

Many people have even been proposing that StartSSL be removed from the trusted CA lists included with OSs and browsers since so many StartSSL certificates will remain unrevoked, and there is a valid point to that.

I'm sorry but how is their server left unsecure when they can simply begin rejecting the old certificate on their server?

The private key could have been stolen any time during that the heartbleed vulnerability has been present on the server (~2 years).

This would allow for a MITM attack which would obtain user credentials and unauthorized access to a server.

Since the attack isn't recorded it's unknown if it was used extensively before it was made public. The time between announcement and patching was likely significant enough for the potential of someone stealing the private key during that period as well.

This is also why re-using the same private key for the new certificate is a bad idea.

Think about the wide variety of sites that would use a free SSL certificate that might not have the funds for revocation. Almost every site I've ever seen has had people try to hack it.

There is a fairly decent chance that a very small site would not have someone steal it's private key, but it's hard to make that assumption, that's why every site about Heartbleed suggests revocation of the old certificates.

Why not just regenerate a key and get a new cert? Why revoke the old one if all your services will just reject it? I mean, you can do it just to be sure you don't make a mistake. But beyond this why?

I don't think you understand. There is no way to tell your users' browsers to reject the bad cert other than revocation.

yeah I'm not sure why you need to make the BROWSER reject the bad cert, when your server can reject it -- what are you trying to avoid?

You're trying to avoid Mallory setting up her own evil server with the old cert that she stole via heartbleed and pretending to be you.

Because the BROWSER is what's being attacked in a MiTM. To the server it just looks like a regular client connecting. It never sees the certificate the client saw. There is nothing for the server to reject.

The attack being described here goes like this:

1. Attacker steals the private key via heartbleed or other means

2. Attacker sets up their own server using the stolen private key

3. Attacker tricks a user into accessing their server rather than the real server via any of a number of methods, such as a compromised hotspot.

4. User provides their sensitive information to the attacker, thinking they're on the real site.

No server-side action can mitigate the risk of a stolen private key in the above scenario, since the user never communicates with the legitimate server. That said, most browsers ship with certificate revocation lists disabled by default, so revoking the certificate doesn't help nearly as many people as we'd like. But for people who do enable CRLs, they'll see the scary warning rather than their browser trusting the revoked cert.

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