Some more amusing anecdotes from the world of PKI: - A standard type of fraud that's been around for awhile is for scammers to set up an online presence for a legit offline business, which appears to check out when someone tries to verify it. A more recent variation on this is to buy certs for legit businesses. One of these certs was traced back by a security researcher who found that the scammers had obtained it through the incredibly devious trick of shopping round commercial CAs until they found one that was prepared to sell them a certificate.
- In a repeat of the original race to the bottom with non-EV certs, CA's have issued EV certs for RFC 1918 addresses (!!!). What makes this particularly entertaining is that in combination with a router warkitting attack and Moxie Marlinspike's OCSP faking it allows an attacker to spoof any EV-cert site. - The list of people who have bought certificates for Apple from commercial CAs keeps on growing (I guess Microsoft is just so five minutes ago :-). For example one SMTP admin needed a cert for his server and wondered what would happen if he asked for one for *.apple.com instead of his actual domain name. $100 and a cursory check later he had a wildcard cert for Apple. At least two more users have reported buying certificates for Apple, and there are probably even more lurking out there - if you too have a certificate from a certificate vending machine saying that you're Apple, do get in touch - There's malware out there that pokes fake Verisign certificates into the Windows trusted cert store, allowing the malware authors to be their own Verisign. - CAs have issued certs to cybercrime web sites like https://www.pay-per-install.com (an affiliate program for malware installers), because hey, the Russian mafia's money is as good as anyone else's. - One of the most important things a CA needs to manage is certificate serial numbers, because the combination { CA name, cert serial number } is a unique identifier used in lots of security protocols to identify certs. Without this uniqueness, you can't tell who signed something, you can't revoke a cert, you can't... well, you get the idea. Not only have commercial CAs issued certs with duplicate serial numbers, they've issued *CA certs* with duplicate serial numbers. Ouch! (When this was pointed out to the CA who did this - "oops, my bad, we'll get those re-issued for you" - someone else pointed out that their OCSP responder certs had expired, which none of the CA's clients appeared to have noticed until then. "Yeah, we'll look into fixing those too. Anything else while we're at it?"). If anyone has any further amusing PKI stories, please get in touch, I'd love to add a Part IV to this series. Peter. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com