Embedding improper SCTs into OCSP Responses (SwissSign)

1. How your CA first became aware of the problem (e.g. via a problem report 
submitted to your Problem Reporting Mechanism, a discussion in 
mozilla.dev.security.policy, a Bugzilla bug, or internal self-audit), and the 
time and date.

On November 16th, 2017 SwissSign was informed by Brendan McMillion, Cloudflare, 
about “Embedding improper SCTs into OCSP Responses” and the discussion in 
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/certificate-transparency/Ydoetykx3UA/mZeKOOYhBAAJ
 regarding this issue.


2. A timeline of the actions your CA took in response. A timeline is a 
date-and-time-stamped sequence of all relevant events. This may include events 
before the incident was reported, such as when a particular requirement became 
applicable, or a document changed, or a bug was introduced, or an audit was 
done.

November 16th, 2017 
SwissSign has validated this problem (Cloudflare and Chrome / Chromium) and we 
can confirm it. In addition, we analyzed the combination of apache Webserver 
and Chrome / Chromium and discovered that this combination worked well and did 
not show invalid SCTs in Chrome.

The analysis of the underlying cause showed that currently all SCTs of a 
pre-certificate and SCTs of a certificate are stored in the same database and 
our OCSP-responder uses this database. So our OCSP responder also embeds 
pre-certificate SCTs, if they are present.


3. Whether your CA has stopped, or has not yet stopped, issuing certificates 
with the problem. A statement that you have will be considered a pledge to the 
community; a statement that you have not requires an explanation.

This problem is not related to a misuse of a certificate or a certificate 
format error. Therefore, we will not stop issuing certificates.


4. A summary of the problematic certificates. For each problem: number of 
certs, and the date the first and last certs with that problem were issued.

Since the introduction of the CT pre-certificates on March 20th, 2017, we have 
identified 120 potential candidates for the problem description which must now 
be analyzed in detail. Most of our customers order their SSL certificates 
without pre-certificates since SwissSign requires the use of OCSP stapling in 
the subscriber agreement. Up to now we are only aware of one certificate with 
this problem description:
3B426A5F18498B1F79E2CF54CBBC03758BAD775E


5. The complete certificate data for the problematic certificates. The 
recommended way to provide this is to ensure each certificate is logged to CT 
and then list the fingerprints or crt.sh IDs, either in the report or as an 
attached spreadsheet, with one list per distinct problem.

The affected certificate is logged in the CT Log.

6. Explanation about how and why the mistakes were made or bugs introduced, and 
how they avoided detection until now.

The OCSP-stapling method was our first CT-Log implementation. Later we added 
the X.509v3 extension method. Our test suite regarding the “X.509v3 extension 
method” was focused on the correct certificate format. In our test scenarios 
with the apache web-server the reported error from Cloudflare did not occur.

7. List of steps your CA is taking to resolve the situation and ensure such 
issuance will not be repeated in the future, accompanied with a timeline of 
when your CA expects to accomplish these things.

Our development team is analyzing the solution and we are convinced that by 
release 4.10 at the latest (production rollout January 13th, 2018) this problem 
will be solved. We are currently assessing a workaround for the impacted 
customer and seeing if it would be possible to apply it before the release.
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