I feel that there's a great deal of consultancy and assistance that CAs and PKI professionals could bring to their more sophisticated customers with scenarios such as these where public key pinning an a field-deployed application may present problems for certificates being revoked.
A best practices document explaining to the application developers and server-side teams that: 1. An app which calls a server-side API under your control should _always_ do so on a TLS endpoint at a different hostname & SNI label than any browser-facing websites. 2. Following step 1's guidance means that you can control the lifecycle of the certificate for the services accessed by your own application(s) separate from WebPKI facing certificates meant to facilitate a TLS authenticated session to a modern browser. 3. It also means that the endpoints serving the application CAN but don't have to be from a publicly trusted PKI. For compatibility reasons, they generally should be, if there are any external consumers of the API, but ultimately if their own application wishes to PIN, they should pre-create several certificates with distinct keys and write their app to override the platform trust decisioning and pin on the set of keys that their API endpoint certificates will have, ignoring revocation and requiring that the presented leaf certificate be a signature over one of the set of pinned public keys. This is essentially free in virtually all deployment models today. Oversubscribing TLS endpoints (for our purposes let's say a DNS based hostname and TLS SNI label define a TLS endpoint) for different target audiences, especially when those audiences are modern browsers in combination with anything else, is one of the most significant causes of compatibility issues and legacy cruft which have historically hindered the agility of the WebPKI. On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 10:12 AM Nuno Ponte via dev-security-policy < [email protected]> wrote: > Dear m.d.s.p., > > I would like to bring into discussion the use of certificate/public key > pinning and the impacts on the 5-days period for certificate revocation > according to BR §4.9.1.1. > > Recently, we (Multicert) had to rollout a general certificate replacement > due to the serial number entropy issue. Some of the most troubled cases to > replace the certificates were customers doing certificate pinning on mobile > apps. Changing the certificate in these cases required configuration > changes in the code base, rebuild app, QA testing, submission to App > stores, call for expedited review of each App store, wait for review to be > completed and only then the new app version is made available for > installation by end users (which is turn are required to update the app the > soonest). > > Meeting the 5-days deadline with this sort of process is “challenging”, at > best. > > A first approach is to move from certificate pinning to public key pinning > (PKP). This prevents the need to update the app in many of the certificate > replacement operations, where the public key is reused and the certificate > can be replaced transparently to the app (generically, an “User Agent” > doing PKP). > > However, in the event of a serious security incident that requires re-key > (such as key compromise), the certificate must be revoked in less than 24 > hours (for the benefit of everyone – subscriber, relying parties, issuing > CA, etc). It’s virtually impossible to release a new app version within > this timeframe. And this, I think, make a very strong point against the use > of PKI. > > On the other side, PKP is a simple yet powerful and effective technique to > protect against MITM and other attacks. It seems to be widely used in apps > with advanced threat models (mobile banking, sensitive personal > information, etc) and there are many frameworks available (including native > support in Android via Network Security Configuration [1]). > > There are several possible mitigation actions, such as pinning more than > one public key to have more than one certificate to quickly rollover in > case of a revocation. Even then, it is very likely that all the redundant > key pairs were generated and maintained by the same systems and procedures, > and thus all of them will become effectively compromised. > > Ultimately, it may become common practice that 1) PKP frameworks are set > to bypass revocation checks or 2) PKP is done with private certificates > (homemade, self-signed, managed ad-hoc with no CRL/OCSP services). Does any > of this leads to a safer Internet? > > I don’t expect this thread to end up into an absolute conclusion > advocating for or against, but opening it to discussion and contributions > may help to document possible strategies, mitigations, alternatives, pros & > cons, and hopefully provide guidance for an educated decision. > > Best regards, > > Nuno Ponte > Multicert SA > > [1] https://developer.android.com/training/articles/security-config > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > dev-security-policy mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy > _______________________________________________ dev-security-policy mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy
