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Hotmail, Live, Outlook, and Bing Connection Errors, and Browser Security

posted by on Wednesday May 31 2017, @06:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the hiring-an-unpaid-intern-is-hard-work dept.

Bing.com OCSP certificate expires: how pathetic is that?

lgsoynews writes:

For over 8 hours now, when trying to access Bing.com, you'll get a warning about their OCSP certificate (message from Firefox):

An error occurred during a connection to www.bing.com. Invalid OCSP signing certificate in OCSP response. Error code: SEC_ERROR_OCSP_INVALID_SIGNING_CERT

How pathetic is that? I mean, companies such as Microsoft are so big; don't tell me they don't have the human & technical knowledge to manage their certificates. Even an intern could write some kind of tool to ensure a warning is sent beforehand!

It's embarrassing that something that simple (cert & domain expiration) is still a frequent problem, and for BIG tech companies too!

Palemoon: Hotmail, Live, Outlook and Bing connection errors, and our security.

An Anonymous Coward writes with an update from the Pale Moon dev team:

Today, our users started seeing connectivity errors when trying to connect to most Microsoft on-line services like Hotmail, Onedrive, Outlook, Microsoft Live, and even the https version of the Bing search engine. The culprit? misconfigured servers on Microsoft's side, specifically their so-called "stapled OCSP responses".

Now, this gets technical rather quickly, so a quick summary of what this is all about:
[...]
What happened is that servers for the domains mentioned did not use the correct certificate chain to sign their stapled OCSP responses. As a result, connections to the related https servers started to fail. But, notably, only from browsers using NSS (like Pale Moon and Firefox). Chrome didn't complain (more on that later). Edge was apparently also fine, but I haven't looked into why that is, myself.

From a browser's point of view, this should be considered (very) bad, because it looks like some other party (not being the authority that issued the certificate) is trying to tell the browser that a certificate isn't revoked. This party could be an attacker that is trying to use a revoked (mis-issued) certificate, for example.

Now, considering all browsers can be expected to support stapled responses, this highlighted a rather disturbing security issue with mainstream browsers: Apparently, only Pale Moon and Firefox (and rebuilds) are doing the correct thing.

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15823

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2017, @05:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2017, @05:04PM (#518377)

    Firefox's shrill hissy fit over seeing self-signed certificates is indeed certifiable.

    Try Skip Cert Error [mozilla.org] for saner behavior, though it's still recommended to keep notifications active so you know that "something was unusual" with the certificate.

    Since HTTPS is effectively broken as governments can demand valid signed keys from Certificate Authorities, actual solutions to the problem are mentioned at youbroketheinternet.org - many of the solutions are still being developed.