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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Let’s Encrypt said it will give users of its Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates more time to replace 1 million certificates that are still active and potentially affected by a Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) bug before it revokes them.
The popular free certificate authority had given users until Wednesday, March 4, 9:00 p.m. EST to replace 3 million certificates because the bug in its Boulder software—discovered and patched this past Sunday–impacted the way its software checked domain ownership before issuing certificates. However, users grumbled that this was not enough time to correct the problem.
Users and major integrators of Let’s Encrypt managed to replace more than 1.7 million of the affected certificates by the original deadline; however, more than 1 million were left that would have been revoked, causing the company to rethink its plan, a Let’s Encrypt spokeswoman told Threatpost late Wednesday.
“Rather than potentially break so many sites and cause concern for their visitors, we have determined that it is in the best interest of the health of the Internet for us to not revoke those certificates by the deadline,” Josh Aas, executive director for Let’s Encrypt said in a blog post updating users of the situation Wednesday.
The company’s plan now is to revoke 1,706,505 certificates that the company is confident were already replaced as well as “445 certificates that we treated as highest priority for revocation because, at the time we found the bug, they had CAA records that forbid issuance by Let’s Encrypt,” Aas wrote in the post.
“We plan to revoke more certificates as we become confident that doing so will not be needlessly disruptive to Web users,” he wrote.
Disclaimer: SoylentNews uses Let's Encrypt certificates.
Previously:
HTTPS for All: Let's Encrypt Reaches One Billion Certificates Issued [Updated]
Let's Encrypt: An Automated Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday March 05 2020, @07:32PM (16 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Redundant) by NotSanguine on Thursday March 05 2020, @07:37PM (1 child)
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 06 2020, @11:44AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday March 05 2020, @07:56PM (6 children)
My apologies. I responded too quickly.
that's a completely false statement.
I have a deadbolt on my front door. It provides some level of security, but it can't stop someone from bashing the door down or taking the door off its hinges.
By your logic, my deadbolt is useless and I shouldn't bother locking my door at all.
And the same goes for passwords (they can be cracked, pulled from a hacked database, etc.). As such, passwords are useless and should never be used.
Credit/debit cards can be cloned/stolen and I can be tortured into revealing my PIN. As such, chip and pin systems are completely useless.
In fact, there is no such thing as perfect security. Which is obvious to those of us who actually *practice* infosec. Security is a continuum, and is (or should be) implemented on a scale and with the resources appropriate to whatever is being secured.
I'm really cranky if I don't have my coffee in the morning. As such, making sure my coffee, and the means to brew it, are secure is pretty important to me. So. Do I get a safety deposit box to keep my coffee and brewing rig? That would pretty much ensure the security of that stuff, right?
No. Because the *value* of such things, plus the need for access to those things, makes it impractical and a waste of resources to do so.
If, instead, I had several million dollars in bearer bonds, I'd likely expend significantly more resources in securing them. And a safety deposit box might well be a good idea, rather than keeping them next to my coffee beans in the freezer.
Even with corporate data, trade secrets, confidential documents, etc. that applies. If security that makes *required* access to such data impractical, that's too much.
Let's Encrypt isn't, and has *never* been about providing a high level of data integrity/non-repudiation for web data.
Rather, it's intended to encrypt (odd how that's in the name and everything) web data to make it *harder* to eavesdrop upon while in-transit.
Please do respond. I'd be interested to discuss this with you further -- specifically this idea that "security is binary." How did you come to that conclusion?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0, Troll) by fustakrakich on Thursday March 05 2020, @11:57PM (1 child)
By your logic, my deadbolt is useless and I shouldn't bother locking my door at all.
Well, by my logic, if the deadbolt is made of paper mache, or if it's a black box that pops open when an airliner flies over the house [we remember our old electric garage doors] it does little more than look nice.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @04:16PM
Troll?
Why do people get so defensive when somebody tells them they bought snake oil?
They pushed out a system that's not ready for prime time, and it might not ever be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @05:18AM (1 child)
I am not arguing either way but your argument is not half as smart as you think and makes it stupider than it probably is. Security is not provided by the bolt on your door. Security is provided by the idea that police will consider it a grave criminal act to break that bolt and won't take you seriously if the door wasn't bolted. It is easier if you think you were living in a jungle. That bolt would show intent and intelligence of the thief if the bolts are undone and give you information whether you should spend energy in tracking it, or not.
No really! People who live in jungle bury it in the ground and guard the information about the location, not the location itself.
As I said, I am not arguing either way about the original topic but against the example you chose.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday March 06 2020, @06:27AM
I'll ignore your obnoxious and insulting tone for the moment, as I smack your ridiculous "argument" down.
GP stated that "security is binary."
His point was that either something is secure, or it isn't and there are no gradations in security. To wit, if something isn't *completely* secure, it is completely *insecure* and therefore useless.
That, much like your "argument," is ridiculous on its face.
The example of my door is actually an *excellent* one.
The deadbolt lock certainly doesn't completely prevent someone from breaking into my apartment. But it most certainly stops someone from walking up to my door, turning the knob and walking right in or jimmying the lock.
The police have exactly *zero* to do with it. Not that I would count on them anyway. They're generally worse than useless.
One would need to bring a lock pick, a drill, a battering ram or other tools to either remove the lock or the door to gain entrance. And once they take the time to break into the lobby of my apartment building (also locked), they'd need to take the time to forcibly enter my apartment, likely making lots of noise at all points and alerting the 50+ people in the building to their presence.
That significantly raises the difficulty factor in entering my home. Is it perfectly secure? No. However, it's an *effective* mechanism for keeping unwanted folks out, and with that deadbolt, someone seeking to obtain *someone's* belongings or do harm to someone would need to expend significant effort to do so. Making that deadbolt (without any help from the po-po) quite useful.
As such, unless I am being *specifically* targeted, someone going to such lengths is extremely unlikely. And if I am being specifically targeted, there are much easier ways to gain access to my home.
As such, in the case of my door, security is most certainly *not* binary.
It's actually really amusing that you call *me* dumb, since not only didn't you understand the point of the example, but you also came up with the moronic bullshit you did. Jungle indeed. Hah!
I'm actually laughing out loud (at you) as I write this.
Since you declined to "remain silent and be thought a fool," and rather, "spoke and removed all doubt," to my mild amusement (I am pretty easily amused, so YMMV), thus making my evening more pleasant *at your expense*, I thank you AC.
Cheers!
As I proofread my post, I'm moved to laughing *at* you even more, so I decided to include this addendum. Damn you're thick!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 06 2020, @11:47AM
Digital security, at least the PKI part, is supported by mathematical proofs, bits of iron aren't, in fact they come with known breaking points. Totally different realms.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 06 2020, @12:03PM
Now, knowing what we now know, should those LetsEncrypt certificates be trusted?
In the past, knowing what we know now, should LetsEncrypt certificates have been trusted?
Not all 8 combinations of answers make sense, but I have a response for all of the vaguely sane ones.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday March 05 2020, @08:08PM (2 children)
No, it isn't.
The number you want to measure is the amount of time and money needed to break security, and the value of the target. To use the meatspace version, no security is worse than a couple of mall cops is worse than a military base perimeter, but that doesn't mean that there aren't places where a couple of mall cops or even no security at all is appropriate, nor does it mean that a military base perimeter can't be breached by somebody willing to expend a lot of time and effort and money and lives to do so.
So, for example, I run some tiny websites on a volunteer basis for some non-profits. And there's no sense in spending a huge amount of time or money on those sites' security, because there's no sensitive data on them, and not that much of a problem if I have to shut the sites down completely for a while. By contrast, the websites for 8-figure online businesses I'm responsible for get a lot more of my monitoring and attention.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:48PM
To expand on this: the value of almost all web traffic, by itself, is approximately zero. This means for most sites, the value of any security system is approximately nothing. Thus, excepting hobbyists who like to tinker with their servers for fun, in most cases you are wasting your time if you spend more than approximately zero minutes securing your website, and you are wasting your money if you spend more than approximately zero dollars on it.
This essentially the crux of what makes Let's Encrypt so great: it brings the cost of setting up HTTPS on most sites down to somewhere between "nothing" and "bugger all": you just run certbot and you are done.
Before Let's Encrypt launched most people running webservers would have understood this cost/benefit -- even though they may not have been exactly aware of it. I attended a presentation by Seth Schoen around a year before the launch where he said something like (paraphrasing from memory) "it currently takes about an hour to setup HTTPS on a website, and from asking server administrators why they weren't using HTTPS the answer was it was too much work". Those administrators were not stupid, they were right: it was too much work. They, quite rationally, would have more rewarding things to do with that hour.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 06 2020, @11:55AM
All costs above more than the amount of resources available are effectively equal to infinity, as there's no test that can be performed that can distinguish them.
Of course there's the "attacks always improve" caveat, but that's more of an issue for the symmetric side, which tends to be renegotiated via the PKI side often enough that breaks would be very limited in scope, so the cost of the gains for the effort are diminished.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @08:20PM (2 children)
Might as well post your billing address and credit card numbers. Since security is binary and there is no 100% system connected to the internet, doing so is won't affect your security level at all. They are probably out there anyway so it isn't even new information for the internet.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 06 2020, @11:56AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 06 2020, @11:58AM
Noone has my private keys.
Notice the difference?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @07:28AM
The IETF would disagree [ietf.org].