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Let's Encrypt has announced the generation of root and intermediate certificates, share the public keys, and show the layout of their operational structure. The keys are RSA (the Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman algorithm) for now with ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) versions coming later this year.
The root certificates are for the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and separately for the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) for the ISRG. OCSP is described in RFC 6960 and used for revocation of certificates.
The intermediate certificates are for two different intermediate Let's Encrypt CA (Certificate Authority) servers named/numbered X1 and X2. These are cross-signed by the IdenTrust root CA for ease of deployment and use by existing browsers without the need for any modifications until the browsers add the ISRG root CA through updates. The Let's Encrypt intermediate CA X2 is only intended for disaster recovery in case of a non-functional X1. The Let's Encrypt announcement has a schematic of the structure.
The target is (or was) to launch the Let's Encrypt service in the second quarter of 2015 (which ends this month) and they plan on further announcements during the next few weeks.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by sigterm on Wednesday June 10 2015, @03:31AM
SSL is not necessarily "owned" by NSA, GCHQ or anybody else, unless we use weak/flawed cryptographic algorithms/software. In fact, the articles you provided links to, explains this: An adversary will need to steal keys, use side-channel attacks or issue fraudulent certificates (for use in Man-in-the-Middle attacks) in order to efficiently decrypt SSL traffic.
A short key on an intermediary CA makes the latter scenario more plausible. A successful attack against an intermediary CA key will not help an attacker decrypt traffic to/from an end entity, but it will enable the creation of fraudulent certificates.
So while the NSA may use National Security Letters to strong-arm the Let's Encrypt initiative into issuing a fake certificate for a specific MitM attack regardless of key size, a short key size could make brute-force attacks possible, and then everyone with access to sufficient computing power could issue fake certificates for any domain.
(Personally, I'm not all that worried about the Chinese or the Russians reading my emails, since unlike the NSA/CIA/GCHQ they don't have the power to arrest or "disappear" people in the western world. But when it comes to encryption backdoors in general, I really don't think the principle of "the more, the merrier" applies, hence I'd like keys to be longer than just the bare minimum required as of right now.)
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday June 10 2015, @04:48AM
SSL is not necessarily "owned" by NSA, GCHQ or anybody else, unless we use weak/flawed cryptographic algorithms/software.
"not necessarily" is just pedantry. when it comes to encryption, it's either secure or it's insecure (aka owned).
check out this wikipedia chart [wikipedia.org]. SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 are both insecure and have been replaced with TLS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @07:17AM
The thing is, SSL does not care which CA issued the certificates. So even if you choose the most trustworthy Norwegian CA, the NSA can just get their fraudulent certificates from a different one.
Check the list of certificate authorities your browser accepts by default. It's huge. Any of them can issue certificates for any domain. Rumor has it that two of those actually are the NSA. And even if not, every single one that is in the USA can be used via National Security Letters. And the CA is not allowed to tell anyone when this happens.
Still looking at the list? Ok, now look for China. They can do the same thing, and they probably don't even need a National Security Letter to do it.
SSL is broken by design, and cannot be fixed. We need to start over.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Friday June 26 2015, @11:25PM
This is a late reply/comment (desperately trying to catch up, only now have I started reading the comments to my own submission) and /I don't disagree with you at all/ but just in case Norway wasn't used as a random $country or in case somebody mistakenly thinks there's anything particularly good or better going on there I wanted to point out —not only— that Norway is a Nine Eyes member but that recently there's been something odd going on there:
TL;DR: don't count on Norway :(
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 10 2015, @03:24PM
unless we use weak/flawed cryptographic algorithms
Isn't it known to be broken by everyone? Big Bro shows up with a NSL says all your data belongs to us; including live; send bill for time to this address?
The only use I know of that isn't broken so far for https is idiot marketing people buying 50 domain names for one company and putting https on all of them. Paypal is famous for this, there's some paypalstories dor com or something like that BS marketing site or something which is possibly the only you'll see a URL out on the scam-ternet that claims to be, and actually is, paypal, and yes that one site is legit with a verified paypal.com SSL cert?
Every other possible attack group either powns the server, powns the browser, powns the OS, powns the corporate legal dept with a NSL ... There's not many attack vectors left for non state bad guys to use.