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Comodo Caught Breaking New CAA Standard One Day After It Went Into Effect

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 13 2017, @12:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the oh-did-that-start-today? dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1937

One day after the CAA (Certificate Authority Authorization) standard became obligatory on September 8, a German security researcher caught Comodo breaking the rules and issuing an SSL certificate it was not supposed to issue.

CAA allows website owners to specify what Certificate Authorities (CAs) are allowed to issue certificates in their name. Site owners can set up a CAA rule for their domain by adding a text field in DNS entries such as the one below:

bleepingcomputer.com. CAA 0 issue "symantec.com"

This small rule tells any Certificate Authority that only Symantec can issue SSL certificates for the BleepingComputer.com domain.

According to the rules of the CAA standard approved by the CA/Browser Forum in Ballot 187, this April, Certificate Authorities such as Comodo have to check a CAA field in DNS records before issuing new SSL certificates.

On Monday, German security researcher Hanno Böck shared with the infosec community that he managed to obtain an SSL certificate from Comodo — now revoked — for his own website, even if the CAA field limited SSL issuance only to Let's Encrypt.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/comodo-caught-breaking-new-caa-standard-one-day-after-it-went-into-effect/

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by rigrig on Wednesday September 13 2017, @12:51PM

    by rigrig (5129) <soylentnews@tubul.net> on Wednesday September 13 2017, @12:51PM (#567198) Homepage

    Is there a lookup table of all "CA"-strings with the actual signatures of each cert they use for signing the issued cert?

    No, this is not meant to be checked by website visitors, only by the CA when issuing a new certificate.
    Those will have a page telling you what to put there. Like this one by Comodo [comodo.com], which tells you to put in comodoca.com to have them issue certificates for your domain.
    And also claims that

    Comodo, however, has been supporting this on ALL certificates for the last 12+ months.

    This is not so much for security, but meant to prevent "unintended certificate mis-issue" (although I suppose you can block all CAs and only lift the block for a bit when renewing)

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