TLS certificate management on Android [LWN.net]

TLS certificate management on Android

Posted Mar 3, 2016 6:32 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: TLS certificate management on Android by ptman
Parent article: TLS certificate management on Android

That might lead to... to... gasp... delegation!

Just imagine every mom&pop company paying only ONCE to get *.momandpopcompany.com certifcate and signing THEIR OWN!!! third-level certificates instead of going through Established CA Authorities.

That can't be let to stand. Nope.

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TLS certificate management on Android

Posted Mar 3, 2016 10:38 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

The Established CA Authorities will presumably continue charging an arm and a leg for certificates that have the required flags set to act as a sub-CA, so it's probably not a real problem as far as they are concerned.

TLS certificate management on Android

Posted Mar 3, 2016 20:13 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

You can't charge too much - there's going to be a race to the bottom. And really lucrative clients like ebay.com or amazon.com will easily pay any amount of money for it.

TLS certificate management on Android

Posted Mar 6, 2016 20:35 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

Amazon is already cross-signed and is seeking independent inclusion in major trust stores (e.g. Mozilla) because they want their Amazon Web Service product to have a one button SSL service of the sort you get for free on a cheap virtual host these days but they don't (quite reasonably) want to pay an existing for-profit CA to issue those certs. So Amazon can issue a million certs tomorrow across the entire namespace, they wouldn't want a delegation.

The "delegation" pipe dream is just that. Today, in 2016, there are brand new SSL certificates being minted that still don't use the correct method to indicate which DNS names the certificate is for, but instead rely on bug compatibility between major browsers to "get away" with continuing to do things the way they did with Netscape Navigator (remember that?)

Huge parts of the x509 certificate spec are written off as unsuitable for any purpose for years and probably decades to come because either incompetently written software was allowed to spread into the wild that relies on nobody using that part of the spec, or, perhaps even worse, Certification Authorities (who are supposed to be experts) signed certs that mis-used those parts of the spec and which don't expire for many years. Delegation is one of those parts. I thought it sounded like a brilliant idea when I first heard about it, but it can't work for probably a decade or more after we get CAs to treat it as real, and we're nowhere near even that. Nobody wants to fight with them about something we probably will never get to see any use out of anyway.

TLS certificate management on Android

Posted Mar 6, 2016 21:25 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> So Amazon can issue a million certs tomorrow across the entire namespace, they wouldn't want a delegation.
I should have been more clear - large companies need a lot of certificates for internal purposes and for user-facing services.

AWS already has one-click SSL for load-balancers.

> The "delegation" pipe dream is just that... Huge parts of the x509 certificate spec are written off as unsuitable for any purpose
The problem is not that parts of X509 are not accessible, but that it's a freaking mess. And TLS is a doubly freaking mess.

Writing a fully conformant TLS stack with all the options supported is pretty much impossible. We're still getting bugs discovered in the spec itself (all those downgrade attacks).

The correct course of action would be designing a completely new infrastructure, that can utilize advances like DNSSEC from the start. It's a pipe dream, but still....