BlackHat USA 2011: SSL And The Future Of Authenticity

Perspectives/Convergence really is a great system, but it unfortunately still has several problems: - it completely leaks your browsing history: you basically ask a notary "what's the certificate you see for kinkyneighbors.com?". Convergence addresses this, though - it requires network-heavy intermediaries for all the browsing of all the people around the world. - it still doesn't solve authenticity: an attacker could very well be controlling all connections arriving at your house, or leaving the target's server, and fool everyone Convergence/Perspectives should be coupled with certificate pinning, aka storing _really_ trusted authorities (ie verified by hand) on your computer. Guess what ? [Moxie's next project is just that [0] (For anyone curious, I highly recommend Moxie's talk [1] about Convergence, it does a great job at explaining what's the problem, what's Convergence and how it can solve at least part of it) [0] [link] [1] [this video]

Some developments in this area are: * Convergence.io * DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) + DNSSEC * Tack.io For various reasons listed in [1] Convergence is not likely to be implemented (by default) in major browsers. On DANE + DNSSEC, where the cert is authenticated via the information published in your DNS, Moxie Marlinspike has said it better then I can: "CAs are sketchy, but this is a whole new world of sketchiness. Think, sketchasaurus. Registrars were never built or selected with security in mind, and most of them don’t have a very good track record in this area. Shouldn’t it be laughable that the current first step in deploying DNSSEC is to create an account with GoDaddy?"[2] The 2011 BlackHat video[3] and blog post[2] by Moxie Marlinspike are great sources of information. IMO, Tack.io is the most viable solution. It's compatible with the current model but removes the thread of one CA being able to compromise all domains. [1] [link] [2] [link] [3] [this video]

The problem is that right now, in the common case, the browser/OS vendors can't black-list individual CAs. Their ability to do so with DigiNotar is exceptionally rare, and would not be possible most of the time. Trust agility ensures that clients have the ability to make these trust decisions easily. A client does not necessarily have to be a user , it could still be the browser/OS vendors. For details on how Convergence works, in order to answer your question of how it prevents 1/4th of the SSL internet from going down when Comodo gets hacked, the best reference is (unfortunately) still the presentation: [this video]

You are either stupid or subversive. By now we all know Keith Alexander’s view of hackers (socially disabled, semi-autistic kids sitting behind a laptop at 4 a.m. wearing a batman suit and gloves) and his view on technical matters is equal with Comodo’s [2] leader. As for NSA having skilled personnel??? Sure - some of them are skilled - but they don’t take decisions[1]. The stupid guys do (again, K. Alexander is an excellent reference for incompetence add to that that he is a lier[3] and you’ ve got an explosive mix). NOTE: In “War and Peace” - Tolstoy’s masterpiece - there’s a Russian officer (Prince Andrey IIRC) who realizes the insane tragedy of human history: While the Prussian and Russian army coalition (hundreds of thousands of men, with families and lives left behind…) is about to face the fiercest opponent of their era (Napoleon, is a legend among Russian military officials) the two Generals (Prussian and Russian) are fighting and sabotaging each other about who is going to lead the battle… Until it’s too late. They both get easily crashed, without putting up a fight. So you can play naive , stupid , stunned or cunning all you like but human history is FULL of stupid people in position of power. [1] Quora: “Does the NSA have better engineers than Facebook or Google?”: [link] [2] “BlackHat USA 2011: SSL And The Future Of Authenticity”: [this video] [3] “K. Alexander lies to congress” - [link]

Why have a single entity at all? Moxie Marlinspike proposed Convergence ( [this video] ) as a solution - I think that something like that has far more potential wheels to travel than a Namecoin based system. I should be able to choose who I trust, a notary system would allow me to do just that. No central CA systems. The biggest concern I can see is Identity management, but, as mentioned by Moxie, most of these CA don't do anything close to proper Identity management any more - I have a number of certificates bought from quite a few different CA's all made out to my rabbit, at no fixed address. Notaries can, of course, do additional verification - they could even advertise this as a premium. I don't see why this can't be extended to DNS lookup's either. I trust X notaries and pin the results I get, I can choose to trust a majority, or be hyper paranoid and require everyone to agree. No need to run a power hungry blockchain, no single point of technology failure. Technically, all of that is feasible today. And I imagine we will see a number of different technologies combined to form a proper, decentralised, system.

I wonder why moxie's Convergence [0] didn't take off. To me it sounds near-perfect. It could handle multiple layers of authenticity, including DNS. The project has been inactive on GitHub for 5 years [1], however the Namecoin project picked it up [2] as "FreeSpeechMe" and added support for IPv6, and .bit, .onion, .b32.i2p domains. Now this, too, has been discontinued "because Mozilla removed the relevant API's as of Firefox 33". They "intend to release a replacement soon". According to Jeremy Rand [3] "A replacement is in the works (and is mostly working already)", but the source doesn't seem to be public or I can't find it. Are there any downsides of Convergence? 0: [this video] 1: [link] 2: [link] 3: [link]