SECURITY - Vulnerability of Internet Certificates

"An Attack Sheds Light on Internet Security Holes" by RIVA RICHMOND, New York Times 4/6/2011

Excerpt

The Comodo Group, an Internet security company, has been attacked in the last month by a talkative and professed patriotic Iranian hacker who infiltrated several of the company’s partners and used them to threaten the security of myriad big-name Web sites.

But the case is a problem for not only Comodo, which initially believed the attack was the work of the Iranian government. It has also cast a spotlight on the global system that supposedly secures communications and commerce on the Web.

The encryption used by many Web sites to prevent eavesdropping on their interactions with visitors is not very secure. This technology is in use when Web addresses start with “https” (in which “s” stands for secure) and a closed lock icon appears on Web browsers. These sites rely on third-party organizations, like Comodo, to provide “certificates” that guarantee sites’ authenticity to Web browsers.

But many security experts say the problems start with the proliferation of organizations permitted to issue certificates. Browser makers like Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple have authorized a large and growing number of entities around the world — both private companies and government bodies — to create them. Many private “certificate authorities” have, in turn, worked with resellers and deputized other unknown companies to issue certificates in a “chain of trust” that now involves many hundreds of players, any of which may in fact be a weak link.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, has explored the Internet in an attempt to map this nebulous system. As of December, 676 organizations were signing certificates, it found. Other security experts suspect that the scan missed many and that the number is much higher.

Making matters worse, entities that issue certificates, though required to seek authorization from site owners, can technically issue certificates for any Web site. This means that governments that control certificate authorities and hackers who break into their systems can issue certificates for any site at will.

Experts say that both the certificate system and the technology it employs have long been in need of an overhaul, but that the technology industry has not been able to muster the will to do it. “It hasn’t been perceived to be a big enough problem that needs to be fixed,” said Stephen Schultze, associate director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. “This is a wake-up call. This is a small leak that is evidence of a much more fundamental structural problem.”

In the Comodo case, the hacker infiltrated an Italian computer reseller and used its access to Comodo’s systems to automatically create certificates for Web sites operated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Skype and Mozilla. With the certificates, the hacker could set up servers that appear to work for those sites and try to view the unscrambled e-mail of millions of people, experts say.