Building a better CA infrastructure: Via Freedom to Tinker.

As several Tor project authors, Ben Adida and many others have written, our certificate authority infrastructure has the flaw that any one CA, anywhere on the planet, can issue a certificate for any web site, anywhere else on the planet. This was tolerable when the only game in town was VeriSign, but now that's just untenable. So what solutions are available?

First, some non-solutions: Extended validation certs do nothing useful. Will users be properly trained to look for the extra changes in browser behavior as to scream when they're absent via a normal cert? Fat chance. Similarly, certificate revocation lists buy you nothing if you can't actually download them (a notable issue if you're stuck behind the firewall of somebody who wants to attack you).

A straightforward idea is to track the certs you see over time and generate a prominent warning if you see something anomalous. This is available as a fully-functioning Firefox extension, Certificate Patrol. This should be built into every browser.

In addition to your first-hand personal observations, why not leverage other resources on the network to make their own observations? For example, while Google is crawling the web, it can easily save SSL/TLS certificates when it sees them, and browsers could use a real-time API much like Google SafeBrowsing. A research group at CMU has already built something like this, which they call a network notary. In essence, you can have multiple network services, running from different vantage points in the network, all telling you whether the cryptographic credentials you got match what others are seeing. Of course, if you're stuck behind an attacker's firewall, the attacker will similarly filter out all these sites.

There are a variety of other proposals out there, notably trying to leverage DNSSEC to enhance or supplant the need for SSL/TLS certificates. Since DNSSEC provides more control over your DNS records, it also provides more control over who can issue SSL/TLS certificates for your web site. If and when DNSSEC becomes universally supported, this would be a bit harder for attacker firewalls to filter without breaking everything, so I certainly hope this takes off.

Let's say that future browsers properly use all of these tricks and can unquestionably determine for you, with perfect accuracy, when you're getting a bogus connection. Your browser will display an impressive error dialog and refuses to load the web site. Is that sufficient? This will certainly break all the hotel WiFi systems that want to redirect you to an internal site where they can charge you to access the network. (Arguably, this sort of functionality belongs elsewhere in the software stack, such as through IEEE 802.21, notably used to connect AT&T iPhones to the WiFi service at Starbucks.) Beyond that, though, should the browser just steadfastly refuse to allow the connection? I've been to at least one organization whose internal WiFi network insists that it proxy all of your https sessions and, in fact, issues fabricated certificates that you're expected to configure your browser to trust. We need to support that sort of thing when it's required, but again, it would perhaps best be supported by some kind of side-channel protocol extension, not by doing a deliberate MITM attack on the crypto protocol.

Corner cases aside, what if you're truly in a hostile environment and your browser has genuinely detected a network adversary? Should the browser refuse the connection, or should there be some other option? And if so, what would that be? Should the browser perhaps allow the connection (with much gnashing of teeth and throbbing red borders on the window)? Should previous cookies and saved state be hidden away? Should web sites like Gmail and Facebook allow users to have two separate passwords, one for "genuine" login and a separate one for "Yes, I'm in a hostile location, but I need to send and receive email in a limited but still useful fashion?"

[Editor's note: you may also be interested in the many prior posts on this topic by Freedom to Tinker contributors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 -- as well as the "Emerging Threats to Online Trust: The Role of Public Policy and Browser Certificates" event that CITP hosted in DC last year with policymakers, industry, and activists.]

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