by gionn on 5/30/20, 5:16 PM with 150 comments
by jeffbee on 5/30/20, 6:49 PM
by LeonM on 5/30/20, 8:05 PM
The certificate reseller advised my customer that it was okay to include the cross-signing cert in the chain, because browsers will automatically ignore it once it expires, and use the Comodo CA root instead.
And that was true for browsers I guess. But my customer also has about 100 machines in the field that use cURL to access their HTTPS API endpoint. cURL will throw an error if one of the certs in the chain has expired (may be dependent on the order, don't know).
Anyway, 100 machines went down and I had a stressed out customer on the phone.
by admax88q on 5/30/20, 7:27 PM
If certificate revocation doesnt work then certs need to expire super frequently to limit potential damage if compromised.
A certificate that expires in 20 years does absolutely nothing for security compared to a certificate that never expires. Odds are that in 20 years the crypto will need to be updated anyways, effectively revoking the certificate.
by sleevi on 5/30/20, 8:42 PM
At the core, this is not a problem with the server, or the CA, but with the clients. However, servers have to deal with broken clients, so it’s easy to point at the server and say it was broken, or to point at the server and say it’s fixed, but that’s not quite the case.
I discussed this some in https://twitter.com/sleevi_/status/1266647545675210753 , as clients need to be prepared to discover and explore alternative certificate paths. Almost every major CA relies on cross-certificates, some even with circular loops (e.g. DigiCert), and clients need to be capable of exploring those certificates and finding what they like. There’s not a single canonical “correct” certificate chain, because of course different clients trust different CAs.
Regardless of your CA, you can still do things to reduce the risk. Using tools like mkbundle in CFSSL (with https://github.com/cloudflare/cfssl_trust ) or https://whatsmychaincert.com/ help configure a chain that will maximize interoperability, even with dumb and old clients.
Of course, using shorter lived certificates, and automating them, also helps prepare your servers, by removing the toil from configuring changes and making sure you pickup updates (to the certificate path) in a timely fashion.
Tools like Censys can be used to explore the certificate graph and visualize the nodes and edges. You’ll see plenty of sites rely on this, and that means clients need to not be lazy in how they verify certificates. Or, alternatively, that root stores should impose more rules on how CAs sign such cross-certificates, to reduce the risk posed to the ecosystem by these events.
by elithrar on 5/30/20, 5:33 PM
Top offender so far seems to be GnuTLS.
by Mojah on 5/30/20, 5:36 PM
As a general rule of thumb:
1) You don't need to add root certificates to your certificate chain
2) You especially don't need to add expired root certificates to the chain
For additional context and the ability to check using `openssl` what certificates you should modify in your chain, I found this post useful: https://ohdear.app/blog/resolving-the-addtrust-external-ca-r...
by MobileVet on 5/30/20, 6:23 PM
https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2034
Anyone that was already connected was able to continue accessing the sites but new connections failed. This mostly affected web users.
Our main app server continued to crank along thankfully (also on Heroku) and that kept the mobile traffic going which is 90% of our users.
Edit: adding Heroku ticket link
by encoderer on 5/30/20, 5:20 PM
TIL that I can buy a cert that expires in a year that is signed by a root certificate that expires sooner. Still not sure WHY this is the case, but this is definitely the case.
by snapetom on 5/30/20, 8:25 PM
by seibelj on 5/30/20, 5:37 PM
by luckylion on 5/30/20, 5:33 PM
by compumike on 5/30/20, 6:55 PM
Edit: for https://www.circuitlab.com/ we saw all Stripe webhooks failing from 4:08am through 12:04pm PDT today with "TLS error". Since 12:04pm (5 minutes ago), some webhooks are succeeding and others are still failing.
Edit 2: since 12:17pm all webhooks are succeeding again. Thanks Stripe!
by zouhair on 5/30/20, 10:04 PM
$ lynx -dump https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history
Looking up wiki.factorio.com
Making HTTPS connection to wiki.factorio.com
SSL callback:certificate has expired, preverify_ok=0, ssl_okay=0
Retrying connection without TLS.
Looking up wiki.factorio.com
Making HTTPS connection to wiki.factorio.com
SSL callback:certificate has expired, preverify_ok=0, ssl_okay=0
Alert!: Unable to make secure connection to remote host.
lynx: Can't access startfile https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history
by 0x0 on 5/30/20, 10:20 PM
by halukakin on 5/30/20, 7:31 PM
by fragsworth on 5/30/20, 6:09 PM
by ric2b on 5/30/20, 6:49 PM
Caused us some connections issues that required a restart of both our clients and the rabbitmq cluster.
by dvdkhlng on 5/30/20, 8:24 PM
That's quite bad, as I tried to do a clean re-install of jitsi-meet, and now I have no installation at all any more.
by userbinator on 5/31/20, 12:07 AM
While Android 2.3 Gingerbread does not have the modern roots installed and relies on AddTrust, it also does not support TLS 1.2 or 1.3, and is unsupported and labelled obsolete by the vendor.
If the platform doesn’t support modern algorithms (SHA-2, for example) then you will need to speak to that system vendor about updates.
I find things like that really really irritating. Crypto is basically maths, and a very pure form at that, so should be one of the most portable types of software in existence. Computers have been doing maths since before they were machines. Instead, the forced obolescence bandwagon has made companies take this very pure and portable technology and tied it to their platform's versions, using the "security" argument to bait and coerce users into taking other unwanted changes, and possibly replacing hardware that is otherwise functional (and, as mentioned earlier, is perfectly capable of executing the relevant code) along with all the ecological impact that has. Adding new root certificates at least for PCs is rather easy due to their extreme portability, but I wish the same could be said of crypto algorithms/libraries.
by niffydroid on 5/30/20, 7:51 PM
by bransonf on 5/30/20, 8:17 PM
Perhaps a coincidence, but also likely that their cert expired.
by taypo on 5/30/20, 6:46 PM
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/gshh70/sectigo_root_...
by pixmin on 5/30/20, 8:34 PM
I think a large portion of online communications have been affected today.
by badrabbit on 5/30/20, 6:41 PM
by aarbor989 on 5/31/20, 7:08 PM
by minaguib on 5/31/20, 1:02 AM
by vld on 5/30/20, 7:00 PM
by PixelPaul on 5/30/20, 10:34 PM
by m-p-3 on 5/30/20, 9:35 PM
by antaviana on 5/31/20, 1:41 AM
by ta17711771 on 5/30/20, 6:55 PM
We need to do something.