Intermediate certs allow anyone to mint web credentials for any Internet server.

Astonishingly, the private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237.

exploiting compromised certificates requires an active adversary-in-the-middle attack, meaning the attacker must act as a proxy between two TLS parties and receive encrypted traffic, decrypt it, reencrypt it, and send it to the other party. Such capabilities, in some cases, are usually limited to only the most well-resourced attackers. People with control of a local network—at a coffee shop, university, or other organization—face much less of a challenge.

https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/

Xkcd 221: int getRandomNumber() { return 4; // chosen by fair dice roll. guaranteed to be random. }

    • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      6 days ago

      Ok, but what would that look like in a way that would have mitigated this situation? Seems likely that such a system could actually exacerbate this specific scenario.

      • mschae@discuss.mschae23.deEnglish
        6·
        6 days ago

        Something like DANE, maybe? Only the websites actually using the compromised certificates would be compromised.

        • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          Conceptually, I get it. Esepecially if you go with the ‘DNS pinning of CA’ to have a ‘belt and suspenders’ approach where two chains of authority must be broken, one of which inherently tied to your name.

          Practically speaking, DNSSEC hasn’t managed to get ubiquitous adoption. To the point where browsers started giving up and doing DNS over HTTPS to well known providers instead.

        • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          After trying for a bit, I can certainly relate to understanding little of it. It’s not as concretely explained as I would like and sticks to abstract principles. So no idea about the current state of affairs.

    • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      Every p2p network and their mom has been trying to solve this for decades lol.

      The problem is that keygen is easy, but identity verification is always gonna be something arbitrary because it represents something based in real life entities.

      Even with TLS, people only trust google.com as being Google because they learned that Google uses google.com.

      I could make a goggle.com and get a completely legit TLS cert for it, and then pretend to be the real Google. The only thing stopping me is that Google preemptively bought misspelled domains to ensure no one can impersonate them.

      The lazy solution already exists. Just don’t use PKI and use direct trust on first connect like SSH.