A world of hurt after GoDaddy, Apple, and Google misissue >1 million certificates

ronjor · Mar 12, 2019

Dan Goodin - 3/12/2019

With all that said, despite the shortcomings of the misissued certificates, there is very little chance their non-compliant entropy can be exploited. Certificates are now generated using SHA256, a modern algorithm that doesn’t have the known vulnerabilities of MD5. The 64-bit requirement, rather, is more a matter of insuring against new attacks that will likely be discovered in the coming decades.
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FanJ · Mar 14, 2019

More quotes from that Ars article:

The snafu is the result of the companies' misconfiguration of the open source EJBCA software package that many browser-trusted authorities use to generate certificates that secure websites, encrypt email, and digitally sign code. By default, EJBCA generated certificates with 64-bit serial numbers, in keeping, it seemed, with an industry mandate that serial numbers contain 64 bits of output from a secure pseudo-random number generator. Upon further scrutiny, engineers discovered that one of the 64 bits must be a fixed value to ensure the serial number is a positive integer. As a result, the EJBCA default produced a serial number with 63 bits of entropy.
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The 63 bits is far off the mark of the required 64 bits and, as such, poses a theoretically unacceptable risk to the entire ecosystem. (Practically speaking, there’s almost no chance of the certificates being maliciously exploited. More about that later.) Adam Caudill, the security researcher who blogged about the mass misissuance last weekend, pointed out that it’s easy to think that a difference of 1 single bit would be largely inconsequential when considering numbers this big. In fact, he said, the difference between 2**63 and 2**64 is more than 9 quintillion.
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Think again about the difference between 2**63 and 2**64

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In The Netherlands the NCSC (National Cyber Security Centrum) has issued a warning:
https://www.ncsc.nl/actueel/nieuwsb...voldoen-mogelijk-niet-aan-uitgifte-eisen.html

and the official Dutch Policy Authority (PA) Logius has issued a warning because official Dutch PKIoverheid-certificates are involved:
https://www.logius.nl/actueel/update-uitgifte-servercertificaten
Thousands of those official Dutch PKIoverheid-certificates have to be revoked. See also article at security.nl :
https://www.security.nl/posting/601483/Logius laat duizenden PKIoverheid-certificaten intrekken

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A world of hurt after GoDaddy, Apple, and Google misissue >1 million certificates

ronjor Global Moderator

FanJ Updates Team

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A world of hurt after GoDaddy, Apple, and Google misissue >1 million certificates

ronjor Global Moderator

FanJ Updates Team

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