Re: Origin Signed Responses and certificate requirements

On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 02:09:00PM -0400, Ryan Sleevi wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 1:51 PM, Ilari Liusvaara <ilariliusvaara@welho.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Web packaging is not similar to Secondary Certificates. It is however
> > similar to Delegated Credentials.
> >
> 
> Sure it is. A compromise of a secondary certificate key, or of a web
> packaging key, reduces the cost of attack to "Can I induce a client to talk
> to the attacker" - which, in a Web context, is sort of a key design feature
> of the Web. If you can, then the holder of a compromised Secondary
> Certificate, or a compromised Signed Exchanges key, can induce a client to
> accept as "from the origin" their content, in an otherwise undetectable
> manner.

Also, due to the requirement that SC keys are online, even if the key
is protected from dumping, it can still be misused (in realtime) if the
web server is compromised (and such compromise may be difficult to
detect). WP/DC keys do not need to be online.

> > Also, saying that keys for for WP/DC SHALL be protected in some
> > specified way would have really nasty interactions with current
> > CABForum BRs, making it effectively impossible to get such
> > certificates. So any enhanced protection is at most RECOMMENDED.
> >
> 
> I'm not sure why you say they would have 'really nasty interactions'.
> Parties that want code signing certificates from CAs trusted by Microsoft,
> for example, can only do so for keys on hardware security modules. Which
> effectively means the CA sending out an USB token or smart card, and
> provisioning the key themselves.

Getting code signing certificates is much much harder than website
certificates (except EV) anyway. So there the HSM requirement is not
that much of an increase.

Also, here is yet another difference. Required capacity. WP/DC/CS need
fairly little signing capacity, so one could put the keys to a
smartcard or basic USB token (with signing capacity on order of 1-3
signature per second) if one wanted to. However SC needs much more
capacity, so smartcard or basic USB token is not going to cut it.


-Ilari

Received on Thursday, 12 April 2018 18:32:24 UTC