Re: [TLS] Eleven out of every ten SSL certs aren't valid

[Ivan Ristic <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 5:33 PM, Nicolas Williams
<[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 07:50:38PM +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>> In case someone here still hasn't seen this, the subject is a reference to:
>>
>>   SSL Certificates In Use Today Aren't All Valid
>>   http://www.esecurityplanet.com/features/article.php/3890171/SSL-Certificates-In-Use-Today-Arent-All-Valid.htm
>>
>> which posits that only 3% of SSL certs in use today are valid.  The figures
>> seem a bit suspicious though, for example they claim 23 million SSL sites
>> while the same article quotes Netcraft as claiming there are 1.5 million SSL
>> certs in use (the Netcraft figures may be for CA-issued certs only, since they
>> quote Verisign as a percentage of that total).  Still, 3% seems pretty low,
>> could this be due to something like virtual hosting and the client not sending
>> the hostname, thereby getting the wrong cert?  Even with that though, I
>> wouldn't have expected a 97% invalidity rate.
>
> The subject line is very funny, but, seriously, this doesn't bother me
> in the least.  Why?  Because anyone can put up a site with an invalid,
> self-signed, or might-as-well-be-self-signed-because-no-one-uses-its-
> root-CA cert.  Therefore the number of sites with such certs is utterly
> and completely _meaningless_ [m _e _a _n _i _n _g _l _e _s _s _].
>
> What matters is that the sites that ought to be using HTTPS with valid
> certs are[*].  I'm talking about banks, payment sites, shopping sites
> that accept credit cards, etcetera.  By and large those appear to be
> valid most if not all the time I, as a user, need them to be.  I'd like
> to see a study of such sites' TLS and PKIX usage.
>
> So I'd phrase this as 9-out-of-10 sites that need to have valid certs.

The problem with that view is that, while the users are experiencing
all those sites with invalid certificates they are getting used to the
idea that nothing bad comes from browser warnings. Then, one day, when
they're accessing their bank's web site from an insecure network, they
ignore the one warning they shouldn't and get owned by the MITM guy.


> Nico
>
> [*]  Ignoring, for lack of a better alternative, the fact that browsers
>     ship with such long lists of trust anchors that we might as well
>     not even try to pretend we're using a PKI.
> --
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-- 
Ivan Ristic
ModSecurity Handbook [http://www.modsecurityhandbook.com]
SSL Labs [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssldb/]