Re: [websec] HPKP: Cross-signing with a self-signed certificate and pinning that cert?

You might want to check out TACK (http://tack.io/) which is the closes
proposal I know of to this.

Reasons this hasn't caught on:
1) Requires site owners to create and reason about a second private
key/certificate
2) Requires more changes to TLS stack.

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 4:18 PM, jxtps435 <jxtps435@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm interested in implementing HPKP on my sites, but it is a bit tricky to
> do:
>
> - We add / remove websites from a single SAN certificate on a semi-regular
> basis.
>
> - Our CA recently switched out at least their intermediate, if not their
> root cert in response to the SHA1 -> SHA256 transition.
>
> - We'd like to be able to switch root CA for business reasons.
>
> So pinning any of these certs seems like a recipe for disaster (maybe
> things won't change in the future, but when they have demonstrably changed
> in the past I would / should get fired if I don't take that into account).
>
> So basically, I need to be able to switch out our certificates at any
> time, for any reason, to any CA, without bricking our sites, to be able to
> use HPKP.
>
> Sounds impossible, right?
>
> But wait. What if I could cross-sign my certificates with a self-signed
> certificate and pin that certificate?
>
> So the browser would trust the regular root CA's authority, but it would
> do the pinning to my not-at-all-trusted self-signed certificate, enabling
> me to update my certs whenever I want, and as long as I can keep my
> self-signed cert safe no-one else can tamper with our sites.
>
> Would that work in theory? Would that work with current implementations?
> Thoughts?
>
>
> (I don't know the details of cross-signing, but apparently Google does it:
> http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/09/disabling-sslv3-and-rc4.html
> )
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> websec mailing list
> websec@ietf.org
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/websec
>
>