Cryptography & Security Newsletter

Feisty Duck’s Cryptography & Security Newsletter is a periodic dispatch bringing you commentary and news surrounding cryptography, security, privacy, SSL/TLS, and PKI. It's designed to keep you informed about the latest developments in this space. Enjoyed every month by more than 50,000 subscribers. Written by Ivan Ristić.

Back in February, we wrote about the EU's plans to mandate support for Qualified Website Authentication Certificates (QWACs) in all browsers. This intention hasn’t gone over very well with Mozilla in particular: in response, the company kicked off its Security Risks Ahead campaign and an associated Twitter account and started to lobby against the changes.

Heated conversations are taking place, but largely using press releases and LinkedIn posts as far as we can tell—for example, Mozilla’s position statement from November 2021. In March 2022, a number of security researchers also published an open letter opposing the change. Then there’s Mozilla’s more recent press release, which followed an event that took place in Brussels in November 2022.

European Signature Dialog is hitting back, in a LinkedIn post and the group’s website.

Chris Bailey of Entrust summarized the issue during the Trust Services Forum in October 2022. He also outlined some possible resolutions.

Eric Rescorla wrote about the problem from a technical perspective. Although he is Mozilla's CTO, he was not writing on Mozilla's behalf in this case.

It’s clear what the conflict is about. On the one hand, the EU wants to assert its sovereignty about an important topic that affects the lives of its citizens. On the other hand, browser vendors don’t want anyone else to tell them what to do when it comes to their user interfaces and security controls. But although there has been some form of conversation taking place for a year now, neither side has been very good at explaining why it’s right and the other side is wrong.

Bring out the popcorn.

Short News

Here are some things that caught our attention since the previous newsletter:

• Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) published their 2022 annual report.
• Sofía Celi reported that the Kyber license agreements have been signed. The license allows for royalty-free use of the NIST standard.
• Ryan Hurst wrote about the fragile nature of WebPKI as currently deployed.
• Chrome announced that it will start to randomize the order of TLS extensions as a way to reduce potential ecosystem brittleness.
• Microsoft announced that future versions of its Edge browser will implement self-contained certificate validation, decoupling this work from the underlying operating system.
• Trust Asia’s 2024 CT log has been declared qualified and approved for inclusion in Chrome.
• Ian Carrol discovered serious security issues in the administrative control panels of a Turkish CA. There was a follow-up discussion on Mozilla’s mailing list and an incident report on Mozilla’s bug tracker.
• Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team wrote about state-sponsored actors compromising a digital certificate authority in Asia.
• The Security. Cryptography. Whatever. podcast discussed the Matrix protocol with Martin Albrecht and Dan Jones.
• Antonios A. Chariton implemented an OCSP responder using Cloudflare Workers.
• Huzaifa Sidhpurwala wrote on the Red Hat Blog about the recent email address buffer overflow issues in OpenSSL.
• The Washington Post investigated TrustCor Systems, a publicly trusted certification authority, for its ties to intelligence agencies. Rachel McPherson, TrustCor’s VP of Operations, responded via Mozilla’s dev-security mailing list. Joel Reardon, a professor at the University of Calgary, provided more information on the same list.
• The Common CA Database (CCADB) Steering Committee established a new public mailing list to discuss topics related to CAs and root store programs that use the CCADB.
• The HTTP Working Group announced the last call for the new Client-Cert HTTP Header Field IETF document, which standardizes how a TLS terminating reverse proxy communicates client certificate information to the origin server.