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Re: [saag] Further MD5 breaks: Creating a rogue CA certificate

pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) Wed, 31 December 2008 01:50 UTC

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From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
To: paul.hoffman@vpnc.org, pmhesse@geminisecurity.com, rlmorgan@washington.edu
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Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 14:20:39 +1300
Cc: ietf-pkix@imc.org, ietf-smime@imc.org, cfrg@irtf.org, saag@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [saag] Further MD5 breaks: Creating a rogue CA certificate
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"Peter Hesse" <pmhesse@geminisecurity.com> writes:

>Ceasing the issuance of certificates with MD5 used in the signature doesn't
>solve the problem of the certificates that have already been issued and are
>still out there, any number of which may be rogue.
>
>Replacing, or marking as untrusted all root certificates which have any
>current valid (i.e. non-expired, non-revoked) certificates with MD5 used in
>the signature could have tremendous undesirable impact and be an untenable
>solution.

I hate to be the one to point to the elephant in the room (well OK, I don't
hate it, it's rather fun actually) but you need to keep this in perspective:
one in ten AuthentiCode-signed Windows binaries is malware, and cybercrooks
have no problems at all obtaining certs from commercial CAs using stolen
identities and credentials for pretty much any use they want.  The current MD5
attack is very cool but there's no need to worry about bad guys doing much
with it because it's much, much easier to get legitimate CA-issued certs the
normal way, you buy them just like everyone else does (except that you use
someone else's credit card and identity, obviously).

In other words, if this problem is fixed, would anyone other than security
geeks even notice?  I doubt the crooks will.

Peter.
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