In case you missed it, there was a bit of a row in the usually staid Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) world when the Government of France was caught red-handed spoofing some of Google’s Web sites with forged SSL certificates. The French claimed it was “human error,” and the mistake “had no consequences on the overall network security.” Sacrebleu!
The dustup, however, was not confined to Google. Microsoft indicated that the breach was possibly far wider, impacting Google Chrome on Windows, among other apps. Microsoft rushed out a fix, but not for Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. Sorry, all you Windows XP users out there – that secure Google site might not be from Google at all, and nobody is going to do anything about it.
Not only does this faux pas raise the stakes for Google’s Certificate Transparency project, but it also points out something far more sinister. After all, the NSA and Iran have also spoofed SSL certificates with compromised Certificate Authorities. In fact, it’s a relatively straightforward hack. So here’s the question: we know about France, the NSA, and Iran, but who is copying this attack that we don’t know about? After all, we only know about the ones that were caught. Where the French go, so goes the world. Can we trust PKI at all anymore?
