More on Certificates and Trust Decisions

/>

I
said earlier that certificates could be used to establish identity and hence the right
to run trustworthy software on your machine. I
want to emphasize in the strongest possible terms that this is not all that certificates
are used for. A lot of people are confused
by this, including a lot of very smart, technically savvy developers. Cryptographic
security is complex and poorly understood.

Let
me give you an example. One time I went
to a friend's web site. My friend is
a sharp and highly experienced developer. His
web site happens to use HTTPS, the "secure protocol", and I was very surprised when
I got an error message from IE saying that the certificate associated with the site
could not be trusted because it was self-signed. In
other words, the certificate says "The bearer's name is Sven Svenson. The
bearer's identity has been confirmed by Sven Svenson."

Obviously
that is not any kind of identity-establishing evidence! To
trust the cert you have to trust the certifying authority, but the certifying authority
is the person whose identity is in question! This
chain of trust is not rooted in an explicitly trusted authority, so it is worthless.
What is stopping, say, Bjorn Bjornson from typing up the same certificate? Nothing!

I
asked my buddy why he didn't use a Verisign certificate and his answer surprised me: "Nobody's
told me that they won't use the service unless I got a Verisign cert. And if they
did, I'd probably tell them that they shouldn't use my system if they don't trust
me ;)
"

My
friend was confusing code signing with secure HTTP. HTTPS
does not use certs to establish a trust
relationship between the client and the server by establishing the identity of the
code author
! HTTPS uses certs to
establish secure communication over an insecure
network by establishing identity of the web site
. Those
sure sound similar but they are in fact completely
different
uses of certs. Why? Because
in the first case, it is the code author who
is (potentially) untrusted. In the second
case, it is the insecure network that
is (definitely) untrusted.

Before
I continue let me briefly explain what the goal of HTTPS is, and how it works.

The
goal of HTTPS is to ensure that when you send information over the internet, two things
happen. First, the information is encrypted
so that if it is intercepted, the eavesdropper cannot read it. Second,
the server that you're talking to really is
the server that you THINK you're talking to.

 

We
have these two goals because there are two threats: first, someone
might be listening in on the traffic between the client and the server
, so you
need to ensure that they can't make sense of what they overhear. Second, someone
may have set up a "fake" server
that fools your client into believing that it
is talking to the "real" server, so you need to ensure that you are talking to the
"real" server.

When
you go to a secure web site -- like your bank, or Amazon or some other web site involving
transmission of credit card numbers over the internet -- the first thing the web site
does is send you a certificate containing the name of the web site. The
certificate has been signed by a trusted root -- Verisign, for example. Your
browser can then compare the certificate's web site name with the web site you actually
went to, and because it is vouched for by Verisign, you know that you
really are talking to the right server
. The
certificate also contains information about how to encrypt messages so that
only the server can decrypt them. That
is then enough information to mitigate both threats and establish a secure channel. (The
details of how that channel is established are not particularly germane; I may discuss
this in a future post.)

I'll
say it again: the certificate is NOT there to establish a trust relationship
between the client and the server. The
certificate is there so that you know that
you are talking to the real server, and no one can eavesdrop
. This is the internet
we're talking about: for all you know, evil geniuses have cut every line between
you and the entire internet and have inserted their own evil routers and servers that
look just like the real internet
. (For
all you know, this is someone else's blog!) It's Verisign's job to ensure that
those evil geniuses never get their hands on an Amazon.com certificate vouched for
by Verisign, because that is the only evidence you have that you are actually talking
to the real internet.

So
when you go to a web site with a self-signed HTTPS certificate, IE pops up an "abort
or continue?" dialog box. What that box
is trying to communicate is:

"Hey,
buddy, you are trying to communicate securely with FooCorp's web server but because
the certificate does not establish a chain of trust, IE is unable to determine if
the insecure internet between you and FooCorp has been taken over by evil genius hackers
who are presently spoofing you into believing that you are on the real internet
. Do
you want to go ahead and possibly be spoofed, or stop right now?"

Unfortunately,
the dialog box is not particularly clear on this point, and besides, everyone clicks
"OK" without reading dialog boxes. But
that's another story.

To
sum up: whether you trust FooCorp or not is not the issue -- if you're going to send
them your credit card number, presumably you already trust them! What
you don't trust is the wiring between
you and them. There might be hackers
at their ISP, or your ISP, or at any node on the network. There
might be people listening with packet sniffers and packet replacers. There might be
people listening to your wireless network traffic. HTTPS
is designed to protect users against untrustworthy, insecure or hostile network
providers
by ensuring identity and encrypting traffic.