Re: Creating a rogue CA certificate

["Elazar Broad" <elazar () hushmail com>]

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<snip>
is more cost effective
</snip>

should have been is *it

On Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:57:52 -0500 Elazar Broad
<elazar () hushmail com> wrote:
> That's true, keeping up with security is not cheap nor easy.
> Tradeoff's are tradeoff's, the question is, when it comes down to
> the $$$, is more cost effective to be proactive vs reactive in
> this
> case. Time will tell...
>
> On Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:42:47 -0500 Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:
> > On Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:13:07 EST, Elazar Broad said:
> > > And they should have listened then, it was only a matter of
> time
> > > before someone fleshed out a practical attack, and that time is
> > > now. Then again, I am sure there some ATM's out there still
> > using
> > > DES. How many time's do we need to prove Moore's law...
> >
> > Playing devil's advocate for a moment...
> >
> > And perhaps they *were* listening, but realized that security is
> > about
> > tradeoffs, and they balanced the cost of doing the upgrade back
> > then
> > against the chances that a team as technically and budget-wise
> > prepared
> > as this one, *and with nefarious intent*, would do something
> > significantly
> > drastic enough to dent their revenue stream.
> >
> > Read section 5.2 of the hashclash/rogue-ca paper.  The victim CA
> > is churning
> > out an average of 1,000 certs in 3 days, let's say at $12 per.
> > That's some
> > $600K per year for just the weekends, not counting the Mon-Thurs
> > span which
> > is probably even higher (and why they targeted a weekend).  So
> $2M
> > per year
> > or more.
> >
> > Who wants to place a bet that said CA will be selling *the same
> > number*
> > of certs every week, meaning they had *no* economic loss due to
> > this hack,
> > because their customers won't actually *see* the news article and
> > give them
> > a bad feeling about their CA?  And with no actual loss, why spend
> > the money
> > to implement the change?
> >
> > Hint: It *isn't* just a matter of changing one line in a script
> to
> > say
> > 'sha1' instead of 'md5' - you *also* need to go back and look at
> > all the
> > certs you've issued already and figure out if they've been
> > tweaked...
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