Re: Security team successfully cracks SSL using 200 PS3's and MD5 flaw.

[Martin List-Petersen <martin () airwire ie>]

Joe Abley wrote:
> On 2009-01-02, at 09:04, Rodrick Brown wrote:
>
> > A team of security researchers and academics has broken a core piece
> > of Internet technology. They made their work public at the 25th Chaos
> > Communication Congress in Berlin today. The team was able to create a
> > rogue certificate authority and use it to issue valid SSL certificates
> > for any site they want. The user would have no indication that their
> > HTTPS connection was being monitored/modified.
>
> I read a comment somewhere else that while this is interesting, and good
> work, and well done, in practice it's much easier to social-engineer a
> certificate with a stolen credit card from a real CA than it is to
> create a fake CA.
>
> (I'd give proper attribution if I could remember who it was, but it put
> things into perspective for me at the time so I thought I'd share.)

It is. But this issue might open for man-in-the-middle attacks, which is
much harder for issued certificates.

Issued certificates usually also incorporate a check, that you control a
domain etc.

With engineered certificates you can practically avoid that whole process.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
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