Another CA Issues False Certificates To Iran 229
arglebargle_xiv writes "Following on from Comodogate, we have another public CA issuing genuine false certificates to Iran, this time for Google. There's speculation that it's a MITM by the Iranian government, but given the existing record of CAs ready to sell certs to anyone whose check clears, it could just be another Comodogate." Another (anonymous) reader says, "What might be worrying is that the CA behind the forgery is the official supplier of most Dutch Government certificates, diginotar.nl. They are supposed to be very stringent in their application process. As a Dutchman, I'm very interested to see how this one plays out."
Adds Trailrunner7: "The attack appears to have been targeting Gmail users specifically. Some users trying to reach the Gmail servers over HTTPS found that their traffic was being rerouted through servers that shouldn't have been part of the equation. On Monday afternoon, security researcher Moxie Marlinspike checked the signatures on the certificate for the suspicious server, which had been posted to Pastebin and elsewhere on the Web, and found that the certificate was in fact valid. The attack is especially problematic because the certificate is a wildcard cert, meaning it is valid for any of Google's domains that use SSL."
Mozilla, Google, MS all agreed to remove the CA (Score:5, Informative)
http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2011/08/29/fraudulent-google-com-certificate/ [mozilla.com]
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/08/update-on-attempted-man-in-middle.html [blogspot.com]
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2607712.mspx [microsoft.com]
Re:Penalty: instant deletion of the CA, surely? (Score:5, Informative)
Mozilla, Google & Microsoft (at least, so far) have all now removed Diginotar from their list of trusted authorities in their respective browsers.