Microsoft deems all DigiNotar certificates untrustworthy, releases updates

Sun Sep 11 17:19:39 UTC 2011

On 9/10/11 23:30 , Damian Menscher wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 11:33 PM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Marcus Reid <marcus at blazingdot.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 09:17:10AM -0700, Network IP Dog wrote:
>>> I like this response; instant CA death penalty seems to put the
>>> incentives about where they need to be.
>>
>> I wouldn't necessarily count them dead just yet;  although their legit
>> customers must be very unhappy  waking up one day to find their
>> legitimate working SSL certs suddenly unusable....
>>
>> So DigiNotar lost their "browser trusted"  root CA status.  That
>> doesn't necessarily mean they will
>> be unable to get other root CAs to cross-sign CA certificates they
>> will make in the future, for the right price.
>>
>> A cross-sign with CA:TRUE  is  just as good as being installed in
>> users' browser.
>>
> 
> The problem here wasn't just that DigiNotar was compromised, but that they
> didn't have an audit trail and attempted a coverup which resulted in real
> harm to users.  It will be difficult to re-gain the trust they lost.
> 
> Because of that lost trust, any cross-signed cert would likely be revoked by
> the browsers.  It would also make the browser vendors question whether the
> signing CA is worthy of their trust.

To pop up the stack a bit it's the fact that an organization willing to
behave in that fashion was in my list of CA certs in the first place.
Yes they're blackballed now, better late than never I suppose. What does
that say about the potential for other CAs to behave in such a fashion?

> Damian