Hello Peter, > On 21 Nov 2022, at 14:30, Peter Müller wrote: > > Hello Michael, > hello *, > >> Hello Peter, >> >>> On 10 Nov 2022, at 10:39, Peter Müller wrote: >>> >>> Hello development folks, >>> >>> well, I always hate it when the concerns expressed in blog posts of mine come true. >>> Alas, in case of the last one on DANE (https://blog.ipfire.org/post/global-pki-considered-harmful-a-plaidoyer-for-using-dane), >>> we now seem to have another textbook incident of a trusted, but rogue CA operator >>> likely providing TLS surveillance capabilities to government entities: >>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/08/trustcor-internet-addresses-government-connections/ >>> >>> Mozilla stated that it is currently investigating into TrustCor Systems' nature, and >>> would remove its root certificates from its trust store if questions sent to TrustCore >>> are not answered in a satisfying manner by November 22. > > meanwhile, a TrustCor Systems representative provided some answers to the questions > raised (https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-policy/c/oxX69KFvsm4). > From what I gathered, the common sentiment on the dev-security-policy mailing list is > that these answers were not satisfying - a sentiment to which I concur. > >>> >>> We are probably not going to have a Core Update released before this date. Also, as >>> much as I would like to remove TrustCor Systems' certificates from the trust store >>> we ship, this would be a slippery slope: First, we would have _another_ thing we have >>> to maintain our own, and second, there are plenty of other dubious root CAs out there - >>> where do we draw the line? >>> >>> (To be honest, I am a bit surprised to see such TLS surveillance activity being >>> carried out through dedicated root CAs - to the best of my understanding, procuring >>> a trusted intermediate CA would have been a more stealthy approach.) >>> >>> I guess this leaves us with watching Mozilla's trust store closely, and adapt their >>> changes before releasing the next Core Update. >> >> Yes, I would say so. >> >> You mentioned the obvious reason before. Another one would be that it is not a good idea if some browser can open a TLS connection to some website, but IPFire cannot. That is unintuitive and difficult to debug behaviour. > > Just for the records, mobile operating system GrapheneOS announced to unilaterally > remove TrustCor Systems' root CAs: https://twitter.com/GrapheneOS/status/1590621986044383232 > > Regarding intuitiveness, I would argue that IPFire machines establish a very limited > number of HTTPS connections to an (usually) relatively small amount of target FQDNs, > so the removal of a root CA used as little as TrustCor Systems apparently is is unlikely > to induce major side-effects. Given that HTTPS fetching tools are usually quite explicit > about untrusted certificates, debugging should not be too difficult. > > Let's wait until tomorrow to see how Mozilla decides - should they choose to keep this > CA on board, we can always discuss whether or not we want to follow this decision. :-) Agreed. I hope they will remove it and then we can put this problem aside. -Michael > Thanks, and best regards, > Peter Müller