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The ‘SSL Encryption Without Authentication’ Debate

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THREATLABZ
10月 03, 2008 - 8 分で読了

Every so often I encounter a debate where an individual is making a case for the value of supporting/accepting self-signed SSL certificates in browsers. Basically their argument is “I do not care about authentication of SSL, I just want the encryption part…so why should I have to pay VeriSign or another commercial CA all that money for an SSL certificate that verifies my identity?” This question seems to be newly fueled by the fact that Firefox 3 now requires the user to go through a laborious 4-step process to allow the browser to connect to an SSL site utilizing a self-signed certificate.

The problem is: anyone who asks the above question is ignoring how SSL works and how SSL employs encryption in the first place. If you are trying to keep an evil person from learning your secrets, but you do not authenticate who you are talking to, you are basically overlooking that you may well be telling your secrets to the evil person directly! If you don’t authenticate the identity of someone, they are essentially an unidentified stranger to you. And the idea of wanting to keep your secrets from strangers (i.e. encryption) but also be willing to give your secrets to strangers (i.e. no authentication) is contradictory. If you have no idea of who you are talking to, then what value is the encryption really providing? How do you tell a complete stranger a secret in private and still expect the secret to remain safe from strangers?

Let’s look at how SSL tackles authentication via the use of certificates. A signed (i.e. authenticated) certificate is essentially a digital record that says “My name is Bob, and this big trusted company over here agrees with that statement.” The idea is that browsers trust a set of big trusted companies (Certificate Authorities such as VeriSign, Thawte, etc.), and that creates a trust chain: we trust the browser, the browser trusts the CA, the CA says this is Bob, so we trust it is Bob. On the other hand, a self-signed (i.e. non-authenticated) certificate is a digital record that says “My name is Bob, and you will just have to trust me that what I am saying is true.” It’s almost like the honor-system approach of everyone stating who they are; but how do we know if they are lying? Essentially, you don’t…because self-signed certificates can be created by anyone to say anything (that is the whole purpose of self-signed certificates). An evil attacker can trivially generate certificates that say “My name is Paypal, and you will just have to trust me,” “My name is eBay, and you will just have to trust me,” “My name is Bank of America, and you will just have to trust me,” etc. The only thing that prevents the attacker from deceiving you with these malicious self-signed certificates is your browser’s better judgment of not trusting these arbitrarily fabricated declarations of identity having no proof. Remember: security is about keeping you safe despite lies and deception; we need to ensure that a simple lie by an attacker won’t compromise the entire process. In this case, self-signed certificates offer a way for attackers to lie about their identity with impunity.

So let’s go back to the original premise of the question and look a bit more technically at what’s going on. The argument is the desire to have encryption without authentication. That means the sensitivity and secrecy of the data is still an issue/desire, otherwise, why bother with encryption? The primary threat vector mitigated by end-to-end encryption on a network is passive eavesdropping (a.k.a. network sniffing). But keep in mind that, in SSL, the encryption keys are dynamically negotiated by the two endpoints at the start of the connection (after authentication has concluded). Thus encryption by itself offers no security value if the passive eavesdropping attacker decides to switch to an active man-in-the-middle or interception attack (which is technically viable if they were already in a position to eavesdrop your network traffic to begin with); this just means you are now negotiating an encryption key with the attacker and directly sending them your data. SSL normally mitigates these attacks by the use of authentication, to ensure the endpoint you negotiate your encryption key with is indeed who they say they are. However if we allow self-signed certificates to be used and therefore overlook the authentication aspect, there is zero guarantee that the person you just negotiated an encryption tunnel with isn’t the person you were trying to secure your information from (via encryption) in the first place. True, it does require the attacker to switch from a passive attack to an active attack, but that is of little consequence if the attacker truly wants to compromise the data. And attackers are already playing very active roles in attacks today (setting up an entire phishing site and sending out phishing emails isn’t exactly a passive affair…).

I have a hunch the real motive behind petitioning for self-signed certificate support is purely economic. Web site operators want to appear to conform to user expectations of security and privacy via the use of SSL (the whole “make sure the little lock icon appears in your browser before you send sensitive info” mantra), but without having to shell out cash for a real SSL certificate (if they just paid the money for a proper CA-signed certificate, this whole debate is moot). It’s the façade of security without actually delivering on the promise. But those that are using self-signed SSL certificates for production uses, even prior to the newer crop of browsers handling them less favorably, are already doing a slight injustice to security as whole—because they are forcing a user to essentially make a “Yes I know this is insecure, please proceed anyways” decision. Accepting self-signed certificates in older browsers is usually just a semi-scary dialogue followed by a one-click override from the user….and apparently the protagonists of this debate believe this (was) acceptable for users to do. But isn’t that just exacerbating the phenomenon of users continually making bad security choices, by explicitly encouraging them to do so? We should not be encouraging users to bypass or override security protection mechanisms put there for their own good; what starts as an encouraged exception may eventually become an assumed norm (I’d like to make a Pavlov reference here, but I don’t want it seen as belittling the behavior or intelligence of users).

All of that said, I suppose there are some certain approaches that may offer a balanced compromise. If we look at SSH, we encounter the same basic problem: when the client first connects to the server, it doesn’t know if the server is actually the right server or not. So usually the client prompts the user with a small fingerprint of the server’s identity in order to verify that identity out-of-band. If the user instructs the client to proceed, the client caches the server’s identity fingerprint. From that point on, as long as the server’s identity fingerprint matches what is cached, life is good. If that identity fingerprint ever changes, then lots of security bells and whistles go off because something is afoot, such as a man-in-the-middle attack (or the server admin re-generated their identity information, which is not something done arbitrarily). Basically it reduces the “no-authentication” scenario down to only the very first, initial connection that the client makes to the server. An attacker would have one chance—and one chance only—to intercept that very first connection and supply impersonated credentials. But also keep in mind, if the attacker stops the interception ruse and allows the connections to proceed to the proper server, the client will immediately alert the user to something fishy because the server identity (as seen by the client) has changed. So an attacker can remain undetected if and only if they intercept that very first connection, and only for as long as they actively and continually intercept all future connections. That reduces the chance of successful attack to a very small window, and requires moderate effort on part of the attacker to remain undetected. Perhaps this approach could be adapted to browsers, where a self-signed certificate for a given site can be manually verified once (the first time), and then cached so that as long as the certificate doesn’t change, it can be assumed to be the same site. It is entirely a change to the client browser and how SSL certificates are validated; no SSL protocol or server-side changes are necessary.

But unless browsers were to enact such a change, the use of self-signed certificates in this day in age is a risky proposition. They are fine for testing purposes, but they should never be used in production with real users. An alternate approach to using self-signed certificates is to create your own CA (you can use the free OpenSSL suite to do so) and use your CA to sign your server certificates; then encourage your users to install your CA certificate. This at least maintains the integrity and security value of the SSL protocol, and would allow the users' browsers to function without any security warnings requiring user interaction. However, you must then guard your CA private keys thoroughly, as you have now because a trusted entity in the browser’s eyes; if your CA keys are stolen, it would allow attackers to generate arbitrary certificates that are signed by your CA. In other words, the attacker could create the equivalent of arbitrary self-signed certificates but would actually use you as the trusted signing authority, and since the users’ browsers now trust your CA, the browsers would inherently trust all of the attacker’s certificates.

Regardless of what you do, one thing is for certain: you do not want to be the weakest link in the security chain. SSL literally has a trust chain established by the use of authentication certificates, and trying to bypass authentication (and the associated trust chain) compromises all security (including encryption) offered by SSL. No one likes being identified as the weakest link, so save your company the PR trouble and just buy that SSL certificate from a proper CA. It’s what is best for everyone involved, and your wallet will recover.

- Jeff

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