Intermediate certs allow anyone to mint web credentials for any Internet server.

Astonishingly, the private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237.

exploiting compromised certificates requires an active adversary-in-the-middle attack, meaning the attacker must act as a proxy between two TLS parties and receive encrypted traffic, decrypt it, reencrypt it, and send it to the other party. Such capabilities, in some cases, are usually limited to only the most well-resourced attackers. People with control of a local network—at a coffee shop, university, or other organization—face much less of a challenge.

https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/

Xkcd 221: int getRandomNumber() { return 4; // chosen by fair dice roll. guaranteed to be random. }

    • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      Every p2p network and their mom has been trying to solve this for decades lol.

      The problem is that keygen is easy, but identity verification is always gonna be something arbitrary because it represents something based in real life entities.

      Even with TLS, people only trust google.com as being Google because they learned that Google uses google.com.

      I could make a goggle.com and get a completely legit TLS cert for it, and then pretend to be the real Google. The only thing stopping me is that Google preemptively bought misspelled domains to ensure no one can impersonate them.

      The lazy solution already exists. Just don’t use PKI and use direct trust on first connect like SSH.

    • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      11 hours ago

      Ok, but what would that look like in a way that would have mitigated this situation? Seems likely that such a system could actually exacerbate this specific scenario.