SSL in Real Life


We live in the Post Snowden Era and we all need to think about what shall happen with our Privacy, with the Internet and the way we communicate. The situation is fundamentally different to what we had about 20 years before…

All the laws which should protect us were made in times were surveillance needed physical access to place phone taps and microphones. Communication was bound to a distributed physical medium which needed direct access to break into it. Additionally, communication was from point to point on shorted path.

In the internet everything is connected now and on infrastructure based on TCP/IP serves everything. The internet is not as distributed as most people think. Because some very large internet knots bundle a lot of communication on them. Their number is limited and some institutions are able to hook into them as revealed…

One of the recommendations is to encrypt everything. From simple web pages over email to all other forms of communications. As long as only some communication is encrypted, there is still to much information open, so everybody should encrypt it messages (even the unimportant ones) to increase the noise in the net to make it attackers more difficult to find out what are important communications and what is not. With this in mind, we decided at PureSol Technologies to provide all out Website via HTTPS (SSL encryption via HTTP). As soon as the decision was made, the issues started…

Trusted Communication only via Root CA


One of the current major issues is that only Root CAs are able to issue good certificate for SSL which bring Browsers to the “Green Lock Mode” which shows the site as trusted without any warning. Otherwise, browsers show a warning about not trusted certificates, because the authentication was not performed and nobody knows whether the certificate was provided by the correct organization or person. This is correct in so far, that I could create certificates which claim to be issued from Microsoft Corportation. To avoid this, some so called Root CAs are authorized to check the certificate to be authentic. A good idea so far…

Problem 1: There are not so much Root CAs and the prices are too high for small companies like PureSol Technologies. The prices for certificates can go up to the 1kEUR per year. I better spend this money for developers.

Problem 2: There were already issues with security breaches in Root CAs. The most prominent one was the erronous issues certificates to an individual in the name of Microsoft. The issue, this individual was not in any kind related to Microsoft. See Mircosoft database: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/293818

Why shouldn’t I provide my own certificates? I can create my keys and certificates on a completely disconnected computer and copy the stuff via Sneakernet. OK, there is still the issue, that I claim to be me, but knowbody knows whether this is correct or not… But to pay thousands of Euros for that kind of service which should be a one time event?

Not handled Certificate Revokation Lists

It is still not standardized when, how and by whom the certificates are to be rechecked for validity. The above mentioned issue with the VeriSign create Microsoft certificates showed, that even Microsoft had to create a hot patch to contain that issue, because Windows itself could not deal with certificate revokation lists. It is still a place of construction and a week spot in SSL and the network of trust.

So, Root CAs provide an expensive service to provide security, but it is not really clear, how the revokation lists are handled. The problem here is manyfold. What happens, if the service for revokation check is down? How often is to be checked?

Running an Own Certificate Authority

After checking prices, services and how much work it is to deal with SSL and certificates on our own, we decided to run our own Certificate Authority.

You can find the needed public information at http://ca.puresol-technologies.com.

There is only one issue: The PureSol Technologies Certificate Authority is not a pre-installed CA in browsers. So, if an HTTPS connection is opened to PureSol Technologie site, the browsers will download the certificates and during the check they find, that no known Root CA has checked and signed these.

To overcome this, we provide the PureSol Technologies Certificate Authority Website for certificate download. To check the authenticity we provide the certificates to clients via Sneakernet for local installation.

Additionally, site which are “read-only” for clients are provided via HTTP and HTTPS. Only sites which enforce user interaction like logins, we provide via HTTPS only. All HTTP connections on these sites are automatically redirected to its HTTPS variant.

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