Relevant mailing list post: <a href="https://www.mail-archive.com/dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org/msg04654.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.mail-archive.com/dev-security-policy@lists.mozil...</a><p>In this email, Comodo discloses the security issue to Mozilla. The email was sent 26 days after researchers Florian Heinz and Martin Kluge of Vautron Rechenzentrum AG informed them of the bug.<p>Comodo clearly states that they used OCR for .eu and .be domains because the TLD registrars redacted their port 43 WHOIS data, and only provided an image of an email address on their web WHOIS pages. There was apparently no other way to obtain the email address.<p>Rather than flag humans to fix OCR in ambiguous situations, they had automated heuristics to correct the OCR, as determined by the security researchers. However, the heuristics chose the wrong output for the domain @a1telekom.at, producing @altelekom.at (an L instead of a one). The researchers registered altelekom.at and obtained a cert for a domain owned by A1 Telekom, a major ISP.
>The OCR has a reproducible bug and has trouble differentiating small l and the number 1. It also has trouble differentiating the number 0 and the small o. Instead of fixing the bug or not using such obviously unsuitable software the software apparently evaluates the following characters - if there is a number after the small l it reads the l as the number 1. Similar issues with o/0.<p>So what they're saying is y0u can fo0l their servers with 1eetspeak?
I am usually not good with donations but one company that I gladly donated to has been letsencrypt.
They have made life so simple. Please donate[0] or become a sponsor[1] if you can.<p>[0] <a href="https://letsencrypt.org/donate/" rel="nofollow">https://letsencrypt.org/donate/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://letsencrypt.org/become-a-sponsor/" rel="nofollow">https://letsencrypt.org/become-a-sponsor/</a>
For the love of God, why has Mozilla not suspended Comodo yet? Too big to fail, my ass -- give a few months of warning before the notBefore cutoff date, and everyone will have plenty of time to switch over to a competent CA.
Comodo should be put out of business. They stole $100 from me for a certificate then gave me the run around for months while I tried to get a refund for a certificate I never received. Still haven't gotten my money back.
The underlying issue here is that WHOIS is still not standardised despite being around for over 30 years, and the registrars do not have any other common interface that can be used to discover domain owners and other metadata. Is there no workable solution to this problem?
Universities that are part of InCommon paid to get unlimited Comodo SSL certs. Their API was pretty terrible and we ended up finding quite a few issues.<p>Every time I hear about these Comodo breaches, I'm not surprised. Supposedly, Iran was able to get them to issue fake certs for some major sites:<p><a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2382518,00.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2382518,00.asp</a>
Previously from Comodo:<p><a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/2887632/secure-advertising-tool-privdog-compromises-https-security.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcworld.com/article/2887632/secure-advertising-to...</a>
Web security based on PKI model based on 100's of "trusted" authorities is just broken. And yet, the "security industry" continues doubling down on "moar TLS" "moar green locks" model instead of coming up with a better model.<p>The tragedy is, that most of the internet access is now happening from mobile devices and majority of <i>that</i> is coming from native apps. The apps need neither the same trust model nor have any "green locks". But PKI/TLS based orthodoxy has such a death grip on the industry that people continue to use this broken model for native apps where it makes even less sense than it does for browsers.
Did Comodo admit to using OCR for this, and that it wasn't a human transcription mistake (humans mistake 1's and l's too)<p>It just seems odd for them to use an image of a web page to transcribe information from a web lookup when they could just scrape the text off the web page directly without using the intermediate image and OCR.<p>However, I could see them using a human in the chain to look up the whois information, it just seems strange to come up with a complicated OCR solution (and if they did, that they couldn't find a font that makes 1's and l's look more distinct, like <a href="http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?t=4004" rel="nofollow">http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?t=4004</a>)
More worrying than some OCR silliness is that Comodo is issuing certificates based solely on WHOIS data. I don't think it is intended for such security critical use.
How people still think the PKI system is actually delivering security is beyond me.<p>We have <i>zero</i> idea how many bad certs like this may be out there (the nefarious people won't publish their results, after all), and yet a browser will still treat a Comodo cert as better than a self-signed one (it's identical to a self-signed cert, since Comodo is a known bad actor now). It's better than plaintext, of course, but that's not saying much.