Crypto certificates impersonating Google and Yahoo pose threat to Windows users | Ars Technica: "A blog post published Tuesday by Google security engineer Adam Langley said the fraudulent transport layer security (TLS) certificates were issued by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) of India, an intermediate certificate authority that is trusted and overseen by India's Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA)."

My personal opinion is that many of the so-called trusted technologies that are in use on the internet have never really been properly audited or stress-tested. It's only as the malware networks reap their rewards that anyone is paying any real attention to exploits. Software is complex and hard to debug and it gets much worse when you consider a heterogenous system such as the global internet. On the plus side, a truly heterogenous system based on standards says that someone is going to emerge as a clear leader in this area.

I personally think the monolithic bloatware OS is going to be superseded in the coming years by something very minimalistic. Maybe a hypervisor. Something so small it can be completely tested and debugged.

This mad race to add OS features isn't really serving anyone. Except the marketers. In other words, people who don't have any vested long-term interest in the integrity of a user's experience. Just as long as the gloss is still the most prevalent consideration.

Oh, wait. Icon gloss has been deprecated for flat minimalistic design. By design I mean fashion fad.

Labels: certificate trust chain, security, self-signed certificates

Before DeveloperID was announced, I spent considerable time creating a 3-layer self-signed codesign certificate chain for my own applications. There are bugs (at least in Keychain Access for Snow Leopard) that make creating self-signed certificates painstakingly error-prone. Mostly due to the fact that the Certificate Assistant does not remember all settings when moving backward and forwards through the wizard.

In any event, it is possible to create your own root Certificate Authority (which you can publish on your web site, ala Apple's Root CA) and your own intermediate software-signing certificate and your own leaf certificates.

Someone conversant with OpenSSL can probably get it done faster and quicker than with Certificate Assistant.

My intent in creating a self-signed certificate chain was to verify that 3rd party codesigning certificates -- and binaries signed with 3rd party certificates -- would work with Tighten Pro. And they do. As long as the signing chain has 3 certificates.

Labels: certificate authority, codesigning, self-signed certificates, validation