A mighty fortress is our PKI, Part II

Ben Laurie ben at links.org
Wed Jul 28 06:34:14 EDT 2010


On 28/07/2010 00:14, Paul Tiemann wrote:
> On Jul 27, 2010, at 3:34 PM, Ben Laurie wrote:
> 
>> On 24/07/2010 18:55, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>>> - PKI dogma doesn't even consider availability issues but expects the
>>>  straightforward execution of the condition "problem -> revoke cert".  For a
>>>  situation like this, particularly if the cert was used to sign 64-bit
>>>  drivers, I wouldn't have revoked because the global damage caused by that is
>>>  potentially much larger than the relatively small-scale damage caused by the
>>>  malware.  So alongside "too big to fail" we now have "too widely-used to
>>>  revoke".  Is anyone running x64 Windows with revocation checking enabled and
>>>  drivers signed by the Realtek or JMicron certs?
>>
>> One way to mitigate this would be to revoke a cert on a date, and only
>> reject signatures on files you received after that date.
> 
> I like that idea, as long as a verifiable timestamp is included.
> 
> Without a trusted timestamp, would the bad guy be able to backdate the signature?

Note that I avoided this issue by using the date of receipt.

-- 
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html           http://www.links.org/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff

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