Dennis Fisher

The inherent problems with the certificate authority infrastructure have been known for a long time, but they’ve become even more obvious with the news of the recent compromise of DigiNotar, which resulted in the issuance of a slew of fraudulent SSL certificates. In this talk from the Black Hat USA conference earlier this month, Moxie Marlinspike discusses the issues with CAs and his suggestion to replace the whole infrastructure.

VASCO, the parent company of DigiNotar, says that the fraudulent certificate for Google’s domains that the certificate authority issued was just one of many such bogus certificates it handed out in recent months, and blamed the growing scandal on an attack on its CA infrastructure.

When a small group of activists announced the debut of The Crypto Project earlier this year, for many, ahem, mature, security and privacy advocates it brought to mind memories of the original cypherpunk movement that began in the 1990s and that group’s seminal efforts to encourage the use of strong cryptography and anonymity online, as well as its successes and failures. The two groups are not allied by anything other than ideology, but The Crypto Project’s leaders are aiming to follow in the footsteps of the cypherpunks, build on their accomplishments and make security and privacy tools freely available to the masses.

UPDATE: A certificate authority in the Netherlands issued a valid SSL wildcard certificate for Google to a third party in July, leading to concerns that attackers may have been using the certificate to route sensitive traffic through their own servers, capturing it and compromising user data in the process. The certificate was revoked by the CA, DigiNotar, after the problem came to light Monday and Mozilla and Microsoft both have removed DigiNotar from their lists of trusted root CAs.

The Morto worm that began compromising machines via open RDP services this past weekend is continuing its work, going after workstations and servers and creating large amounts of network traffic from TCP port 3389.

A new worm called Morto has begun making the rounds on the Internet in the last couple of days, infecting machines via RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol). The worm is generating a large amount of outbound RDP traffic on networks that have infected machines, and Morto is capable of compromising both servers and workstations running Windows.

The Apache Software Foundation plans to have a fix available in the next day or so for the denial-of-service problem in Apache that was publicized late last week. The bug, which in some forms has been under discussion for more than four years, involves the way that the Web server handles certain overlapping range headers.