Apologies, I realize that Mozilla’s policy is that revocation is up to the CA 
and there is no such thing as an exception. A more careful way to state what I 
meant is that I’m surprised that there is not more discussion around the 
revocation of all of these certificates and the impact to the ecosystem 
compared to an assumption that they will all be revoked. There has been some 
discussion of course, but 1.8 million certificates is a lot of certificates to 
replace. I’d think to see more discussion here from GoDaddy about ether they 
are replacing the certificates or not and the pros and cons of doing so.

 

From: Wayne Thayer <wtha...@mozilla.com> 
Sent: Friday, March 8, 2019 3:46 PM
To: Ryan Sleevi <r...@sleevi.com>
Cc: Jeremy Rowley <jeremy.row...@digicert.com>; 
mozilla-dev-security-pol...@lists.mozilla.org
Subject: Re: Pre-Incident Report - GoDaddy Serial Number Entropy

 

Ryan beat me to the punch. so I'll reinforce his message with my own:

 

The overall potential impact from revocations in the current scenario feels 
quite similar to the potential for disruption from revoking certificates 
containing underscores a few months ago. Mozilla's guidance for revocation [1] 
was updated based on the "underscores" discussion, and it is generally 
applicable here. (I will give it another review in light of the current 
situation.)

 

In my opinion, Mozilla should not get in to the business of granting one-off 
exceptions to the BR revocation requirements. In this case, doing so would 
certainly not be fair to Google, and in the future would only result in 
constant pleas for mercy that would be near impossible to refuse. Revocation 
decisions should ultimately be made by CAs and followed up with disclosure and 
preventative action. Mozilla should highlight situations where delaying 
revocation will be viewed as an egregious failure by a CA to respond to an 
imminent threat.

 

I believe that Google's response here sets a good, if imperfect, example of the 
agility we desire for the entire web PKI. I hope that the current event serves 
to illustrate the need for agility and encourages CAs to develop more solutions 
that move us in that direction.

 

- Wayne

 

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Responding_To_An_Incident#Revocation

 

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 3:40 PM Ryan Sleevi via dev-security-policy 
<dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org 
<mailto:dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org> > wrote:

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 4:35 PM Jeremy Rowley via dev-security-policy <
dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org 
<mailto:dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org> > wrote:

> does Mozilla want to require a complete revocation and replacement? Seems
> like a lot of effort and disruption for little value to the Mozilla
> community.


I'm surprised, given the length of the discussion in [1], to see such an
unhelpful framing of the issue, as it sounds remarkably like asking for an
"exception". I had hoped that the changes [2] to the policy [3] had
provided greater clarity about what the expectations are for CAs. It does
seem that CAs are following that process, which is something another CA
recently did in the case of underscores, so perhaps its best to not try and
re-open that discussion? :)

I think a particular piece of guidance and clarification, expected of such
incident reports, and captured in [3], is
"That you will perform an analysis to determine the factors that prevented
timely revocation of the certificates, and include a set of remediation
actions in the final incident report that aim to prevent future revocation
delays."

It does seem that this is an essential and valuable piece for the
community, regardless of the CA affected and regardless of the nature of
the incident. After all, it doesn't seem to dissimilar to the discussion
regarding Heartbleed, and the challenges the ecosystem faced then.

[1]
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/0oy4uTEVnus/pnywuWbmBwAJ
[2]
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/HdirGOy6TJI/oIHKXeSuCAAJ
[3] https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Responding_To_An_Incident#Revocation
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