I think open source is great, but it's not a panacea. While there are many CAs and several root programs, this community is a relatively small one in the grand scheme.
Prior events suggest that there are not enough people with the necessary skill overlap to parse both the rules and the code to make useful analysis while also having an interest in doing so. On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 9:59 AM Mike Kushner via dev-security-policy < dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org> wrote: > On Thursday, March 14, 2019 at 11:54:52 PM UTC+1, James Burton wrote: > > Let's Encrypt CA software 'Boulder' is open source for everyone to browse > > and check for issues. All other CAs should follow the Let's Encrypt lead > > and open source their own CA software for everyone to browse and check > for > > issues. We might have found the serial number issue sooner. > > > > Thank you, > > > > Burton > > Dude, EJBCA has been open source long enough to be able to legally vote > and have a driver's license. Literally. But I agree, and we are open source > for exactly that reason. > > I will add though, and stress, that this was not an issue with how EJBCA > generates serial numbers. EJBCA still produces serial numbers with the max > entropy for a given serial number length, as configured in number of > octets. If you set EJBCA to use 20 octets you'll get 159 bits of entropy, > the max available without breaking the RFC, and it's been that way since > 2014. > > To save people time, by the way, here you go: > > https://svn.cesecore.eu/svn/ejbca/trunk/ejbca/modules/cesecore-common/src/org/cesecore/certificates/ca/internal/SernoGeneratorRandom.java > > This was not an issue with the source, it was an issue with the end user's > understanding of what it means to define an SN length as given number of of > octets, how integer octets are defined in x690, and what entropy that can > be derived. That is all a documentation failure on our end - we could have > been more explicit, and we could have reached out more. > > There's also the faulty assumption that SN length = entropy. As we've > seen, many other CA implementations produce SNs with far less entropy than > their length would allow. I'm not saying that there's anything inherently > wrong with that, but it illustrates the danger of making assumptions. > > As we didn't follow cabf at the time we weren't fully aware of the > severity of the problem, and assumed that affected parties understood their > configurations and raised the SN length. > _______________________________________________ > dev-security-policy mailing list > dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy > _______________________________________________ dev-security-policy mailing list dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy
