Re: [cryptography] How much does it cost to start a root CA ?
Jon, Many thanks for this very informative post - really appreciated. Some comments, below... On Sat, 5 Jan 2013, Jon Callas wrote: Now that $250K that I spent got an offline root CA and an intermediate online CA. The intermediate was not capable of supporting workloads that would make you a major business. You need a data center after that, that supports the workloads that your business requires. But of course, you can grow that with your customer workload, and you can buy the datacenter space you need. You're the second person in this thread to mention hardware and datacenter costs ... and while I don't want to drift too far into a blood and guts sysadmin rundown, I am curious... Are you talking about the customer facing, retail side of things with the webservers and the load balancers and all of the things that make a robust web presence or are you talking strictly the x.509 components ? Because it seems to me (naive ?) that even a very high volume x.509 signing operation is ... maybe a pair of good 1u servers and a rack at a decent (sas70/pci/blah/blah) datacenter ... ? Ok, a firewall and maybe some IDS system ... but we're still only a handful of 1u boxes and a quarter of a rack... Perhaps it's this kind of thinking that leads to failed audits :) There are rumors, which you've read here about how there are lots of underhanded obstacles in the way of becoming a CA. My experience is that the only underhanded part of the industry is that no one in it dispels the rumors that there are underhanded obstacles in your path. This is pretty much the first time I have, so I suppose I'm as guilty as anyone else. That's nice to know, and I'm heartened that all the way into 2012 this is still the case, but ... boy oh boy does this look and smell like a marketplace ripe for monopolization and a cartel ... it's almost a classic case. I think the presence of a major browser that is a community, independent effort is an interesting wrinkle, and the fickleness of the browsing public (how fast did chrome shoot up the charts ? Safari ?) adds a wrinkle too, but ... there's no way the large, entrenched players aren't sitting around thinking gee we have a nice thing going here... Not a conspiracy theory, just common sense... Thanks again for a really thougt-provoking post. ___ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
[cryptography] How much does it cost to start a root CA ?
Let's assume hardware is zero ... it's a really variable cost, so I assume (correct me if I'm wrong) that it is a trivial cost compared to legal and audit costs, etc. So what does it cost to start a root CA, get properly audited (as I see the root CAs are) and get yourself included into, say, firefox or chrome ? A followup question would be: Is inclusion of a root CA in the major browsers a shall issue process ? hat is, you meet the criteria and you get in ? Or is it a subjective, political process ? Finally, it seems to me that since there re so few root CAs (~30 ?) and the service provided is such an arbitrary, misunderstood one, that existing CAs would be actively trying to prevent new entrants ... and establish themsevles as toll collectors with a pseudo monopoly ... what evidence (if any) do we have that they are pursuing such an ecosystem ? Thank you. ___ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [cryptography] How much does it cost to start a root CA ?
On Fri, 4 Jan 2013, yersinia wrote: Finally, it seems to me that since there re so few root CAs (~30 ?) and the service provided is such an arbitrary, misunderstood one, that existing CAs would be actively trying to prevent new entrants ... and establish themsevles as toll collectors with a pseudo monopoly ... what evidence (if any) do we have that they are pursuing such an ecosystem ? Many today say that there are too many root CA, not a few. Is not it? https://www.eff.org/observatory. Maybe. That's outside the scope of the questions I asked, though - I'm just interested in how difficult it is currently to start one, and what barriers the incumbents are putting into place... ___ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [cryptography] How much does it cost to start a root CA ?
On Fri, 4 Jan 2013, Greg Rose wrote: You could ask the folks at CAcert... I imagine Ian Grigg will also chime in. Certification costs a lot, and as you have observed, the incumbents try very hard to keep you out. Despite some reasonable sources of funding, CAcert still didn't succeed. Well, I actually have not observed that, I just *assumed* it to be the case based on my general understanding of markets, etc. So it appears that was a good assumption. I would indeed like to hear about how the incumbents protect this turf and to what degree they are doing so ... ___ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [cryptography] The NSA and secure VoIP
On Thu, 1 Mar 2012, Jeffrey Walton wrote: On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 10:27 PM, Steven Bellovin s...@cs.columbia.edu wrote: http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/292189,nsa-builds-android-phone-for-top-secret-calls.aspx makes for interesting reading. I was particularly intrigued by this: Voice calls are encrypted twice in accordance with NSA policy, using IPSEC and SRTP, meaning a failure requires “two independent bad things to happen,” Salter said. Margaret Salter is the head of the Information Assurance Directorate of the NSA. Interesting. I seem to recall that cascading ciphers is frowned upon on sci.crypt. I wonder if this is mis-information Yes, I've had that beaten into my head from books/talks/posts forever now, but I never quite understood it. If the end result of your ciphertext has headers or metadata that can be used for known-plaintext attack, then it makes sense, but if you are just feeding raw ciphertext into the next algorithm, it shouldn't be a danger... right ?___ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [cryptography] trustwave admits issuing corporate mitm certs
On Sun, 12 Feb 2012, Jeffrey Walton wrote: (2) Did the other end of the SSL/TLS tunnel also agree to be monitored? Ding! Yes, that is the key - and was the key the first time we visited this subject a few months ago. When all is said and done, and Jane Doe cube peasant signs away her life, and the browsers all look the other way and every CA is doing it ... after all of that, does Wells Fargo actually consent to your bullshit Fortune 30,000 firm monitoring their online banking ? I'll bet not. How about eftps.gov ? How about dmv.ca.gov ? There are two sides to an SSL transaction ... ___ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
