On 2009-01-07 at 08:06 -0500, Cat Okita wrote:
> This one's going to be messy -- check your code, check your certs...
> 
> http://openssl.org/news/secadv_20090107.txt

On a related note, have people seen the recent demonstration that the
flaws in MD5 can be used for practical attacks against the Internet PKI,
such that a rogue Certificate Authority trusted by all common browsers
can be created, thus undermining all checks on identity?

The new hole above looks as though it's useful for a direct
man-in-the-middle, but for as long as you accept certificates where a
path in the trust chain uses MD5 signatures you're also up a dark creek
without a paddle.  Expecting users to start checking the hash algorithms
for bank sites, etc, is a definite non-starter.  Until the NIST
competition yields a new standard hash algorithm it looks as though
we're using the less-broken SHA1 for certs.

http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

So if you're going through your certs anyway, it's probably worth
checking your internal Certificate Authority cert and making sure you're
not using MD5 and re-issuing certs as needed so that you're ahead of the
game when browsers stop supporting MD5-based certs -- hopefully this
year.

-Phil
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