How not to collect sensitive information

So I was chatting with a friend today about the recent Register article about TeliaSonera’s application to add a new root into into the Mozilla root program.

I could not recall ever visiting a site that used a certificate from TeliaSonera so I started looking around for one in my web crawler data, a few moments later my friend pointed me at Telia’s own home page where he noticed they were collecting user id’s and passwords from a CSS layer not served over SSL:

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More interestingly they also accept your Social Security Number as an alternative to your user id:

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Now it does submit these over SSL but if your reading this you know that the information is still susceptible to a Man In The Middle attack.

A quick look at its SSL configuration also shows the server has a number of SSL configuration problems:

1. Susceptible to DDOS because it supports client initiated renegotiation

2. Vulnerable to MITM because it supports insecure renegotiation

3. Supports weak and extra weak (export strength) ciphers

 

The certificate itself also doesn’t include OCSP pointers (which is required now under the baseline requirements, though it was issued before they become mandated) but more importantly it only includes a ldap reference to a CRL which most clients wont chase and if they did most firewalls wont allow out – in other words it can’t be meaningfully revoked by anyone other than the browsers.

More concerning is it is issued off of a root certificate authority which means its likely an online CA, vs something in a offline vault which means all sort of badness if you consider not all patches of browsers get adopted and the only way to revoke certificates like this is to patch the browser.

2 thoughts on “How not to collect sensitive information

  1. Erwann Abalea (@eabalea)

    I hadn’t looked at their own website.

    You’re right, it’s not BR compliant (issued by root, no OCSP, no SAN, the CRL contains suspended certificates), yet they replied to Mozilla January communication that their CA operation conform to CAB/Forum BR.

    Reply

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