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by trulyrandom 2344 days ago
The advisory from Microsoft is quite bizarre. It focuses on code signature validation, rather than X.509 as a whole. It also doesn't say anything about how the vulnerability itself works. Vague advisories like this are dangerous, because it gives adversaries an advantage over IT departments that don't know which system they should patch first. It would be much better if everyone understood exactly what the impact is from the get go. The NSA advisory is a bit better, but still doesn't tell us how exactly the ECC certificate validation bug works. We're left with only a few hints.
1 comments
JackRabbitSlim 2343 days ago
X509 as a whole is fine and this isn't so much arbitrary MITM of any web server. It's specific to ECC public keys(not specifically X509 certs) that validate from cryptoAPI which is a fairly limited but devastating scope. EG Code signing.

Firefox uses its own NSS libraries not cryptoAPI to verify certs and is completely unaffected. I assume every major browser uses NSS or their own APIs as well. And of course RSA and AES certificates remain unaffected.

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trulyrandom 2343 days ago
TLS supports ECC certificates, so any web client using crypt32 to verify those is affected. That includes web browsers and lots of other types of services, so it's not primarily code signed executables.

Does Firefox still use NSS when using the Windows Certificate Store for the source of trusted root certs? What about Chrome?

You're right that RSA certificates are unaffected. There's no such thing as AES certificates, though.

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tialaramex 2343 days ago
> Does Firefox still use NSS when using the Windows Certificate Store for the source of trusted root certs?

Yes. When enabled this feature in Firefox just effectively copies certificates from one of the Windows trust stores but continues to use its own (NSS) logic for trust decisions. Note also that Firefox's config switch only looks at your local changes - a corporate CA, a MITM proxy on a dev's workstation, something like that. Firefox continues to rely on Mozilla's judgement not Microsoft's for global trust policy.

> What about Chrome?

Chrome is probably affected. Chrome uses the platform (in this case crypt32.dll) trust decisions and then layers on additional rules from Google, such as the requirement for proof of CT logging. So unless an additional rule is blocking the weird curves they'll pass on Chrome on Windows.

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tptacek 2343 days ago
A CERT person on Twitter was explicit about this impacting all of X.509.
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