[cabfpub] .onion proposal

Jeremy.Rowley jeremy.rowley at digicert.com
Thu Nov 13 21:34:00 UTC 2014


Thanks Brian.  I see your point on the non-onion domain. Since that was 
intended only as a bootstrap to increase validation levels, I'm okay 
dropping it.

On 11/12/2014 6:34 PM, Brian Smith wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 12:51 PM, Jeremy Rowley
> <jeremy.rowley at digicert.com> wrote:
>> I’d like to continue the .onion discussion that I started here about a month
>> ago.  Primarily, I’d like to see how we can create a very limited exception
>> to the general prohibition on internal name certificates that will take
>> effect in 2015 for the purpose of permitting the CA community to  show
>> support for both Tor and entities operating .onion names.
> I suggest that you redefine "internal name" so that .onion isn't
> considered an internal name. I don't see much resistance to that.
>
>> 2)      The CA MUST verify a non-onion domain name owned by the applicant
>> and assert that domain name in the same certificate as the .onion address
> I don't think that this should be required. It could have very
> negative consequences. In particular, whether this is even safe or not
> depends on some unspecified/undocumented subtleties of how browsers
> coalesce connections. Also, it seems unnecessary. We don't require
> such a thing for the issuance of normal certificates, and I don't
> think Tor is special here. In fact, for now, I would argue that the
> certificate should only contain a single dNSName SAN entry, which
> would be the single .onion address.
>> 2)      Tor uses its own encryption so the certificates are about
>> identification
> It is true that Tor uses its own encryption, but HTTPS over Tor is
> going to use HTTPS encryption too, right? And, there are significant
> benefits to the HTTPS-level encryption.
>
>> 3)      .onion addresses are generated from the service provider’s key,
>> meaning they are unique (you don’t choose the onion address)
> As Facebook showed, you can control a significant part of the onion
> address. However, it is too expensive and complicated to do so for
> most people, so it would be unreasonable to force somebody requesting
> a certificate to do what Facebook did. However, CAs should be aware of
> the possibility of somebody generating addresses which are misleading
> (e.g. contain trademarks of other companies) or addresses that are
> confusingly similar to other addresses.
>
> I agree with your other points.
>
> Cheers,
> Brian
> .
>




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