HTTPS-foutmeldingen Piratenpartij (en StartSSL is afschuwelijk)

I feel it is a disservice towards not only me and the organisation I represent with StartCom but towards the cryptographic community as a whole. This is a 0-day vulnerability that affects a huge portion of current software – what 'appropriate action' do you feel is reasonable to mitigate this?

Personally, I feel appropriate action is exactly what I have been doing for the past *two days*, updating all my servers and compiling everything against a new version of OpenSSL; followed by informing my certificate authority that the private keys in question are possibly compromised.

The actions I am taking here are entirely reasonable from my perspective. Conversely, I do not feel asking your customers to collectively shell out thousands of dollars for revocation when the possibility of a compromised key is realistically outside of their control.

> See also the Subscriber Obligations at
> https://www.startssl.com/policy.pdf in particular:
> • Never share private keys with any third party and use
> adequate protection and best security practices to secure
> private keys in order prevent losses and compromises thereof.
> • Notify StartCom immediately in case of a private key
> compromise and request revocation of the affected
> certificate(s).
I obviously never shared my private keys – they were affected by a 0-day vulnerability. There is a huge difference here.

From your own policy, I would like to particularly mention:
1.4.2.1     CA Obligations
* Accept revocation requests according to this document

According to the same document:
4.9.1        Circumstances for Revocation
Revocation of a certificate is to permanently end the operational
period of the certificate prior to reaching the end of its stated
validity period. A certificate will be revoked when the
information it contains is suspected to be incorrect or
compromised. This includes situations where:
* The subscriber’s key is suspected to be compromised;

This should not be a new problem either, as the StartSSL Certificate Authority has revoked certificates earlier with the "Debian weak key" problem: <http://www.startssl.com/?app=25#74>. Considering this vulnerability is not limited to a single distribution and the massive amount of affected servers, I feel this is not a similar situation but an even more urgent situation for revocation.

Dismissing this situation as a 'customer problem', is a slap in the face to not only your customers, but frankly undeserving of a 'trusted' certificate authority. Knowingly refusing to revoke potentially compromised certificates lest users pay hundreds of dollars is nothing short of a hostage situation – and it does not really want to make me be a customer of this certificate authority despite having been generally favourable for a long time.

And, I mean, I can understand wanting to make bank from the hundreds of users – I'm not a communist nor an idiot – and I'm not asking for free revocation either: I'm asking for a reasonable agreement in the handling fee for revocation for all certificates that is not (amount of certificates) * $30,-. That would total around 1200-1500 dollars for all certificates currently in use by Piratenpartij – an exorbitant sum we frankly, cannot afford. And I daresay, a sum most of your customers cannot afford.

Still hoping for leniency,

Cordially,
—
Patrick Godschalk
patrick.godschalk [at] piratenpartij [dot] nl
OpenPGP: <https://argure.nl/identity/ecc14594.asc>
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