Showing posts with label web infrastructure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web infrastructure. Show all posts

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Rogue CA Certificate Using PlayStations and MD5 Collisions

Alex Sotirov and Jacob Appelbaum presented "MD5 Considered Harmful Today: Creating a rogue CA Certificate" at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress (or 25C3). Their process, which relied on a cluster of 200 PS3 consoles creates a valid rogue CA certificate that will be accepted by major browsers. The only real fix for this is for browsers to move to SHA-1, which will avoid the known collision errors in MD5. In the short term, this is unlikely to be exploited, but the proof of concept does point to a need to move to a more secure verification method.

ZDNet has more, including details from Sotirov and Appelbaum, as well as a link to their demo site which uses a backdated CA from 2004 to demonstrate the issue.