full-disclosure - Re: Expired certificate

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Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:55:32 -0500
From: Marsh Ray <marsh@...endedsubset.com>
To: Dan Kaminsky <dan@...para.com>
Cc: "full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk" <full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk>
Subject: Re: Expired certificate

On 07/17/2010 11:23 AM, Dan Kaminsky wrote:
> -- but imagine if drives *intentionally* committed suicide one day
> after warranty expire. People would go nuts!
>
> Somehow, this is all OK in X.509.

The usual logic given for this and other types of mandatory password 
expiration schemes is that it limits the time of exposure when the 
credentials are compromised. These days this reasoning makes less sense 
when the attacker might only need to use his unauthorized access for 
50ms or so to install a persistent backdoor.

Still, unless you really expect people to trust a certificate that's 
been sitting on some web server for 10 years, there's going to have to 
be some kind of expiration.

Drivers licenses, (as Pavel said) passports, most kinds of real-world 
credentials expire. In the computer field we deal with 10+ orders of 
magnitude on the time axis (10 years vs 100 ms) so normal policies don't 
scale well. So we question what seems perfectly reasonable to ordinary 
people and they figure we've just lost our common sense.

Operationally, it just shouldn't be that big a deal to schedule a 
maintenance every few years. Like expiring domain registrations, the 
hardest part is simply to not lose track of it. The Accounting dept in 
an organization can sometimes help to not forget that stuff.

- Marsh

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