Tag Archives: root certificate

CAcert renewed root certificates

CAcert has finally upgraded the Root and Class 3 certificates from the old MD5 encoding to the modern SHA-256. Your browsers will like us again! The new certificates were installed in “the usual places” on April 10th. You may go to our web site home page, https://www.cacert.org, and over on the right-hand side, three lines from the top, is “Root Certificates.” The short way to get there is https://www.cacert.org/index.php?id=3.

We would like to thank all software team members for the job they did. All teams consist of volunteers. If you want to support the work done by the Software Team, including the review, please donate to continue to run this service. Thank you.

CAcert erneuert Stammzertifikate

CAcert hat endlich die Stamm- und Class 3-Zertifikate von der alten MD5-Kodierung auf die moderne SHA-256 aktualisiert. Ihre Browser werden uns wieder mögen! Die neuen Zertifikate wurden am 10. April an “den üblichen Orten” installiert. Sie können auf unsere Homepage https://www.cacert.org gehen, und auf der rechten Seite, drei Zeilen von oben, finden Sie “Root Certificates”. Der kurze Weg dorthin ist https://www.cacert.org/index.php?id=3.v

Wir möchten uns bei allen Mitgliedern des Softwareteams für die geleistete Arbeit bedanken. Alle Teams bestehen aus Freiwilligen. Wenn Sie die Arbeit des Software-Teams, einschließlich der Überprüfung, unterstützen möchten, spenden Sie bitte, um diesen Service weiter zu betreiben. Danke.

CAcert a renouvelé ses certificats racine

CAcert a finalement mis à jour les certificats Root et Class 3 de l’ancien encodage MD5 vers le moderne SHA-256. Vos navigateurs nous apprécieront à nouveau ! Les nouveaux certificats ont été installés dans “les lieux habituels” le 10 avril. Vous pouvez vous rendre sur la page d’accueil de notre site Web, https://www.cacert.org, et sur le côté droit, à trois lignes du haut, se trouve “Root Certificates”. Le chemin le plus court pour s’y rendre est https://www.cacert.org/index.php?id=3.v

Nous aimerions remercier tous les membres de l’équipe du logiciel pour le travail qu’ils ont fait. Toutes les équipes sont composées de bénévoles. Si vous souhaitez soutenir le travail effectué par l’équipe du logiciel, y compris la révision, veuillez faire un don pour continuer à faire fonctionner ce service. Merci.

Successful Root-Re-Sign

On March 12th 2016 CAcert performed the Root Re-Signing at our data center in Ede, NL. After the initial attempt[1] had to be postponed on short notice.

The process followed the procedures that are available in the Wiki[2]/SVN[3] along with the tooling[4] used.

The re-signing was conducted by two CAcert critical administrators, a secure-u access engineer, and supervised by CAcert’s internal auditor.
Its execution has been announced on the cacert-systemlog mailing list[5]. The execution report by the critical team has been published there too[6]. The report of the auditor is published in our Wiki[7].

We want to send special thanks to all who helped in preparing and testing the procedures and tools for the process and thus made this smooth execution possible.

CAcert Inc. board tried to have the part for creation of the needed software to be held in public but was overruled by some of the involved teams.

As the re-signed root certificates are available to CAcert the next steps are to publish them to the public. This will need some time as the software team needs to prepare the code changes[8][9][10] and have them reviewed. Once this is done the publishing of the re-signed root certificates will be announced on the blog and all community members will get informed via e-mail.

[1] https://blog.cacert.org/2015/12/re-signing-root-certificate/
[2] https://wiki.cacert.org/Roots/Class1ResignProcedure
[3] https://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/SystemAdministration/signer/re-sign-2016/implementation.txt
[4] https://github.com/CAcertOrg/cacert-procedures/tree/root-resign-sha256/rootResignSHA256
[5] https://lists.cacert.org/wws/arc/cacert-systemlog/2016-03/msg00001.html
[6] https://lists.cacert.org/wws/arc/cacert-systemlog/2016-03/msg00002.html
[7] https://wiki.cacert.org/Audit/Results/session2016.1
[8] https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1305
[9] https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1254
[10] https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1194

Re-Signing Root Certificate

On Friday, 29th January 2016, the long-planned re-signing of CAcert’s root certificate will finally take place.

This action has been overdue for quite some time now as several browser and OS vendors have dropped support for MD5-signed certificates or otherwise made such certificates unusable.

The re-signing process [1] has been tested successfully at last FrOSCon in August 2015 [2].

Attendance of the re-signing ceremony will be open to the public and will take place near CAcert’s data center in Ede, NL. As soon as more details become available we’ll provide a wiki page with the exact schedule and location.

UPDATE: Unfortunately the Re-Signing event had to be postponed due to shortage of manpower in the different teams involved in the process. The currently a new date is being searched. As soon as the new date is available it will be announced here.

[1] https://wiki.cacert.org/Roots/Class1ResignProcedure
[2] https://wiki.cacert.org/Audit/Results/session2015.4

CAcert fingerprints via DNSSEC

Recently we got several questions about automated installers for our certificates. While the new ca-cacert package in Debian Testing is a nice way for a verified installation it isn’t perfect. One issue is the initial download of the certificates when the source package is built by the maintainer; the second issue is that not everybody is using Debian.

As for a long time there was no way to automate the check of the trust anchor with tools you already have we used cryptography to make it work: DNSSEC. While you can’t directly download the certificates directly from DNS – the information would be to huge and hardly manageable – you still get enough information to bootstrap the verification from DNS. All you need is a way to query and validate TXT RRs from DNS, a way to download files via HTTP and a way to calculate some hashes.

The information about the fingerprints is stored in the DNS zone _fp.cacert.org – the underscore indicates non-host information. For each generation of root certificates a new sub-directory will be created. The current one is “g1”. To list all available certificates of a specific generation you can query the label _certs for that sub-directory given a DNS query for _certs.g1._fp.cacert.org yielding the two names “root class3” as the certificates. Each of those references in turn provides both an URL (“_url”) and a set of fingerprints (_md5, _sha1, _sha256) needed for the verified download of that certificate. To download the current (g1) root certificate you’d thus look for the download URL at _url.root.g1._fp.cacert.org and verify the SHA2-256 fingerprint given at _sha256.root.g1._fp.cacert.org. Fingerprints are always uppercase and without any delimiters.

For further technical details have a look into the Wiki [1]

[1] https://wiki.cacert.org/HowToDocuments/FingerprintsViaDNSSEC

Availability of CAcert Root Certificates on Linux Distributions

After the inclusion of CAcert in Debian has been a quite complicated story for the past few years we are glad to announce that there’s a new package in the Debian Sid (unstable) branch: ca-cacert. This package has been created and will be maintained by Dmitry Smirnov. This package became necessary after Debian decided to remove CAcert from its main certificate store provided by the package ca-certificates in early 2014 [1].

Our goal is to promote awareness and education on computer security through the use of encryption, specifically by providing cryptographic certificates. These certificates can be used to digitally sign and encrypt email, authenticate and authorize users connecting to websites and secure data transmission over the internet. Any application that supports the Transport Layer Security (TLS) or the somewhat older Secure Socket Layer Protocol (SSL) can make use of certificates signed by CAcert, as can any application that uses X.509 certificates, e.g. for encryption or code signing and document signatures.

The re-inclusion – even if just as a supplementary package – allows users of Debian and its many derivatives to securely access and install our certificates. Using this path for installation of our root certificates a major attack vector during installation has been mitigated by providing an additional, verified means to get an authenticated copy of our root certificates. Another possibility to verify our certificates after download has been prepared recently and will be documented soon.

CAcert is still pursuing to become audited and thus available in the default browser and OS trust stores.

We thank all people who were involved in creating and providing this package and hope for a constructive future development. Furthermore we like to thank the maintainers of the openSUSE package who made sure our root certificates have been available for the past years [2]. Also we want to thank all other package maintainers for other OS helping to provide a safe anchor for our certificates[3].

Currently our Wiki editors are working on HowTo documents [4, 5].

[1] https://packages.qa.debian.org/c/ca-cacert.html
[2] https://software.opensuse.org/package/ca-certificates-cacert
[3] https://wiki.cacert.org/InclusionStatus
[4] https://wiki.cacert.org/HowToDocuments/
[5] https://wiki.cacert.org/HowToDocuments/DE

CAcert root certificates included in the Replicant (Android) distribution

The Android distribution Replicant has recently decided to include the CAcert root certificates in default installations.

Replicant logo

Replicant was started as a pragmatic way to achieve software freedom on mobile devices, providing a fully free version of Android. Over the years, support for a dozen of different mainstream devices was added.
However, most of these devices are severely flawed when it comes to software freedom, privacy and security. Thus, it was decided to focus the development effort of Replicant for a few specific devices that perform better regarding those aspects, instead of trying to catch up with the latest mainstream devices. Replicant is sponsored and supported by the Free Software Foundation.

For further details on the inclusion status of CAcert’s root certificates in other OS distributions see wiki.cacert.org/InclusionStatus