By
Kevin Bocek
April 7, 2014
Recognizing that the trust established by Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and digital certificates plays an important role in everyday life, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) brought charges against Fandango and Credit Karma for failing to protect this trust. Both companies failed to validate digital certificates used for SSL/Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections in their mobile applications. The FTC acknowledged that these failures allow attackers to circumvent the trust established by digital certificates and gain access to users’ confidential personal and financial information. Once this trust is compromised, attackers can redirect traffic to an untrusted site, and the users’ applications cannot detect that traffic has been diverted. Ironically, digital certificates and SSL/TLS secure connections are designed to thwart these Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attacks.
The FTC illustrates how a comprised or fake digital certificate can be used for MiTM attacks against unsuspecting users.
The importance of the settlement is not that businesses must deal with another compliance requirement. Instead, the FTC is reinforcing the fact that securing the trust established by digital certificates is critical. The FTC’s action underscores what others have already found:
Protecting trust is so important that no business or government can ignore it. A single compromised certificate or application that fails to validate certificates can make all the other security controls useless.
A fake certificate purporting to be for GoDaddy’s email service could allow an attacker to masquerade as GoDaddy if applications don’t check if a certificate is trusted.
Attacks on mobile applications that fail to validate digital certificates are nothing new. In an article published earlier this year, Netcraft reported that it had found dozens of fake digital certificates deployed across the Internet. Unlike many attacks using compromised digital certificates, the fake certificates that Netcraft found probably targeted users of mobile applications—40% of which, like Fandango’s and Mobile Karma’s applications, failed to validate the trust established by legitimate digital certificates. While the FTC has started its action with Fandango and Credit Karma, significantly wider holes in SSL and digital certificate security have been reported. In February 2014, for example, Apple patched Mac OS X and iOS because both failed to validate digital certificates for SSL/TLS—an issue that could have been exploited by MiTM attacks.
With Gartner predicting that 50% of network attacks will use SSL by 2017, enterprises must protect the trust established by digital certificates. The FTC provides some basic recommendations that all mobile developers should follow. In addition, developers should evaluate security, including the validation of digital certificates, with the help of a third party. Beyond this, organizations must secure and protect the keys and certificates that establish trust for mobile applications, web browsers, and the thousands of applications behind the firewall. Although every organization depends on these applications, they create a huge surface area of attack.
In response to the rise in attacks on keys and certificates, Forrester recommends that organizations:
In line with these recommendations from Forrester, Venafi TrustAuthority enables organizations to quickly gain visibility, fix vulnerabilities, and establish policies for keys and certificates. Venafi TrustForce automates key and certificate functions to further eliminate the opportunity for compromise and enable organizations to enforce policies and remediate security incidents. IT security teams must start by gaining visibility into how keys and certificates are used, fixing vulnerable certificates, and enforcing policies to protect the trust upon which their business depends—from their mobile applications back to the data center.
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