alt Hacker NewsThere is a variety of projects and researchers scanning for weak keys; possibly that's how this was found (haven't seen anything on that). These certs existed for a year and a half; that's bad but could be worse still.
One of the issues with sub-CAs (well, X509 certs in general) is that they can be ghosts in that there's no way you'll ever get it as a response on a TLS connection, so automated scanners on that won't find it.
CT should cover this (i.e. expose the cert so you can check for weak keys), but I have no idea if/how CT works for sub-CAs. [ed.: see below, doesn't seem to be in CT]
[ed.: these are technically sub-CAs, but rather cross-signed for bootstrapping a new root CA. Thanks @agwa for pointing that out.]
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> One of the issues with sub-CAs (well, X509 certs in general) is that they
> can be ghosts in that there's no way you'll ever get it as a response
> on a TLS connection, so automated scanners on that won't find it.
My understanding is that if something, like a browser, connects to a SSL site, they will either have or can obtain, one way or another, a complete chain all the way up to the root, so there can be no "ghost" certificate. And I would imagine a scanner could do all those same steps, and thus access all the same certs.
Is this a deficiency in scanner software? You seem to indicate it is a fundamental weakness in X509; I'm just trying to understand what.
Could you maybe describe a specific example of what you're describing?
For their own stuff, Mozilla has talked in the past about specifically just only trusting intermediates they've seen. Their modern root agreement says the CA will disclose all relevant intermediates, so arguably they have a complete list and further if that CA "forgot" about a few of them whether that's because your firm is too disorganised ("Oh, right, the one on Barry's laptop, forgot that one") or an actual attempt to sidestep this rule - then we certainly don't want to trust these undisclosed intermediates, do we ? They're either purposefully shady, or they're forgotten about and likely never have been audited.