certificate transparency

I went to a certificate transparency hack day at google london.

Dodgy x509 host certs really annoy me - they were a hassle when I worked on globus where we pretty much have out free host certs without any checking, to anyone who asked.

An achievable goal seemed to be to get a nagios plugin to check for certificates issued against a given hostname. I sort of have that working, with both OK/CRITICAL and a graph:

For now, the plugin is looking for certificates with the substring google in the subject name - there are plenty of such certificates in the log

When new certificates are discovered, they count as suspicious: they appear in red on the graph and the nagios notification system sends me an email. When an administrator (i.e. me) approves of the certs (by running an appropriate script), they turn into OK certificates and go green on the graph.

The underlying python code I'm using has a terribly slow ASN.1 parser, and so is only getting through a few hundred of the 2 million certs in the log every minute (see the blue line on the graph) - in a few days time hopefully it will have caught up. At least gives a pretty graph over time. In real life I'd expect a much smaller number of green certificates and hardly any/zero red certificates, as a flat line over time.

My original intention was to use this for matching domain names, but someone pointed out that it could be used to matching eg. trademark names anywhere in a certificate for some anti-phising detection.

Plenty of flaws:

• doesn't check certificate alternate names (subjAltName)
• doesn't check domain names at all
• doesn't check consistency of data coming from the log server
• doesn't deal with multiple log servers
• doesn't deal with multiple domain name probes efficiently (eg by caching or sharing download/ASN.1 decoding between domain names) - this is perhaps better implemented by using Nagios's passive plugin interface where a monitor could push interesting results (for various domains) into Nagios, rather than the present active/polling style (whichI chose because its easy to do)
• doesn't deal with unknown certificate extensions (at the moment, it ignores them which I think is sometimes the wrong behaviour - if the extension is one that authorises the use of new names (such as subjAltName does...)
• its fairly synchonous which is a bad thing for nagios probes - spending 2 days to verify the initial log is not good for a probe that should take less than 10s