SBN

Let’s Encrypt Vulnerability

The BBC is reporting a vulnerability in the Let’s Encrypt certificate service:

In a notification email to its clients, the organisation said: “We recently discovered a bug in the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority code.

“Unfortunately, this means we need to revoke the certificates that were affected by this bug, which includes one or more of your certificates. To avoid disruption, you’ll need to renew and replace your affected certificate(s) by Wednesday, March 4, 2020. We sincerely apologise for the issue.”

I am seeing nothing on the Let’s Encrypt website. And no other details anywhere. I’ll post more when I know more.

EDITED TO ADD: More from Ars Technica:

Let’s Encrypt uses Certificate Authority software called Boulder. Typically, a Web server that services many separate domain names and uses Let’s Encrypt to secure them receives a single LE certificate that covers all domain names used by the server rather than a separate cert for each individual domain.

The bug LE discovered is that, rather than checking each domain name separately for valid CAA records authorizing that domain to be renewed by that server, Boulder would check a single one of the domains on that server n times (where n is the number of LE-serviced domains on that server). Let’s Encrypt typically considers domain validation results good for 30 days from the time of validation–but CAA records specifically must be checked no more than eight hours prior to certificate issuance.

The upshot is that a 30-day window is presented in which certificates might be issued to a particular Web server by Let’s Encrypt despite the presence of CAA records in DNS that would prohibit that issuance.

Since Let’s Encrypt finds itself in the unenviable position of possibly having issued certificates that it should not have, it is revoking all current certificates that might not have had proper CAA record checking on Wednesday, March 4. Users whose certificates are scheduled to be revoked will need to manually force-renewal before then.

And Let’s Encrypt has a blog post about it.


*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Schneier on Security authored by Bruce Schneier. Read the original post at: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/03/lets_encrypt_vu.html