This is kind of funny. The connection is still encrypted from others that might see it in-flight (ie, coffee shop, etc). However, your right, you would not be able to verify that the person on the other end was really the one you wanted to. However, this discussion is here because someone had one that WAS perfectly valid for gmail.com, even if it was not actually owned by google.
The connection is still encrypted from others that might see it in-flight (ie, coffee shop, etc)
Not really. If you were using your laptop on wifi in a coffee shop, I could intercept your traffic and rewrap the SSL in my SSL. You then have no way to know if you're securely talking to me, or to the original site.
Yes, but in the current situation only a small subset of people were exposed to that certificate, whereas killing the CA outright exposes everyone to bogus certificates for the CA's domain.
It depends who has access to compromise the CA. If it was the Turkish government that did so, they probably aren't going to waste their ammo to try to decrypt Joe Random's banking information.
You can MITM any HTTPS site in the world with an invalid certificate right now. Killing this CA won't change anything in that respect, so I still don't understand what you're getting at, or how killing this CA would make some sites less secure for a period.
All of the sites with legitimate Turktrust certificates would suddenly have invalid certificates. That's all I'm saying.
If you are operating under the assumption that Turktrust is head-to-tail untrustworthy and actively subverting the HTTPS/TLS PKI, then sure, that doesn't matter.
You said "no longer protected" which is what I'm trying to understand. All of those sites would suddenly have invalid certificates, sure, until they fixed it. But the interim period where they have invalid certificates is no more dangerous or insecure than the period before or after. The sites become less accessible, but they remain equally safe (or unsafe).
The CA itself wasn't demonstrably compromised. They issued intermediate CA certs, which makes them untrustworthy as someone who holds the power to issue intermediate CA certs, but doesn't necessarily undermine the trustworthiness of certificates issued through them directly (rather than through their bad intermediate certs), as their bad certs are not part of the chain of trust for end-user certs issued directly through them.
Wouldn't you get a "certificate revocation" banner of some kind though, as apposed to "certificate unknown"?
edit: read the update at the top of the linked article, which clarified that it is not just revocation, but also the inclusion of a new root cert for turktrust that has been suspended.
