How Cybercrime Exploits Digital Certificates. What is a digital certificate? The digital certificate is a critical component of a public key infrastructure.

It is an electronic document that associates the individual identity of a person to the public key associated with it. A certificate can then be associated with a natural person, a private company or a web service as a portal. The certificate is issued by an organization, dubbed Certification Authority (or CA), recognized as “trusted” by the parties involved, and is used ordinarily for the operations of public key cryptography. The Certification Authority issues a digital certificate in response to a request only after it verifies the identity of the certificate applicant. The process of telematics verification of certificates can be done by anyone since the CA maintains a public register of digital certificates issued and a register related to revoke the ones (Certification Revocation List or CRL). Each digital certificate is associated with a time period of validity, so certificates may be revoked if expired.

Other conditions that could cause the revocation of a digital certificate are the exposure of its private key, and any change of the relationship between the subject and its public key, for example the change of the mail address of the applicant. In the process of asymmetric cryptography, each subject is associated with a pair of keys, one public and one private.

What is a digital certificate? The digital certificate is a critical component of a public key infrastructure. It is an electronic document that associates the.

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Any person may sign a document with its private key. Everyone with intent to verify the authenticity of the document can verify the document using the public key of the signer, which is exposed by the CA. Another interesting use linked to the availability of the public key of an entity is the sending of encrypted documents.

Assuming you want to send an encrypted document to Pierluigi, it is sufficient that you sign them with his public key exposed by the CA. At this point, only Pierluigi with his private key, associated with the public key used for the encryption, can decrypt the document.

The public key of each subject is contained in a digital certificate signed by a trusted third party. In this way, those who recognize the third party as trustworthy just have to verify its signature to accept as valid the public key it exposes. The most popular standard for digital certificates is the ITU- T X. CA issues a digital certificate that binds the public key of the subject to a Name Badge (Distinguished Name), or to an Alternative Name (Alternative Name) such as an email address or a DNS record.

The structure of an X. ID algorithmbody emittervaliditysubjectinformation on the public key of the subjectsignature algorithm of the certificatesignature of certificate. It is likely you’ll come across the extensions used for files containing X. CER – Certified with DER encoded, sometimes sequences of certificates.

DER – DER encoded certificate. PEM – Base. 64- encoded certificate to a file. PEM may contain certificates or private keys. P1. 2 – PKCS # 1.

Another classification of digital certificates is the intended use. It is useful to distinguish authentication certificates and subscription certificates. A subscription Digital Certificate is used to define the correspondence between an individual applying for the certificate and its public key. These certificates are the ones used for the affixing of digital signatures that are legally valid.

A Certificate of Authentication is mainly used for accessing web sites that implement authentication via certificate, or sign up for e- mail messages in order to ensure the identity of the sender. An authentication certificate is usually associated with an email address in a unique way. A digital certificate in the wrong hands. Security experts recognize 2. The number of successful attacks against major companies reported during the year has no precedent, many of them had serious consequences. Comodo was the first organization to suffer a cyber attack. High managers at Comodo revealed that the registration authority had been compromised in a March 1.

Comodo Trusted Partner in Southern Europe were stolen. As consequence, a Registration Autorithy suffered an attack that resulted in a breach of one user account of that specific RA.

Its account was then fraudulently used to issue nine digital certificates across seven different domains, including: login. NSDQ: YHOO), mail. All of these certificates were revoked immediately upon discovery. In August of the same year, another giant fell victim to a cyber attack: the Dutch Certification Authority Digi.

Notar, owned by VASCO Data Security International. On September 3rd, 2. Dutch government took over the operational management of Digi. Notar’s systems. A few weeks later, the company was declared bankrupt. But the list of victims is long. KPN stopped issuing digital certificates after finding a collection of attack tools on its server likely used to compromise it.

The company informed the media that there wasn’t evidence that its CA infrastructure was compromised, and that all the actions to respond the incident had been started as a precaution. Experts at KPN discovered the tools during a security audit: they found a server hosting a DDo. S tool. The application may have been there for as long as four years. Unfortunately, the defeat is not finished, because in the same period, Gem. NET, a subsidiary of KPN (a leading telecommunications and ICT service provider in The Netherlands), suffered a data breach, and according to Webwereld, the hack was related to CA certificates. The list of victims is reported in the following table published by the expert Paolo Passeri on his blog hackmageddon.

It includes also other giants like Global. Sign and Digi. Cert Malaysia.

Figure – CA incidents occurred in 2. Hackmageddon. com)Why attack a Certification Authority? Cybercriminals and state- sponsored hackers are showing a great interest in the PKI environment, and in particular they are interested in abusing digital certificates to conduct illicit activities like cyber espionage, sabotage or malware diffusion. The principal malicious uses related to the digital certificates are: Improve malware diffusion. Installation of certain types of software (e.

For this reason, cyber criminals and other bad actors have started to target entities managing digital certificates. By stealing a digital certificate associated with a trusted vendor and signing malicious code with it, it reduces the possibility that a malware will be detected as quickly. Security experts have estimated that more than 2. The most famous example is represented by the cyber weapon Stuxnet used to infect nuclear plants for the enrichment of uranium in Iran. The source code of the malware was signed using digital certificates associated to Realtek Semiconductor and JMicron Technology Corp, giving the appearance of legitimate software to the targeted systems.

Stuxnet drivers were signed with certificates from JMicron Technology Corp and Realtek Semiconductor Corp, two companies that have offices in the Hsinchu Science and Industrial Park. Security experts at Kaspersky Lab hypothesized an insider job. It is also possible that the certificates were stolen using a dedicated Trojan such as Zeus, meaning there could be more.

Figure – Digital certificate used to sign Stuxnet. In September 2. 01. Corel Draw X4 Trial Reset.

Adobe. According to security chief Brad Arkin, a group of hackers signed a malware using an Adobe digital certificate, compromising a vulnerable build server of the company. The hacked server was used to get code validation from the company’s code- signing system.“We have identified a compromised build server with access to the Adobe code signing infrastructure. We are proceeding with plans to revoke the certificate and publish updates for existing Adobe software signed using the impacted certificate . The revocation does not impact any other Adobe software for Macintosh or other platforms .