I think the distribution of the recent CA cert change could have been greatly improved by cryptographically signing the replacement cert in a way that can be verified out-of-band.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this single file is absolutely crucial to obtaining confidentiality when using the cryptstorm vpn service.
* https://cryptostorm.is/ca.txt
* https://github.com/cryptostorm/cryptost ... ter/ca.crt
If someone was able to modify the contents of this ca.txt file while I'm downloading its new version, they would be able to effectively man-in-the-middle all of my traffic to cryptostorm. After doing so, they could see all the sites I visited and all of the contents of my traffic that isn't end-to-end encrypted (lest the MITM those connections too!).
The official notice that advertised this change of CA is here:
* https://cryptostorm.is/newCA
The contents of this message was sadly very terse:
Nothing in the above message mentioned any way to verify the integrity of the new file out-of-band! Therefore, if someone was MITM'ing the TLS connection between the client & https://cryptostorm.is (which is trivial for many powerful multinational corporations & state actors that own CAs whitelisted by our browsers), they'd be able to arbitrarily hand me any contents of the 'ca.txt' file, and then intercept all my future traffic with cryptostorm over my vpn connection.The CA certificate our OpenVPN setup uses is set to expire on Dec 22, so we've had to generate new ones.
That means by Dec 22, all members need to be using the latest one.
The configuration files at GitHub have already been updated with the new CA.
If you want to modify your existing configs manually, you can get the latest CA from https://cryptostorm.is/ca.txt
If you are using v2.22 or v3.0 of the widget, you'll need to upgrade to the new v3.1 widget at https://cryptostorm.is/cryptostorm_setup.exe (hashes available here)
Due to a bug in the self-updating code in v3.0, the widget will NOT automatically upgrade to v3.1. You'll have to manually download/install it from the above link.
If you're still using v2.22, the updating code there will still work since that version just did a simple `start https://cryptostorm.nu/setup.exe`, and setup.exe there has been updated to v3.1.
v3.1 of the widget is using the latest OpenVPN 2.4.x, which means XP is no longer supported.
If you require XP for some reason, you can use an older version of OpenVPN GUI to connect, although even that will most likely stop being supported in the near future.
Note: You can still connect using the old CA certificate, but after Dec 22 OpenVPN will show a fatal error that the CA certificate you're using has expired.
My proposal is:
add a <pre></pre> block on the page 'https://cryptostorm.is/newCA' with an clearsigned pgp message. The signed message should
- state the reason for the change
- include the new cert and
- describe how to validate the authenticity & integrity of the new key
Code: Select all
user@personal:~$ curl -i https://cryptostorm.is/ca.txt
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2017 16:03:42 GMT
Server: Apache
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
Last-Modified: Mon, 18 Dec 2017 07:24:22 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1866
Content-Type: text/plain
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIIFIDCCBAigAwIBAgIJAKekpGXxXvhbMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAMIG6MQswCQYD
VQQGEwJDQTELMAkGA1UECBMCUUMxETAPBgNVBAcTCE1vbnRyZWFsMTYwNAYDVQQK
FC1LYXRhbmEgSG9sZGluZ3MgTGltaXRlIC8gIGNyeXB0b3N0b3JtX2RhcmtuZXQx
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D9Ier/83JLMnBGctT1Kzs9OP/U0=
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
Cheers,