Private keys Leaked – 23,000 SSL Certificates to be Revoked Within Next 24 Hours

More than 23,000 SSL certificates that purchased through the reseller Trustico will be revoked today. The entire saga starts on February 2nd, 2018 when Trustico reached out to Digicert for mass revocation.

“Trustico not has provided any details how the private key leaked or how did they acquire the keys,” says Jeremy Rowley from Digicert.

According to Trustico statement, they allow their customers to generate a certificate signing request and the private key at the time of ordering process. Then these generated private key will be stored cold storage for revocation purposes.

Trustico reached out to Digicert on February 2nd, 2018 requesting a mass revoke and Digicert asks Trustico to provide an evidence for the private key disclosure.

Later Trustico shares the private key along with the order numbers of the associated certificates in a zip file to DigiCert.

According to DigiCert statement on 2/27/2018 as Trustico provided proof of compromise and the private matches to the specific Trustico 23k customers which trigger’s the 24-hour revocation processing requirement under 4.9.1.1.3.

Digicert says as a CA, we had no choice but to follow the Baseline Requirements. Following our standard revocation process, we gave notice via email to each certificate holder whose private keys had been exposed to us by Trustico, so they could have time to get a replacement certificate.

Security researchers accused Trustico of logging private key of their customers “according to their statement they store the key for the revocation purposes” which is unfair and not required. Certificate Authorities and resellers should not hold the copies of the private key.

Customers and security researchers surprised and accused Trustico. Here are some tweets.

They advertised that “We don’t require a CSR” for Generating SSL Certificates.

There is a concern with warranty in the global community, the warranty is actually not for the one who purchases the SSL certificate. It applies only to the users who use the site secured by an SSL certificate.

Global sign, Rapid SSL trying to take some market advantage of the confusion caused.

Google Distrusting Symantec SSL Certificates is a separate issue and you can find more details about it here.