That said, it appears mozilla's decision is founded not on their response in the thread, but on the fact that Trustcor basically is a root CA for the sole reason that they provide a useful service in the exact product being shown as untrustworthy. If the only reason is their email service, and their email service can't hold up to scrutiny (including promising e2ee and not actually providing it, and having poor development security practices) then why do they have root CA power in 99% of client devices? in my opinion, their email service didn't warrant such inclusion to begin with, even if the service was sound, and that's not accounting for their weird corporate ties (which may be legitimate, tbf).
And in practice, on the web you're baking SCTs into the certificates (technically sophisticated customers might buy certificates with no SCTs because they know what they're doing, but that's a speciality product, lotta people buy gasoline every day, but not too many need barrels of crude oil, if you claim 2 million distinct customers served daily but then say they're all buying crude oil I just don't believe you).
To get working SCTs the (pre-)certificate needs to be logged at one of a few dozen trusted Certificate Transparency logs. Which means there's a public record of every such certificate, who issued it and when it was logged.
While this is indeed not a court and doesn't have "Discovery" the CA agreements do require the CA to provide Mozilla and other vendors with complete records of certificates they're interested in, these days that is often provided in the form of crt.sh links because hey, the (pre-)certificates† were in the logs anyway, but it's compliant to provide the data as ZIP files or whatever -- if there is such data and you have it.
So, no, independent researchers can get a pretty good idea by just inspecting a public log view, and the browsers can insist on getting the exact answer if they want it, unless of course TrustCor doesn't care about being distrusted.
† You aren't required to log the certificate as well as a pre-certificate but in many cases CAs do that too. Modern rules are clear that the existence of the (non-working) pre-certificate is assumed to imply the existence of the corresponding certificate even if you claim the certificate was never actually issued.
However, I think it's helpful to consider public comments separately from the responses of browser vendors. I think they did an admirable job of keeping the contents of their messages calm and focused on establishing uncontroversial claims. In no way are Apple or Mozilla's responses trying to make the person squirm, or trying to 'smell the guilt'. Mozilla's final assessment rests on TrustCor's quantifying value statement in light of the MsgSafe.io findings, i.e. the close tie of TrustCor operatives with this malware operation.
The legal system is hardly a panacea. Legal battles can be made to last many years. And a court of law has no ground to litigate on questions of trust in the first place.
The forum was able to establish a list of important and uncontested claims in a few weeks of strenuous discussion, and their assessment of the benefits of keeping TrustCor vs. the risks seems reasonable to me. Third-party inflammatory messages about Microsoft notwithstanding.
Which is why at that point you hire lawyers and a corporate communications agency to do this for you. When your company's existence is on the line, you don't want to do that stuff yourself.
The fact that her responses read like a letter written by a bad lawyer already violates that trust. She's saying as little as possible, admitting nothing, and constantly trying to evade claims on a technicality.
That's true in a court of law, but here the goal is to convince others that you're trustworthy.
Interesting way to describe a situation in which company A had the same owners as malware company B and also integrated a never-before-seen unobfuscated copy of company B's malware into company A's app.
The claims are neither absurd nor unsubstantiated.
Rachel admits that TrustCor (company A) and Measurement Systems (Company B) had the same investors:
> Unknown until recently by any employee officers of TrustCor we and Measurement Systems S de RL had in common a group of investors who represented funds (groups of companies and other funds), not individuals.
She argues it doesn't matter because those people don't own TrustCor anymore, but can't or won't provide any details about the supposed ownership transfer.
Rachel also admits that the supposedly secure email app owned by TrustCor (which lies about being E2EE) had Measurement Systems' malware built into it, which she blames on a rogue employee:
> Prior to my original reply, we had already completed an investigation related to this activity. Our software revision control system revealed immediately when the software was introduced and which developer introduced it. [...] Also as I previously stated, "Whether or not the SDK was added for a developer’s own financial gain or otherwise is beyond us and we don’t care to speculate." Our investigation found the developer in question properly signed our standard "Confidentiality Obligation and Invention Agreement” that requires any developer to obtain a corporate license to any 3rd party software or intellectual property the developer chooses to include. We confirmed through corporate records and email searches that no such agreement was ever obtained by the company or company counsel. Also, none was included inside the software/check-in to revision control. We also confirmed no approval for including this third-party software was ever obtained from Wylie (technically the manager of the developers at that time). Technically that individual developer violated our Confidentiality Obligation and Invention Agreement.
So, which part of what I said is not actually true?
> Anyway I don't believe it's correct to say Company B that "put malware in" their app is the same as Company C that operates an above board CA.
You are mistaken. There is no Company C.
The company that put the malware in their app is MsgSafe.io, a "secure email" provider that advertises E2EE but doesn't actually provide E2EE. MsgSafe is owned by TrustCor. Again, this is something that Rachel readily and repeatedly admits in the email thread, for example in her 18 November email:
> Also, I will use "our company" when speaking of TrustCor (the CA operator) and MsgSafe (the email service).
MsgSafe may technically be a different company from Trustcor in the same sense that Google and Alphabet are technically different companies, but Rachel considers them both together to be "our company."
TrustCor/MsgSafe, Rachel's "our company," is Company A.
Company B is Measurement Systems. Measurement Systems is the company that provides the malware to app developers, not the company that put the malware in in their app. As quoted in my previous post, Rachel admits that TrustCor and Measurement Systems had the same investors. According to public records they still have the same investors. Rachel claims that the previous owners have since divested, but (1) this is not reflected by public records and (2) she is unable or unwilling to provide any documentation of it. Also as quoted in my previous post, Rachel admits that TrustCor/MsgSafe's app contained Measurement Systems' SDK.
> to a product as part of work to instrument the app that never shipped publicly and thus never harmed users.
This is false. The app, although in "beta," was available on the Play Store and linked from MsgSafe.io as well as publicly advertised from the MsgSafe.io twitter account.
> Furthermore, this entire thing is predicated on an allegation that because some piece of analytics malware appears unobfuscated in their app but obfuscated in others, they must have exclusive access to the source and therefore must be the authors. That's.. quite the leap. I can think of many other simple explanations for why the incorrect build of some software might appear in a software product.
No, it's not. There are various other pieces of evidence tying TrustCor/MsgSafe to Measurement Systems, including domain registrations and common investors.
> And I'm beginning to question whether this software the opportunistic researches found is actually even malware in the first place.
This, now, is truly absurd. The Measurement Systems' malware SDK captured and uploaded information including wifi router SSID and MAC, the phone number and email address associated with the device it's running on, the device IMEI, clipboard contents, and GPS locations [1]. There is no good-faith argument that can be made against it being malware.
[1] https://blog.appcensus.io/2022/04/06/the-curious-case-of-cou...
By behaving like they do and more particularly not providing any of the proof asked in the process, Trust is broken. They do not demonstrate they have their shit together, do not demonstrate they understand the process nor the problem, and in general shows they are not equipped in term of knowledge and skills to be a CA.
That they are guilty or not do not matter anymore at this point. They have failed at a more basic level of being a CA. They cannot do the things we expect a CA to do. Them being breached or using their power for bad things do not even matter anymore.
It's basically a series of vague appeals to emotion.
> It really feels like a perversely inappropriate forum for discussing a complicated issue like that.
and
> Rachel was a victim of a sloppy but effective smear campaign.
The facts are neatly summarized in the thread as to why the CA was yanked. It's dispassionate (Except the MS flame) and to the point.
Your defense is almost as poor as the slight accusation of the researcher as misogynistic.
Further, even in times of stress, lashing out isn't the best decision. If I were interrogated by a cop and I called them a bunch of names, I would attract additional charges, on top of being suspected of commiting the crime that I've been accused of.
I'm advising people for a long time now to make screenshots of emails etc. - at least have everything in writing, don't act on phone calls if you feel things are "in a grayzone" (happens often in startups).
> Apparently it may also come as a surprise to some readers and the researchers themselves that other root program members are in fact international governments, and some are also defense companies, or companies who are wholly-owned by defense companies and/or state-owned enterprises, meaning "businesses" that are completely owned or controlled by governments. Further, some of those governments are not free/democratic and in fact some have tragic modern histories of basic human rights violations. We are none of those things and our company does not identify with those values. Given this point above, why of all potential targets are these researchers interested in TrustCor? They could go after countries with human rights violations that have placed a CA in the program.
I'd argue it could be termed "what-aboutism", but I personally fail to see how that matches my definition of "lashing out"...
This part in particular is what I would view as "lashing out"
I agree that it's "what-aboutism". In that regard, it does nothing to establish that TrustCor meets the standards for being a CA.
It does raise a good question for parallel discussion, though: Should Mozilla also be scrutinizing a whole bunch of other CAs as well?
Based on that, it seems like the "rebuttal" is trying to rebut irrelevant things, leaving the undisputable elephant standing in the room. (I admit I haven't read the entire wall of text.)
> I suspect the outcome would have been different if this was handled in a court of law.
If it was a criminal court trying to prove something beyond reasonable doubt, certainly. For a CA, it's the other way around, there needs to be strong evidence that keeping the CA is beneficial to the users.
But in a process sense, I am left wanting. I still don’t know what damage was done and why TrustCor CA got this special treatment in the first place in any way material to their CA issuing business, which they appeared to put great effort into operating by the books.
But, if I read correctly, Rachel claimed that there was no longer any shared ownership and tried to explain that ownership in the sense that the word was being use was not a correct term in the first place. I believe she said it was a shared incorporation services / legal council / investor, at most, and that the speculation as to that relationship conferring any authority pertaining to the CA’s operations was entirely incorrect since the executive authority had long since been signed over to actual company officers.
I can't see Apple saying "Well, on advice of our lawyers we can't actually explain our corporate structure to you." Is it a secret that they have a corporate entity in Ireland, is it a secret what they do with it? Or is it public knowledge that they don't hide?
So I wouldn't describe secret ownership structures as a thing "most every company out there does." But I'm not going to say Apple doesn't do unethical things. (Also is Apple even a trusted root CA for mozilla or microsoft browsers?)
I think non-transparency is an even higher level of problem for a CA. Secrecy about your corporate structure does not seem okay for a CA -- we need to know who they are and who controls them, non-negotiably. Secrecy of corporate structure does not seem like a thing most every company (or every CA) out there does.
But it's quite possible Apple should _not_ be trusted to "run the entire mobile ecosystem" that uses Apple products. You can make that argument. And we can talk about what the heck any of us can do about it individually or collectively if so. That's a different question than who should be allowed as a trusted CA root, or who Mozilla or Microsoft should allow as a trusted CA root.
When you say "that underpins all of this in the first place", I'm not sure what you mean; Mozilla and Microsoft trusted CA roots effect people who aren't doing anything with Apple products, Apple does not in fact "underpin" the entire SSL CA system in the first place. I don't know what to do about the Apple ecosystem if Apple can't be trusted, but I support Mozilla, Microsoft, or anyone else removing trusted CA roots belonging to companies with secretive corporate structures, ownership, or governance. All of this can be true. Apple doing unethical things doesn't mean mozilla or microsoft should allow a trusted root CA with secretive corporate ownership structure.
Combining that with basic questions about how exactly ownership changed that were never answered and instead obfuscated behind reams of "nothing speak".
The final basis for the determination is that the main loss of from distrusting the TrustCor CA was thier sibling company's private email service that is, at best, advertising itself under a very shady definition of E2EE.
Thus this seems like amy easy decision to me.
The interesting conclusion that follows from that is that if you are going to operate a shady CA, it behooves you to find some large clients to make cost of revoking your trust higher.
...Which in essence means CA's probably shouldn't exist as a standalone thing, and everyone should learn to build their own trust networks. None of this vouch nonsense, or Trust theater.
She failed to reasonably and convincingly refute some allegations. There were repeated requests to provide information, some of which would be trivial to produce if acting in good faith.
After reading the exchange, I (as a reasonable bystander with no material interest in either side):
* Don't understand the relationship between TrustCor and the malware distributor in a clear way that company ownership records would provide
* Take it as a false statement that the mail service doesn't have apps, as its website advertises them
* Don't understand how their auditor audited them when they don't appear to have a presence in Canada that would be factual based on the extracts from the auditor findings
Unrelated to her responses, I could take in on faith that a rogue developer added spyware from a company with the same owners, but the finding that the payloads were send to TrustCor servers diminish the acceptance that sufficient controls exist in the company to not question the security of them as a CA.
TrustCor is a company that looks like a front for a Spyware maker, and when asked about that they say: "It's not like you think, but we don't want to tell you what the actual situation is, so you'll have to trust us, it's fine! Also the spyware we were caught distributing is totally not our fault, it's from a contractor in a completely different business unit and is totally independent from our CA business, but again we can't tell you more because it is secret. But trust us, the CA business is completely legit. And the sketchy things you found were all the idea of a guy who passed away recently, so we unfortunately can't ask him why he did it, but it's all legit don't worry trust us."
Playing devil's advocate: Why not? I mean yes, obviously if you end up in jail that might interfere with your ability to operate a CA (or any company for that matter). But barring that, as long as they haven't done anything to affect the security or proper operation of the CA certificate itself, why is that a basis for removing them from root stores? To the best of my knowledge this action is unprecedented.
We do that all the time. If, rather than TrustCor being associated with a company making malware we'd instead found out the company's CEO had cheated on his wife, would that be grounds for removing them from the root certificate store? Context matters.
"TrustCor CA got this special treatment"
I'm not a regular on that mailing list, any source that this is special treatment and other CA that are spyware software and snakeoil encryption software creators etc. are treated differently?
If they can't rebut those concerns/connections in a clear and convincing way, they have no business being a CA. If you are satisfied with the answers, more power to you, but I honestly don't know how you could be after reading through those emails.
So, what you are saying is that they just happened to have the same investor, the malicious developer that they say worked for them just happened to include malware from that company (Unobfuscated, unlike every other example available), said developer was able to route traffic through the company domains, just happened to have identical corporate officers, and just happened to be related to a company that brags about being able to bypass SSL?
Let's just say that there is enough there they better have a very clear explanation about it, and instead they just deflecting deflecting deflecting or refusing to answer. I'm sorry it is bad for their business (assuming they actually are innocent of all this), but that is not an appropriate response for a CA when someone is asking legitimate questions based on legitimate suspicion from what would have to the world's worst series of coincidences.
When someone asks you what is the shared ownership of these two entities, and you tell a story about your summer in lancaster working in the mail room of one of the entities, it isn't useful or related to the question.
Its hard to tell from your repeated assertions that do not match what actually occurred in the thread. It feels like you skimmed, and have some bias attempting to give the benefit of doubt to what you see as the embattled party in some kind of unjust lynching instead of legitimate questions of entire shared corporate officer structures, and clearly shared dev teams [that the representative blatantly attempted to claim was out of line while avoiding the actual part of that evidence that was damning, that the dev somehow had access to the raw source of the library in question that very strongly indicates that it was their library and not the rouge devs'] of a known malware entity and a ROOT level CA.
If you are just trying to play devils advocate in what you feel is somehow a mob action instead of what is probably extremely conservative actions by some of the biggest and most legally careful entities in the planet then honestly, I ask why and for what purpose?
We no nothing. The whole exercise of the thread was to know something.
"Apart from our CA work, we also bought an aging email service with a few customers, and invested substantially in developing it into a flagship email security product line compatible with global email security standards including both S/MIME and GPG. Then, over the last few years we added unique features our customers demanded. Today it stands alone as a valuable email service enjoyed by millions around the world as an alternative to other popular web based secure email providers."
and unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks
"us recently by a biased group of security researchers "
Pushing the irrelevant BETA narrative
"TrustCor has never released a non-beta, public version of any mobile phone software/version and in fact the only mobile-friendly configuration we support is direct-from-browser mobile access that leverages the popular industry-standard framework for delivering near-app-quality mobile experiences using web browsing on mobile devices. You don’t need any downloaded software to use it whatsoever."
(where the still unanswered question is: Where did TrustCor get the source code of the spyware no-one else has?)
"Perhaps they are working with the US defense community, [...]"
Pushing unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that add nothing to the case
and on and on and on the same as before nothing new in that email.
> Certificate Authorities have highly trusted roles in the internet ecosystem and it is unacceptable for a CA to be closely tied, through ownership and operation, to a company engaged in the distribution of malware. Trustcor’s responses via their Vice President of CA operations further substantiates the factual basis for Mozilla’s concerns.
It's not some other company, its the same owners and operators doing malware under one name and running a CA under another.
EDIT: elsewhere in the thread someone linked the bugzilla request for TrustCor to be added. I had assumed that was a long time ago, but it's "only" 7 years ago.
Instead of "tying to set guidelines" you can try to honestly answer the questions.
See also: Ford Pinto
That's on top of the technical and legal evidence of the companies basically being the same company.
The wall-of-text could be a result of unfair accusation, sure. No doubt she's under a lot of stress either way! And I did think that some of the accusations in the thread were a bit harsh, sarcastic, or otherwise inappropriate. But the facts stand.
It’s pretty… idk… irreverent to take the stance: oh gosh look at this person squirming under pressure to defend themselves why would they do that they must be guilty and malicious. I can smell it! It really feels like a perversely inappropriate forum for discussing a complicated issue like that. Rachel wasn’t trying to deceive so much as she was tying to set guidelines for appropriate review of the material at hand. And then the comment at the end to her when she was simply trying to make sure the transition happens cordially without breaking existing certificates as seems is the intention, “why does Microsoft need to answer to you?”, is just snotty on a whole new level. Honestly it makes me think we need special courts and some sort of process to handle this stuff because people don’t have time to… process.
I am probably in the minority here, but I can’t help but feel like Rachel was a victim of a sloppy but effective smear campaign. I suspect the outcome would have been different if this was handled in a court of law.