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Kazakhstan to MitM all HTTPS traffic starting Jan 1
- egeozcan 11y ago> The national security certificate will secure protection of Kazakhstan users when using coded access protocols to foreign Internet resources. How is this protecting users? They are outright lying here, if I understand correctly. Also why are they asking for my location? http://i.imgur.com/fYKHRK1.png http://i.imgur.com/fYKHRK1.png
- majke 11y agoRemember they have your location anyway from your IP address.
- egeozcan 11y agoThat makes it only more interesting. However, I assume, IP-based location isn't that granular?
- andrewstuart2 11y agoIt's very surprisingly granular. I logged dropped packets from my router's firewall for a week and looked up the origin locations with geoip for fun. Just plugging in the coordinates to google maps would zoom directly in on peoples' houses (sometimes in the middle of nowhere). I'm not sure it's 100% accurate, of course, but it sure seemed specific.
- tyfon 11y agoOn the other hand, my ip "resolves" via geoip to a city about 500 kilometers away so I guess it depends on what database you use and what country. The city it resolves to is where my isp has their HQ.
- kiiski 11y agoI tried checking my current ip. It points me to some hotel in Helsinki. I'm about 500 km away from there.
- finnn 11y agoThe actual data source will provide a country, state or sometimes even city and zipcode. Then whatever tool you're using to map drops a pin in the middle of that region. If you zoom in, you get whatever happens to be at the geographic center of whatever the mapping tool (probably Google Maps) thinks is the center. eg if it says "United States" and no other data, you get some random ass place in the middle of Kansas. Sometimes there can be more specific data, but just because you can keep zooming in doesn't mean that that's actually where it is
- dboreham 11y agoYou're describing GeoIP derived from "public" information sources such as the physical address of the assigned entity or the location information provided to the registrar by the block owner. However, there is a different kind of GeoIP that has the potential to be much more specific as to the location, based on a join between Internet traffic and transactions that target a specific location. e.g. when you purchase a physical item from an online vendor, with your house as the delivery address, they now have both your IP and location. Obviously for this to work it depends on a) the IP address remaining the same for some period of time and b) sharing of the necessary information to allow the join. afaik both are often true.
- bajsejohannes 11y agoThis just means that it's precise, not necessarily accurate.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- okigan 11y agoIn US (or is it just Comcast) - it is exact! Seems Comcast maps IP (which they issue) to postal address to exact Geo coordinate.
- Theodores 11y agoTry normal Geo-IP (Maxmind) and it will show the local telco exchange. I am sure the NSA does better but Kazakhstan? I have been inside one of their embassies to be shocked that they were watching the news on a black and white CRT TV!!!
- frandroid 11y agoProbably because they got sick of embassy staff stealing the TVs they kept buying for them. 8)
- gear54rus 11y agoBasically that and... I'd say when you don't share the location, they only have what's available publicly from GeoIP (via ISPs). Wen you do, your user agent actively tries to give them the best possible results (using GPS or anything else), that's the way I would put it.
- jonknee 11y agoThey have a location, it may or may not be related to your location.
- SixSigma 11y agoThen they think I am from London, my IP is 188.29.165.147. But no, I am 200 miles away. http://www.geoip.co.uk/?IP=188.29.165.147&send=LOOK+UP http://www.geoip.co.uk/?IP=188.29.165.147&send=LOOK+UP
- dspillett 11y agoThe location associated with the IP address they see may not be your physical location by quite some margin. If you are connecting via a mobile phone the address is likely to be registered as at one of the phone company's locations which could potentially be in a different state. For many home/office serving ISPs this is similar. Also, if you are using a VPN of some sort the address you present to the web server is quite disconnected from your physical location. If on the other hand they request your location via your web access client and you agree, it will be using localisation APIs that may well know your location with some precision: using GPS if your device has it and has it turned on, or via wireless AP availability based lookups otherwise.
- out_of_protocol 11y agoAt least they are honest - spying and not hiding it ;)
- finnn 11y agoWell technically that's your browser blocking their location request and asking you if you want to let it go through. If they were honest they would say something like "we're about to request your location for x very useful thing that justifies giving up this piece of sensitive data"
- jonknee 11y agoIt's a really backwards way to customize a phone number on their site. They POST your geocode to their server and based on the city you're in change the area/country code. Quite a strange way to do it, but hey.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> How is this protecting users? Its protecting users from getting visits from Kazakhstan's security services for covertly communicated with foreign entities. That is, presuming that the content of their traffic isn't unwelcome by the security services, since otherwise, even with the use of the MitM certificate, they'll still get visits.
- zem 11y agopretty much anything saying "for your protection", "for your safety" or "for your convenience" is a lie. it's a pretty common euphemism in the us too.
- peeters 11y agoWithout in any way condoning the move, there is a lot of protection you can add with decrypted traffic. Malware analysis, DLP, etc. But obviously the security as a whole has to consider the increased risk due to the centralized cert, disregarding entirely the fact that you're trusting a totalitarian government with all of your secrets...
- airza 11y agoSo like, what's the plan for people visiting Kazakhstan here? Install some rando's SSL certificate in your trust store or just not be allowed to access the internet?
- andrewstuart2 11y agoThey're likely only intercepting known https traffic (port 443). If you use a VPN and tunnel all traffic you probably won't have any issues. If a nation-state with the resources of China has come up with a system that can still be (albeit nontrivially) bypassed then I would imagine Kazakhstan will have a much-less-sophisticated first iteration.
- venomsnake 11y agoKazakhstan is quite the friend of china IIRC. They may have gotten their solution too as a goodwill gesture. Or this is on top of it.
- nathan_f77 11y agoI lived in Kazakhstan for a few months, and I think they're already blocking VPN traffic with deep packet inspection. I tried a number of different services, including setting up my own on Digital Ocean.
- vbezhenar 11y agoI use my OpenVPN VPS without any troubles.
- atmosx 11y agoInstall the certificate, then route all your connections through a tunnel. Multiple options are available like openvpn, shuttle[1], etc.. [1] https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle/ https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle/
- airza 11y agoI assumed that they would refuse to serve traffic that they couldn't decrypt with this certificate.
- henryaj 11y ago"telecom.kz wants to use your location." NOPE
- lemieux 11y agoI had exactly the same reaction.
- johncalvinyoung 11y agoSo much nope.
- pdappollonio 11y agoI wonder why that website needs your location... After all it's just a news article / press release.
- voltagex_ 11y agosetCityByIp() in Javascript. They seem to only be interested if your country code comes back as KZ. First use of the MapQuest geolocation APIs I've seen, too.
- tankenmate 11y agoI suspect although this might have some minor use to track users outside Kazakhstan, it's real use is to track web site visitors from within Kazakhstan.
- ronsor 11y agoextra nopes!
- kaizendad 11y agoI really appreciate how they're doing this. The Chinese built up an amazing infrastructure for the Great Firewall; the Kazakhs just say "install our cert!" The Chinese spend billions and have to stay ahead of all of their citizens' clever new ideas at all times; the Kazakhs spend a few hundred and just need to point guns at their citizens until they install a cert. Sure, it's going to be difficult to enforce, but it should also be quite cheap.
- egeozcan 11y ago> it's going to be difficult to enforce I guess it's just a matter of dropping every connection that you can't MITM, no?
- Elhana 11y agoYou don't have to. Proxy handles the request and just gives response back to you signed with national cert. If you don't install it, your browser will just start complaining about every site. At least that is how Bluecoat ProxySG[1] works at my employee. [1] https://bto.bluecoat.com/webguides/proxysg/security_first_steps/Content/Solutions/SSL/ssl_solution.htm https://bto.bluecoat.com/webguides/proxysg/security_first_st...
- voltagex_ 11y agoFunny story, most of the machines / servers at my workplace weren't vulnerable to Heartbleed - but ProxySG was. AFAIK they built their own OS from scratch, too.
- cortesoft 11y agoFor SSL traffic, yes, but that wouldn't stop someone from using a different encryption protocol.
- mil0 11y agocountry wide, this is a loud call for a cloud, distributed proxy provider with a better track record than the telco, to offer tor-like tunnels to at least exit the MITM zone.
- rdtsc 11y ago> secure protection of Kazakhstan users when using coded access protocols to foreign Internet resources. I guess "coded" here means VPN as well... Wonder how other countries' embassies will be connecting if they block all the encrypted connections? Everything through a satellite connection presumably.
- cwyers 11y agoThey're unlikely using plain HTTPS for sensitive traffic, as that still divulges what sites you're visiting.
- cookiecaper 11y agoTechnically it only divulges which IP addresses you're accessing. The URL, including domain name, in the request is encrypted.
- toast0 11y agoServer Name Identification divulges the hostname (in the clear) during the key exchange.
- detaro 11y ago> Wonder how other countries' embassies will be connecting if they block all the encrypted connections? Everything through a satellite connection presumably. Or just getting official exceptions.
- Quiark 11y agoWow, I feel really sorry for all Kzakhstan citizens. Also, this is a great example of 'rubber-hose cryptoanalysis' - who cares about 4096 RSA or whatnot if the government can just beat you until you oblige...
- api_or_ipa 11y agoKneecaps are always the easiest things to break.
- andreyf 11y agoImagining this in heavy Russian accent: "Security as good as veekest link. And veekest link... is kneecaps. Har har har."
- k_sze 11y agoRelevant: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- binarnosp 11y agoSo, the next step is encrypting the content before sending it through TLS...TLS over TLS
- kbenson 11y agoA VPN or SSH tunnel w/proxying is essentially this with a dedicated jump point.
- tptacek 11y agoIf they can unwrap the first layer of encryption, and most normal traffic inside isn't encrypted, people tunneling through MITM'd TLS are playing a game of cat and mouse with a very well-funded adversary that can imprison, torture, or kill them. Obviously, a lot of people do this kind of thing in China, and from what we know, circumventing the "Great Firewall" isn't routinely getting people killed. But people should know what they're doing before they try it in Kazakhstan.
- VMG 11y agoNext step: steganography
- DanBC 11y agoSteganography needs vast quantities of cover data. You're increasing the bandwidth costs dramatically when you recommend steganography for everything.
- stcredzero 11y agoSteganography needs vast quantities of cover data. Porn? Perhaps the world's smut peddlers will become beacons of freedom and civil disobedience? (Sounds like a Neal Stephenson book.)
- viraptor 11y agoThat's a terrible TX/RX ratio. Unless you encode data in each request and receive small pictures only, it would take ages to send any real information. Good for receiving though.
- jakobdabo 11y agoGoogle and Mozilla should blacklist the certificate once it's made public.
- nsgi 11y agoThat would just stop their browsers from working in Kazakhstan on HTTPS sites, who would most likely respond by issuing a new certificate and/or recommending IE. It may also discourage websites from implementing HTTPS. Not sure how this will work with certificate pinning, though. Will sites like Google become inaccessible?
- tptacek 11y agoNo, because locally-installed certificates override pins.
- klapinat0r 11y agoDepends on the client implementation. You should expect applications like Twitter for iOS to become inaccessible as it pins the certificate (correctly), i.e. adding the world of (rogue) CA's still wouldn't make the certificate valid. Apart from replacing the (hardcoded properties of the) certificate
- darkhorn 11y agoWell I think IE won't black list it because Microsoft likes to lick governments' asses.
- zokier 11y agoMakes me wonder how long such policy would last if Google, Facebook, and Microsoft would ignore traffic from Kazakhtelecom MITM server (or just drop the whole Kazakhtelecom IP address space). Of course I'm not saying that they should do that.
- Sleaker 11y agoActually they really should. As soon as major networks start saying NO is when governments change, I think this is one of the few times where this kind of pressure would be mostly good.
- briandear 11y agoAnd it wouldn't work. You've apparently have never been stuck inside China. I was there for a few years and it was brutal, network wise. Local companies just replace what can't be accessed from the outside.
- duskwuff 11y agoChina had a large domestic Internet industry, though. KZ doesn't.
- rinon 11y agoRU does though.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoAfter Donbass Kazakhstan will think thrice before lending their fate to Russia.
- realusername 11y agoExactly, and it's been blocked almost since the beginning in China, which means users are now using local products. If the users can't access the websites they are normally using the next day, they will just get some unblocking software from a friend, this things are shared really quickly.
- israrkhan 11y agowait till private keys for the cert are leaked by some disgruntled telecom company employee.. Puts the whole country internet at risk.
- nkassis 11y agoUnfortunately that might be the most effective way to fight this type of thing. Massive incident that would show the foolishness of the move.
- vbezhenar 11y agoI'm 100% sure that keys are in hardware device and couldn't be leaked. Kazakhstan has certificate infrastructure for years to issue digital certificates for their citizens. Nothing was leaked yet.
- akie 11y agoLove the Orwellian Newspeak: a "National Security Certificate" to protect people accessing "foreign resources"... If you don't know anything about the subject it really sounds like they're doing you a favor.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- fleitz 11y agoWhen you replace Certificate with Letter we understand how dedicated our governments are to our well being.
- jedberg 11y agoAnd everyone made fun of Netflix for implementing a secure protocol on top of http. Suddenly that seems really useful for people in Kazakhstan. http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-modern-take-on.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-m... https://github.com/Netflix/msl https://github.com/Netflix/msl
- tptacek 11y agoIf the protocol is delivered over HTTP and runs in Javascript DOM context, it will be straightforward for an adversary that MITMs all traffic to defeat it.
- klapinat0r 11y agoCurious. How do you go about (trivially) defeating asymmetric encryption? EDIT: or do you mean to replace "all" (content + js)?
- venomsnake 11y agoNo, just inject some JS that reads the required keys.
- klapinat0r 11y agoOkay, so it's (just) for reading the delivered data. Somehow I keep considering MitM a harmful attack (i.e. manipulating the data before it hits the user). My bad :)
- angelbob 11y agoCan do that through injected JS as well.
- MatthaeusHarris 11y agoGiven that you're relying on server-provided JS to verify the integrity of the data in the first place, a MITM could replace the verification function with return(true) and then inject whatever data they want.
- jjuhl 11y agoThat's just wrong and a really unpleasant slippery slope. I hope this causes a huge backlash from users and the internet at large.
- nkrisc 11y agoWell any backlash from Kazakh users would land them in prison most likely.
- 1ris 11y agoKazakhstan is authoritarian state that censors. This is in no way or form slippery.
- fleitz 11y agoThis is actually a huge improvement over the $5 wrench they used to use to decrypt personal communications.
- ocschwar 11y agoWondering about a turtles-all-the-way solution: A web-socket based protocol that opens up a new SSL session with non-MITM'd certificates. So you'd open up the snoop-me HTTPS/1.1 connection, do some GETs, then say "GET /busy, yo", and start what looks like a video-chat conversation that is in fact a regular SSL connection with uncompromised certs. (some protocol) over SSL over Web-Socket over bad-SSL over TCP/IP
- acveilleux 11y agoOnce it happens enough to be on the radar, it will be blocked or MiTM'd. Probably the former, possibly with a free symposium on the application of rubber hoses.
- tacojuan 11y agoSomewhat related would be Tor's flashproxy bridges: https://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/ https://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/
- mike_hearn 11y agoYou can't solve political problems with cryptography, much though the software engineering industry may wish it were so. Ultimately, though it will be very hard to accept, crypto may be on the way out as a technology with any political impact. Governments currently accept the rapid increase in SSL because none of the politicians or regulators understand that it's possible to disable it at a country level, and nobody with any technical clue has been willing to point it out to them. But that situation isn't sustainable, as the Kazakh example shows. A sufficiently determined government won't care about minor details like user convenience. They'll just say "you either install our root cert, or you don't get to use the internet" and that's it. Game over. If even just one western country does it, the rest will all follow within a few years.
- ilaksh 11y agoUse a crypto that doesn't rely on authority.
- OliverJones 11y agoIs Sacha Baron Cohen involved in this?
- exelius 11y agoWhile there are probably 100 different ways to avoid this and retain secure traffic, I would venture to guess that the average Internet savvy-ness of Kazakhstan is pretty low, so using any of them would single you out for additional government attention (whether you're actually doing anything illegal or not). That said, there's a remarkable tendency in countries as corrupt as Kazakhstan for a "shadow" telecom network to pop up. Just run in some fiber from a neighboring country on the down-low and distribute locally via microwave dish. Yeah, it's not exactly difficult to locate a powerful dish, but it's also not glaringly obvious so you can usually pay someone to look the other way. After all, the government officials want to look into everyone's communication, but if their own communication was ever intercepted, they would be the target of blackmail! They want to use the information they gather to blackmail citizens like the Stasi, not the other way around. Of course, the flip side of that are the mobile phone networks operated by the Mexican drug cartels and ISIS. But the only surefire way to avoid government surveillance of this sort is to bypass government regulated telecoms entirely.
- brohee 11y agoKazakhstan is possibly more democratic than all its neighbours save maybe Kirghizstan (I'm not up do date on the current government position). More democratic as in I can't make up who's more of a despot between Putin and Nazarbayev, after all they both win open elections, albeit with an iron grip on medias... But then Kirghizstan is likely depending on its neighbours for connectivity (also landlocked). The other neighbours are shining beacons of democracy such as Russia, China and Uzbekistan...
- nine_k 11y agoWhile Russia does encroach on various Internet liberties, it does so quite lazily so far. It does not have a great firewall, it does not have force-fed SSL certs, it does not crack down on the widespread VPN usage. When Roskomnadzor blacklists certain resources, Internet providers enforce it at their leisure, it seems, because different users report a resource either be blocked or not. "The strictness of Russian laws is compensated by their optional enforcement", as they say. In a smaller country like Kazakhstan such things are easier to enforce, probably.
- aaronkrolik 11y agoHow would this affect access to bitcoin/blockchains in Kazakhstan?
- sneak 11y agoIt won't. Bitcoin p2p traffic is unencrypted and does not use TLS.
- jstalin 11y agoSo how about hacking and leaking their certificate and then making all Kazak government traffic vulnerable to public posting all over the internet?
- dbalan 11y agoSlightly OT - if the bad guy can't fiddle with the trust store of your computer, whats his another methods of analysing a users traffic? Is https breakable by other means?
- ryan-c 11y agoYou can inject hooks into the certificate validation routines to make your certificates accepted, hook the actual encrypt/decrypt functions, or make the session establishment routines leak the master secret.
- Elhana 11y agoThey don't really have to force you to install that root cert. Every https connection will be signed with it, so you either trust that cert and can actually view the site (and gov can read it all) or you don't and just get error in your browser. Everything is breakable, but some things take a really looong time to break. Governments might be able to break some weak https encryption, but not all.
- mtgx 11y agoIs this different than the DoD having a root certificate in iOS (and I think Windows, too)? Couldn't the DoD also MITM the traffic any time they wish?
- tjohns 11y agoYes and no. At a basic level, yes, any CA can issue a certificate which can be used to launch a MITM attack. We trust that the CAs don't do this. If they're caught, the browser industry tends to revoke their CA status -- which is pretty bad for the CA's business model. That said, the CAs have been under increased scrutiny lately, and browsers are starting to build additional protections against this kind of thing: - Certificate pinning (HPKP) allows sites to restrict which certificates can be used for a specific host, even if the certificate is signed by a trusted system root. (Caveat: HPKP isn't enforced for local roots, installed by an admin. That's how Kazakhstan is able to get away with this, because they're asking users to install a new root manually.) - Certificate Transparency is supposed to provide an audit log for CAs, so that any maliciously issued certificates can be detected and acted on. That said, these features are new and not universally supported by all browsers. And neither would help in a case like Kazakhstan, where users are being asked to bypass security features and there's no system root to revoke.
- hannob 11y agoThis sounds pretty bad and we can just hope that this doesn't become the new norm. What makes me kinda angry is however where this originates from: There are countless so-called "IT security" products that had this idea of MitM-ing all traffic before. Basically it's just the same idea on a bigger level.
- NoGravitas 11y agoIndeed. This is already the norm in the Western world, as long as we're talking about the workplace.
- davidu 11y agoGoogle, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, Twitter, etc. could have a very strong influence on changing this if they banded together to respond to this in some way. The government might be doing what they think is right, but public backlash can change policy almost overnight. We saw this in the US recently with SOPA/PIPA. The "Internet" response was unprecedented. The people of Kazakhstan can achieve the same outcome.
- 1ris 11y agoWhat should these companies responses be? And why should the kazach goverment care? They'd prefer if the poeple used russian (or kazach) copy cats like vkontakte anyway.
- davidu 11y agoThe government preference isn't important, citizen preference is. As to what they can do... it's a range from info to painful, but they can choose a range of options from serving up interstitials in a localized language that explains the issues, problems, and privacy and security implications... all the way to deny service. If the citizens demand access to those services, or find it offensive that their privacy and security is being violated and circumvented, they will take action. And these companies can help orchestrate, just as we did with SOPA/PIPA.
- minimuffins 11y agoYou're talking like Kazakhstan is a functional democracy. http://exiledonline.com/the-massacre-everyone-ignored-70-striking-oil-workers-killed-in-kazakhstan-by-us-supported-dictator/ http://exiledonline.com/the-massacre-everyone-ignored-70-str...
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoLet's not forget when they bossed around some Italian secret services, police and administration underlings to arrest and deport the wife and child of a Kazakh dissident: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0d35c07c-e57f-11e2-ad1a-00144feabdc0.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0d35c07c-e57f-11e2-ad1a-00144feabd...
- jug5 11y agoKazakhstan, always playing catch up with America.
- coldcode 11y agoIf all of their https traffic is compromised, would we not be able to break all of their financial traffic remotely?
- untothebreach 11y agoNot necessarily, it just means that Kazakh citizens will have a root cert installed on their machine that will allow the government to MITM their https connections. The connection between the MITM and the client will be encrypted (just with the government-controlled cert instead of the server's cert), and the MITM will have an encrypted connection to the server. I suppose it is possible that the MITM could make an unencrypted connection to the server, but I don't know a good reason for the government to do that.
- mailslot 11y agoWhy can't Internet companies simply block the entire backward country? I can't imagine Borat's motherland traffic monitizes well anyway. You want to MITM? Fine, build your own Kazakh Google.
- jonknee 11y agoThat would actually be a huge win for Kazakhstan. Much like China pushing people to use Baidu and other state friendly services instead of Western owned services.
- RyanZAG 11y agoWoah, it can't be stressed how bad this is. If this succeeds, other countries will definitely follow! If it can be shown to work, it will be demanded that this be implemented by pretty much everyone for difficult to deny political reasons (terrorists, children, crime, etc) This feels like the first bullet in a new war that will occur in every parliament world wide.
- NoGravitas 11y agoIt is already par for the course in the enterprise world (both public and private sector), for difficult to deny political/economic reasons.
- tomjen3 11y agoWhich is quite another thing, after all you are using somebody else network, just as you have every right to hear Adeles new album in your home, but not in mine. Besides these days you can use your own phone and mobile data, at which point you should be safe.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TheSoftwareGuy 11y agoI can't say that I agree with you. Kazakstan has never really been much of a leader in world politics.
- SiVal 11y agoNot following the politics; following the technological "innovation". "Appropriate technology" for "developing" dictatorships.
- bottled_poe 11y ago> If it can be shown to work Work for who? This breaks SSL encryption, a technology which the modern internet relies on.
- danpalmer 11y agoThis is what HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) protects against. It allows a server to specify the only set of certificates that a browser should accept. Meaning that MITM'ing is impossible, without a valid cert in the chain of one of the advertised trusted certificates from the server. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Chrome for Android, and the Android stock browser all support it. I'm not sure how they intend to circumvent this problem, apart from perhaps just instructing users to not use those browsers? That's quite difficult to put into practice.
- tptacek 11y agoNo, it isn't. Locally installed certificates override pins; if they didn't, HPKP browsers wouldn't be deployable inside large companies that have regulatory requirements to monitor traffic from their own desktops, and there would be no benefit, because an adversary who can install software or reconfigure your machine can defeat pins in a variety of other less transparent ways. HPKP is great, but it doesn't address this problem.
- davidu 11y agoAs an aside, this is one of the reasons why I believe locally installed certificates overriding pinning has a quickly eroding shelf life... At some point, something bad will happen like this (or malware-based) and Chrome will raise their hand and say, "sorry enterprises, no more MITM at all, even for locally installed certificates." After that, IE and Firefox will follow and crypto will no longer be so trivially subverted by enterprise organizations.
- tptacek 11y agoThat's another arms race Chrome will lose, because the market for the kinds of enterprise configuration management and "host protection" tools that could override this policy exists and is very lucrative. Chrome would simply be begging enterprise security companies to release products to fuck up their browser. I disagree with you.
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- nashashmi 11y agoI wish somebody could tell me what this means half technically. My mind is wavering between this is a good thing because everyone's connection is becoming secure to not a good thing for reasons unknown.
- tmerr 11y agoIt seems like you've got it backward. Kazakhstan is not making the internet more secure. They're requiring citizens to install something (their own root security certificate) that compromises the security of https. The result is that their government can eavesdrop on all traffic, encrypted or unencrypted. That's the story anyway.
- RangerScience 11y agoThis is extremely relevant to my interests but I don't actually understand what's happening here. Part of that is the awkward translation. Can I get a more detailed description and/or some links to help me understand? Thanks!
- vlunkr 11y agoI'm sure someone else can explain it better than me, but they want all of their citizens to install a certificate on all of their internet capable devices that will route all their traffic through the government so they can see all of it. It's a man in the middle attack on the entire population.
- DanielStraight 11y agoIf we could rebuild the internet from scratch knowing that someone would try to do this, what measures could be put in place to make it impossible to MITM traffic (in other words, make it so the only option is to install monitoring software directly on the user's machine)? Is this something which even can be defeated with current cryptographic theory?
- SXX 11y agoIt's not only can be done in theory, it's already implemented in both TOR and I2P. You can't MITM traffic when it's encrypted end2end. Issue is that cryptography won't help when there is some government that decide to enforce censorship country-wide.
- mike_hearn 11y agoNo, it can't be defeated. If the government says "you can't use encryption on the internet" then it's game over, simple as that. The only thing that stops western countries doing this is the fact that politicians don't realise it's possible (and the horrible UX/deployment issues involved with attempting to install a new root cert on every device your customers may have).
- thewarrior 11y agoMy prediction : Indian government takes up this idea in the next 12 months. If this works this idea will spread.
- ris 11y agoI doubt it - the outsourcing industry would cry foul a million times over.
- chatmasta 11y agoWhy is Kazakhstan's cert any different than the hundreds of "trusted" root certificates that came preinstalled on my mac? Looking at my mac's cert keychain, there are 185 trusted root certs. I don't know what any of them are or who has the private key to them. My ISP could MITM my traffic whenever it wants to, if it has the private key of one of the hundreds of trusted root certs on my device.
- ryan-c 11y agoThose hundreds of trusted root certificates are, at least to some extent, held to operational and security standards. If your ISP used one of those certificates to MitM your traffic, there is a very real possibility of that certificate being blacklisted by browsers. Further, unlike the Kazakhstan certificate, those root certificates cannot bypass HTTPS public key pinning (HPKP).
- chatmasta 11y agoThanks for the info! I didn't know some of this. Two questions: 1: > there is a very real possibility of that certificate being blacklisted by browsers Why would a browser blacklist a certificate? Is it possible for a browser to detect a MITM attack when the SSL traffic is all signed by the private key of a trusted root certificate? 2: > Further, unlike the Kazakhstan certificate, those root certificates cannot bypass HTTPS public key pinning (HPKP). You are saying that pre-installed root certificates behave differently than user-installed root certificates? Wouldn't that behavior be system-dependent? I was under the impression that no root certificates can bypass public key pinning... isn't that sort of the point of pinning? That it allows traffic encryption outside of the normal trust hierarchy? What makes the Kazakhstan cert special that allows it to break pinning?
- ryan-c 11y ago1: A server using HPKP with the reporting feature turned on will receive reports from browsers when the certificate does not match what was expected (provided HPKP is being honored). 2: Browsers ignore HPKP when the server certificate is trusted through a user or administrator installed root CA. All mainstream browsers on all platforms behave in this way. This is by design specifically to allow enterprises to do the sort of traffic interception that Kazakhstan is implementing. The rationale is that if an attacker is able to get as far as installing their own CA on your system, you're screwed anyway.
- xg15 11y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but doesn't android display a rather ennerving "someone might be spying on you" warning when custom root certs are installed? I'm looking forward to the reactions when every (android-using) citizen of the country student gets that warning.
- mike_hearn 11y agoWhy? They would have already installed the root cert themselves and they'd know perfectly well that they are being spied on. It'd just be another annoying warning bar for them.
- xg15 11y agoThey installed the cert because they've been told to and because likely "the internet doesn't work" when they don't. But that doesn't imply they know what a root certificate actually does or what the consequences of adding new root certs are.
- BuildTheRobots 11y agoI installed some custom roots onto 4.4.2 the other night to MiTM some apps. I saw no obvious warnings at all.
- xg15 11y agoI was referring to this: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62644 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62644 I'm not sure how the current status of that warning is, however.
- anovikov 11y agoDoes it mean that using SSL the normal way will become impossible? I can't imagine this. How this can be enforced?
- keyme 11y ago1) The only TLS connections that are let through are all MITM'd. 2) Every other TCP/UDP flow is checked for conformance with plain-text protocols (like HTTP), or far worse, simply for the level of entropy in the data. 3) A threat of legal action is made against anyone caught using secure crypto. Good luck beating that. The key here is that the "entropy detector" doesn't "really" need to work. It only needs to work well enough to scare people into submission.
- anovikov 11y agoHere steganography comes into play - very easily implementable in the form of webcam streams bugged with usable data.
- bgs 11y agoI think I found the law, anyone read Kazakh[1] or Russian[2]? [1] http://egov.kz/wps/poc?uri=mjnpa:document&language=kk&documentId=Z1500000418 http://egov.kz/wps/poc?uri=mjnpa:document&language=kk&docume... [2] http://egov.kz/wps/poc?uri=mjnpa:document&language=ru&documentId=Z1500000418 http://egov.kz/wps/poc?uri=mjnpa:document&language=ru&docume... Edit: I think I got them this time. They seem to be ministerial orders under Kazakhstan's 2004 telecoms law: In Kazakh: http://info-con.mid.gov.kz/sites/default/files/pages/2_kaz.doc http://info-con.mid.gov.kz/sites/default/files/pages/2_kaz.d... http://info-con.mid.gov.kz/sites/default/files/pages/6_kaz.doc http://info-con.mid.gov.kz/sites/default/files/pages/6_kaz.d... And Russian: http://info-con.mid.gov.kz/sites/default/files/pages/2_rus.doc http://info-con.mid.gov.kz/sites/default/files/pages/2_rus.d... http://info-con.mid.gov.kz/sites/default/files/pages/6_rus.doc http://info-con.mid.gov.kz/sites/default/files/pages/6_rus.d...
- selecadm 11y agoThere are zero "cert" mentions.
- selecadm 11y agoInteresting. In 6_*.doc I can read this: "Long-distance and international operators perform transmission of traffic that uses protocols with encryption support using security certificate, except traffic encrypted by means of cryptographic protection on the territory of the Republic of Kazakhstan." So, if encrypted by such means on the country's territory, shouldn't be intercepted? Ha!
- fapjacks 11y agoThis is such a bad idea!
- Create 11y ago"SSL Added and Removed Here" Kazakhstan?!
- acd 11y agohttps://twitter.com/DEVOPS_BORAT https://twitter.com/DEVOPS_BORAT
- multinglets 11y agoAt least they're fucking telling people they're doing it.
- icco 11y agoTIL: "Kazakhstan is currently our 76th largest goods trading partner with $2.5 billion in total (two way) goods trade during 2013. Goods exports totaled $1.1 billion; Goods imports totaled $1.4 billion. The U.S. goods trade deficit with Kazakhstan was $295 million in 2013.” - https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/south-central-asia/kazakhstan https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/south-central-asia/kazakh...
- rikkus 11y agoMaybe this will be what the UK government do as a 'relaxed' version of 'ban all crypto'.
- JumpCrisscross 11y agoTo what degree has the U.S. government, through the NSA et al, provided moral cover for this sort of thing?
- electic 11y agoMy first thought, any tech company to setup offices in this country are probably out the window. However, more importantly, they just made it really easy for other governments to spy on them. In their zeal to protect national security, they have done just the opposite.
- PeterisP 11y agoNot really - to anyone who doesn't possess the certificates used in MITM, the SSL traffic is just as impossible to decrypt as before.
- cmdrfred 11y agoWhen I watched Borat I felt a little bad for the Kazakhstan government getting singled out like that for seemingly no reason. Now it feels incredibly satisfying.
- kazakh 11y agoKazakh here. Fuck, what do we do? Any suggestions other than trying to raise awareness? To give some context, the reason why they are getting away with such brute methods is that the most people wouldn't understand the full implication. I would be surprised if this would prove difficult to enforce - the first thing an ordinary person would do when, say, Facebook wouldn't load is to call up the Kazakhtelecom's support and the support guy would tell them to "press that button that says 'I trust this certificate'" and they would comply. There also hasn't been an uproar re government snooping into private citizens' communication, the kind that US had with Snowden etc., so a lot of people are likely to accept the "for your own security" talk at face value without much skepticism. It's also unlikely that even heightened awareness will inspire much backlash, as there is no real track record of grassroots organizing, even when the government tightens the screws. To its credit, the government has been quite skillful at balancing at just below the limit of pissing people off enough to make them go to the streets for the last twenty years (soaring oil prices in the last decade helped as well).
- DenisM 11y agoI'm afraid there are only two options here: - A life-long educational program for the people, starting with study of basic logic, rhetoric, and obscurantism. Consider collaborating with people trying to do the same in e.g. Russia. - Joining the burgeoning autocratic bureaucracy and playing by its rules to bring change from within. If you don't feel like you have the energy or skills, consider supporting a like-minded, but more capable person in their career. It's never a crime to support a growing bureaucrat. The biggest challenge you're going to face is defining a common idea to unite the people with whom you want to collaborate. "Like-minded" should mean something specific, or else. This idea should paint a picture compelling enough to motivate people to act, even if only a smallish number, and big enough to eclipse the lesser differences among the collaborators. The only easy option is emigration.
- nfd 11y agoRaise awareness, spread the word about Tor. If they start running attacks against Tor, start an uproar. And pitch Tor as an elementary security measure; say "do this to make your communications more secure." It isn't perfect, but maybe it's better than nothing?
- mdumic 11y agoThey lack resources to crack it or otherwise do it in secrecy so they're demanding cooperation. Slick.
- voltagex_ 11y agoI wonder if they'll be checking the validity of the upstream cert?
- gf1 11y agoCould this be used by the Kazakh government to sign malware/spying packages and install them on their citizens' machines? Sounds like a super easy way to open that backdoor. Or is this a different type of cert? I'm thinking along the lines of what Dell and Lenovo were yelled at for (although those were easy to rip off, but the government could possibly serve as the malicious actor here).
- selecadm 11y agoOnly if the cert also has code signing EKU. Then, in case of code signing trust bit not disabled in the cert manager, signed EXEs will appear with "verified publisher".
- gesman 11y agoGoogle should come up with cheap satellite internet. This is the only way to bypass unruly governments. But then you're on a mercy of Google Republic.
- ronsor 11y agoGoogle already has your data anyway
- mhandley 11y agoIdiocy such as this is a strong argument for the use of PAKE rather than CA-based authentication. No need to trust anyone other than the site you're trying to connect to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password-authenticated_key_agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password-authenticated_key_agr... TLDR: Basically, you prove to the website/mail server/sshd that you know your password, while the site simultaneously proves to you that they also know your password (and hence are actually the site you're trying to connect to), all without actually sending the password in either direction. The password is then used to bootstrap symmetric encryption keys.
- wtracy 11y agoI once looked into getting a .kz domain. (I wanted to host comics on a site named "comi.kz".) It turns out that one of the requirements for getting a .kz is that the website be physically hosted inside Kazakhstan. (And yes, Kazakhstani hosting providers that do business with foreigners are expensive.) Right now, I am very glad that I did not go down this route.
- flurdy 11y ago"from which Internet access will be performed (mobile telephones and tabs on base of iOS/Android, PC and notebooks on base of Windows/MacOS)" So use Linux and you will be fine?
- fishanz 11y agoI think this would break, for example, mobile apps which use certificate pinning.
- dendory 11y agoI wonder if non-TLS based VPNs could be used around that? And if those are blocked, how hard would it be to build a SSL over HTTP proxy outside the country?
- cgcardona 11y agoFWIW there are 9.49 million Internet users in Kazakhstan according to wolframalpha.com http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+internet+users+in+khazikstan http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+internet+user...
- rakslice_ 11y agoThis is lame news. But what I'm curious about is: What are they going to do (if anything) to validate the upstream certificates? - What will their upstream root certificate policy be? - If they MITM any old upstream certificate, how will they mitigate the huge target they are painting on Kazakh Internet users?
- peeters 11y agoI would assume their root trust store could be similar to what your browser would use. i.e. a curated set of root CAs with CRL subscription.
- bmahax 11y agoI don't agree with all the comments here. A sovereign state decided to ensure all outgoing traffic is protected by a secure signature that is not possessed by foreign intelligence agencies or hackers (well, that's the idea). It is a very cheap and effective way to achieve this. Spying on the population is not prevented by GeoTrust and Cie's loosy certificates, a lot of literature and real life examples already show that. This is a tragedy of the commons, until everybody has access to REAL security, then no country has interest in having foreign powers spying them while not even being to do what everybody else does. In France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Australia, etc, all of your data is already analyzed and deciphered, they freaking work together to make it less obvious than Kazakhstan. Don't make any mistake and don't call for overthrowing the regime there, it makes no sense. From a citizen PoV, they became almost as watched over as we are for WWW traffic, but their lives are still not as much tracked as ours since they do not have the means of our agencies. They are still better off than us.
- ptaipale 11y ago> A sovereign state decided to ensure all outgoing traffic Not "ensure". MITM. It provides no security benefits. But it might provide another attack surface for additional malicious adversaries (criminals and other governments).
- torrio888 11y agoIt doesn't protect from a foreign intelligence agencies or hackers because connection is only encrypted by Kazakhstan's certificate to the point where MitM is performed by the government of Kazakhstan from that point connection to the website is encrypted with a valid certificate. Even if what you said is true and western countries have private encryption keys of all websites I think that citizens of Kazakhstan would rather be spied by foreign governments than by their own government.
- caf 11y agoTime for httpss:// (HTTP over TLS over TLS)!
- gideon_b 11y agoAww but there's a kitten. This must be innocent.
- sbaha88 11y agoWould it affect vpn services as well? Sad to see more outrage here than in Kazakhstan
- LoLFactor 11y agoFor those of you looking for a mirror (copy) of the page before it was taken down, here it is: https://web.archive.org/web/20151202203337/http://telecom.kz/en/news/view/18729 https://web.archive.org/web/20151202203337/http://telecom.kz...
- sneak 11y agoAll other countries have inferior surveillance.
- adm_hn 11y agoIt seems they removed the page
- aorth 11y agoIndeed. Even more strange is that they are handling it with a (temporary) redirect on that specific article. $ http --print h http://telecom.kz/en/news/view/18729 HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily Connection: keep-alive Content-Length: 154 Content-Type: text/html Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2015 08:41:31 GMT Location: http://telecom.kz/en Server: nginx
- samat 11y agoAny proof for that? Anyone has a copy of original article? Link redirects to the main page of the website.
- nbaksalyar 11y agoThey deleted the press release. It's available on the Web archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20151202203337/http://telecom.kz/en/news/view/18729 http://web.archive.org/web/20151202203337/http://telecom.kz/...
- Sanzhar 11y agoDid they just delete those news? Can't find the link on the telecom.kz website any more?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jumasheff 11y agoKyrgyz here. An evil lesson is soon learnt. It's highly possible that our regulators will try to push similar bill.
- xirtus 11y agovice had a documentary how the US is putting former guantanamo bay prisoners in kazakstan, I think this is connected.
- xirtus 11y agovice had a documentary how the USA was putting former guantanamo bay prisoners in kazakstan, Its worth watching I think this is connected. The US is turning kazakstan into a interzone for tracing the regions servers, not only in kazakh its just a hub.
- sathackr 11y agoLink is 404'd Here is the text of what was there. ENG ALMATY Press center Company News Internet news TV News Publishing Video Archive Photo archives Operators Main page Press center Company News Kazakhtelecom JSC notifies on introduction of National security certificate from 1 January 2016 Kazakhtelecom JSC notifies on introduction of National security certificate from 1 January 2016 From 1 January 2016 pursuant to the Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan «On communication» Committee on Communication, Informatization and Information, Ministry for investments and development of the Republic of Kazakhstan introduces the national security certificate for Internet users. According to the Law telecom operators are obliged to perform traffic pass with using protocols, that support coding using security certificate, except traffic, coded by means of cryptographic information protection on the territory of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The national security certificate will secure protection of Kazakhstan users when using coded access protocols to foreign Internet resources. By words of Nurlan Meirmanov, Managing director on innovations of Kazakhtelecom JSC, Internet users shall install national security certificate, which will be available through Kazakhtelecom JSC internet resources. «User shall enter the site www.telecom.kz and install this certificate following step by step installation instructions”- underlined N.Meirmanov. Kazakhtelecom JSC pays special attention that installation of security certificate can be performed from each device of a subscriber, from which Internet access will be performed (mobile telephones and tabs on base of iOS/Android, PC and notebooks on base of Windows/MacOS). Detailed instructions for installation of security certificate will be placed in December 2015 on site www.telecom.kz. PR department Kazakhtelecom JSC 30.11.2015 Academy of Public Administration under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Official site of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Информационно-аналитический портал Write to us FAQ Site map Report an error Career with Us Procurement Аукционы Reference book Help © 2010-2015, АО «Қазақтелеком»
- mtgx 11y agoFor an easier to link source: http://seclists.org/funsec/2015/q4/30 http://seclists.org/funsec/2015/q4/30
- strictfp 11y agoAnd this, dear fellows, shows how effective it is to fight politics with technical solutions.
- kukabynd 11y agoKazakh here as well. Don’t bother. Nothing will happen. It’s just talk as always.
- DonaldEFoss 11y agoWhile I applaud the privacy advocates, we knew this was coming when HTTP/2 (RFC 4750-4751) because an official standard in May 2015. The only way a country with limited bandwidth can operate a transparent proxy is to stick a new certificate in the root chain so that it can decode, cache and re-encode the traffic. I don't like it anymore than anyone else, but I see a non-malicious purpose here.