3 ms·

I'm mainly concerned with applications that follow standard protocols and allow the user to ask them to connect to arbitrary hosts. There are still a lot of th

by comex 10y ago

I'm mainly concerned with applications that follow standard protocols and allow the user to ask them to connect to arbitrary hosts. There are still a lot of those, even if these days standard protocols are dying out in favor of centralized proprietary services ;) That includes both non-HTTP TLS-wrapped protocols like email and IRC, and applications that access user-supplied HTTP URLs but aren't browsers, like media players, RSS clients, git, Matrix (chat), wget, apt-get, etc. Proprietary services are trickier because there's a question of "security for whom". As someone who mostly uses computers he owns, I would definitely like to be able to sniff Dropbox and see what it's sending. (Actually, Dropbox is a bad example because most Dropbox users already trust them with a lot of personal data, but there are many stories of, e.g., random mobile apps sending user data to servers with no justification.) That's not a security compromise from my perspective because it's my data. But Dropbox or whoever may not want people to get at their app's internal communications, and may see it as a compromise from their perspective. And if I'm using a system where someone else has root, I might agree with them. Of course, root can always attach with a debugger and try to extract the data anyway, but then there's the cat and mouse game of obfuscation...

pvg 10y ago
ask them to connect to arbitrary hosts. There are still a lot of those Yep, I get that and I understand the problem you're describing is an actual problem. I just don't think 'endpoint hands over its plaintext' is the right solution. I would definitely like to be able to sniff Dropbox and see what it's sending Well, I'm sure you can, it's just not as easy as firing up tcpdump. But if you wanted to you could, it probably won't even take you long. 'It's not as convenient as firing up tcpdump' is still not a strong argument for 'just hand over the plaintext', in my mind. I'll wrap this up with a story you might have also seen play out over twitter the last couple of months. Tavis Ormandy, a security engineer currently working on Project Zero at Google has been dissecting various AV products and finding them riddled with pervasive and gross security holes up to and including intercepting TLS traffic and then screwing it up so badly as to make it highly vulnerable. The response from one vocal AV expert has been 'well, we wouldn't have to do that [and screw it up] if you gave us a tap/API into the plaintext so we can keep you all safe'. The predictable retort of security engineers has been 'LOL, NO'. I think ultimately, that 'LOL, NO' is what you're up against rather than some rando ranting at you on a message board. Enjoyable as it has been!

by comex 10y ago

pvg 10y ago

ask them to connect to arbitrary hosts. There are still a lot of those Yep, I get that and I understand the problem you're describing is an actual problem. I just don't think 'endpoint hands over its plaintext' is the right solution. I would definitely like to be able to sniff Dropbox and see what it's sending Well, I'm sure you can, it's just not as easy as firing up tcpdump. But if you wanted to you could, it probably won't even take you long. 'It's not as convenient as firing up tcpdump' is still not a strong argument for 'just hand over the plaintext', in my mind. I'll wrap this up with a story you might have also seen play out over twitter the last couple of months. Tavis Ormandy, a security engineer currently working on Project Zero at Google has been dissecting various AV products and finding them riddled with pervasive and gross security holes up to and including intercepting TLS traffic and then screwing it up so badly as to make it highly vulnerable. The response from one vocal AV expert has been 'well, we wouldn't have to do that [and screw it up] if you gave us a tap/API into the plaintext so we can keep you all safe'. The predictable retort of security engineers has been 'LOL, NO'. I think ultimately, that 'LOL, NO' is what you're up against rather than some rando ranting at you on a message board. Enjoyable as it has been!