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But we are in a better place than before. Without HTTPS everywhere and governments needing to ask people to install new root certs, we would not have learned ab
by cpeterso 7y ago
But we are in a better place than before. Without HTTPS everywhere and governments needing to ask people to install new root certs, we would not have learned about this Kazakhstan MITM issue.
- btown 7y agoYep - without HTTPS everywhere, governments would have been silently able to snoop on Internet traffic without anyone knowing.
- a3n 7y agoSarcasm? Not sure. But all a government has to do is embed within the endpoint, post-decryption. "Or else."
- giancarlostoro 7y agoIt is a valid point, it becomes much more obvious that you're snooping if you're trying to MITM. If you weren't snooping, you wouldn't bother trying.
- StreamBright 7y agoNot only that but they can happily MITM HTTPS as well. Not all the HTTPS sites use certificate pinning or HSTS.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIt's a tough problem because certificate pinning kills a lot of legitimate use patterns; it's not something I'd like to see being the default everywhere.
- StreamBright 7y agoYes but this is how many companies protect their HTTPS traffic (including one financial institution I work for).
- cpach 7y agoWhat root cert would they us for that?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- yjqcy 7y agoThe government of my country has at least one certificate that's trusted by Mozilla (and I guess Chrome and Windows too) by default.
- xorcist 7y agoIt won't stay trusted if it is actively used for MITM attacks. At least that's the idea.
- StreamBright 7y agohttps://security.stackexchange.com/questions/71171/is-there-anything-preventing-the-nsa-from-becoming-a-root-ca https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/71171/is-there-...
- StreamBright 7y agoYou mean CA? There are many options depending on which agency and which target you are talking about. They have few options from stealing a CA from a legitimate CA user if the want anonymity or use one that is built in to your browsers or systems somebody else already pointed out in the thread.
- cpach 7y ago”all a government has to do is embed within the endpoint” That’s a pretty high bar to clear though.
- williamscales 7y agoGiven it's already happened in the US, I don't think it's high enough.
- viraptor 7y agoNot really. NSA requests are backed by LE either directly or... extortion style. https://www.wired.com/2007/10/nsa-asked-for-p/ https://www.wired.com/2007/10/nsa-asked-for-p/
- cpach 7y agoAllright. But they didn’t do it for all ~300M citizens though, did they?
- williamscales 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A They did it to everyone whose traffic transited ATT's backbone
- cpach 7y agoI haven’t immersed myself into the details of the Room 641A scandal, but it does indeed sound awful. I do not approve of the operations of NSA/Five Eyes. But let my re-phrase my question like this: Do we have any evidence that NSA can perform MITM on TLS 1.3? Using a federal US CA would be one way, tricking a CA to issue fraudulent leaf certificates would be another, but as established elsewhere in this thread, both those ways are quite noisy. Attacking the endpoint is another way, but once Mallory does that, all bets are off.
- samstave 7y agoThis is exactly what Carnivore and PRISM were
- cpach 7y agoAnd how would Carnivore/PRISM strip off the TLS encryption?
- jedberg 7y agoOh I agree 100%. It just makes me sad that governments keep trying to spy and we have to keep coming up with new technology to make that harder.
- rapind 7y agoIt's not a technology problem, it's a social one. If a society values it's privacy enough then it will change. The real issue is how abstract the consequences of loss of privacy are. It requires people to actually think beyond "I've got nothing to hide". No worries though. Greedy corporations and governments are greedy and they'll keep pushing the limits of societie's tolerance until it blows up in their face.
- unityByFreedom 7y ago> It's not a technology problem, it's a social one. It's both, everyone can contribute to the solution or the problem.
- missingrib 7y agoGovernments are way scarier though. I can decide not to use Google, people in third world countries need the internet.
- syn0byte 7y agoNo. we just feel better because it just sounds so obviously reasonable doesn't it? Kazakhstan's low-tech approach is just that, low-tech and low-effort. They could have used tons of vectors besides simply saying "install this cert." A tiny shred of effort would have been to package an "updater" that did the install without explicitly saying that's what it was for. Or better yet: Kazakhstan is committed to a greener more ecologically friendly future! All tax documentation will go paperless! Just use the provided USB Key to access your documents in electronic format! A small morsel of effort would be to force it on OS vendors through regulation/licensing/threats/money for localized copies. A good deal of effort would hijack CRLs, pinnings, et al while demanding/sneaking the private keys of the CAs. Public Key Infrastructure is fucking pointless when the infrastructure is precisely what you can't trust.
- cpach 7y agoHow would they sneak the private keys from e.g. Digicert/Geotrust/ISRG?
- mdhardeman 7y agoAnd there would be no point in doing so anyway. Chrome, etc., require that certificates which descend from publicly trusted roots have their certificates published in certificate transparency logs. Someone would quickly notice bogus certs being issued and the associated root would get blacklisted.
- olliej 7y agoThis is why certificate transparency is required now - it means that we no longer need to trust the CAs to tell us when they’ve issued an unconstrained intermediate or cross signed a root. Previously it was essentially luck that led to CA malfeasance being detected. Especially in the post-finally-ending Symantec world the CAs understand that issuing any such cert is likely to very quickly end their business in most other countries. I feel the real problem kz is going to have is that they have now demonstrated that they will abuse having a root cert, so there is no way any root stores will let them in in future. I imagine they’d even have difficulty getting any of the other roots to issue certs for them (managed sub-ca I think? I forget terminology)