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Warning: what follows is completely baseless speculation, and let's concede that right off the bat. Who's to say that this isn't happening in the US as well? T

Warning: what follows is completely baseless speculation, and let's concede that right off the bat. Who's to say that this isn't happening in the US as well? The US has invested billions of dollars in dragnet surveillance that is allegedly useless for anything other than metadata in the context of HTTPS. Is it out of the question to ask whether our secret courts could issue gag orders and claim that national security mandates CA root keys? Such a gag order would only be served to a small group of engineers at large companies, and those engineers would have no right to report on it. We're talking about only a few hundred FISA gag orders, and thousands are served annually. It would make their multibillion dollar infrastructure useful again, wouldn't surprise me if some (unnamed, anonymous) judge bought the argument. To employees at vulnerable companies, what's your PKI like? Is anyone aware of a company that implements strong multi-party checks on accesses to important private keys? If the NSA wanted your keys, how many employees would need to be served gag orders? Is it on the order of dozens or hundreds?

everdrive 7y ago
>Who's to say that this isn't happening in the US as well? No one can say it because you just claimed it's all secret and can't be proven.
admax88q 7y ago
If the NSA was using their own certificates to MITM all HTTPS traffic it would be easily noticed by security researchers. Its not like they obtain the private keys of every US company. They'd have to make their own replacement certain for every site they wish to intercept. That could easily be noticed by security professionals and targeted companies by monitoring.
- nickysielicki 7y ago
  What about just for the Alexa 100?
  - Filligree 7y ago
    Far too many people would be able to notice. Someone in one of the companies would whistleblow.
    - 24gttghh 7y ago
      But would they? The Snowden leaks were 6 years ago. I am assuming the government didn't just throw up their hands and give up after that... edit: not to say they are specifically MITM'ing HTTPS widescale.
      - austinheap 7y ago
        There are a lot easier ways to exfiltrate data than wholesale breaking TLS encryption and MITM'ing 295+ tbps of domestic traffic. That said, every super power is working on better decryption capabilities.
  - admax88q 7y ago
    Event just a single site from the alexa 100 would be too obvious. I'm sure some security researchers and/or companies are already monitoring the certificates issued from major websites for abnormalities.
filleokus 7y ago
Earlier this would probably have been a somewhat plausible solution, but not even then for mass scale surveillance. Assume NSA et. al had access to trusted CA private keys, then they could generate certificates for arbitrary domains which would be trusted by clients. But if they MITM'ed _all_ connections (or even a large portion) surely someone would have noticed, like in the DigiNotar case [0]. But it's even harder (or better) now, with the advent of Certificate Transparency. Since browsers check certificates, periodically, against the CT logs which would fail for forged certificates [1]. However, stealing private keys from companies themselves is a practice that I can imagine happening on a small scale, like the Realtek signing keys for Stuxnet [2]. But doing that on a large scale is not really sustainable. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar#Issuance_of_fraudulent_certificates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar#Issuance_of_fraudule... [1]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/190096/how-will-certificate-transparency-be-enforced https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/190096/how-will... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Windows_infection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Windows_infection
cjbprime 7y ago
The larger the conspiracy theory is, the higher the risk that someone will simply decide it's worth whistleblowing on. The whistleblowing could even be effectively done anonymously in this case. Secret Government surveillance of end to end encrypted data in the US would be such a huge news story and public interest that it wouldn't be difficult to find engineers willing to take the risk of anonymously providing evidence of it to the press. A "few hundred" gag orders placed on engineers about something deeply outrageous sounds completely implausible as lasting secrecy. Secrets simply can't be kept at that scale. Even NSA employees themselves would eventually refuse to keep such a program secret, as we saw with Snowden.
durpleDrank 7y ago
Baseless? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit I could of sworn there are instances where root authorities had brush ins with the law, maybe I'm just remembering a theoretical rant I heard somewhere.

everdrive 7y ago

>Who's to say that this isn't happening in the US as well? No one can say it because you just claimed it's all secret and can't be proven.

admax88q 7y ago

If the NSA was using their own certificates to MITM all HTTPS traffic it would be easily noticed by security researchers. Its not like they obtain the private keys of every US company. They'd have to make their own replacement certain for every site they wish to intercept. That could easily be noticed by security professionals and targeted companies by monitoring.

nickysielicki 7y ago
What about just for the Alexa 100?
- Filligree 7y ago
  Far too many people would be able to notice. Someone in one of the companies would whistleblow.
  - 24gttghh 7y ago
    But would they? The Snowden leaks were 6 years ago. I am assuming the government didn't just throw up their hands and give up after that... edit: not to say they are specifically MITM'ing HTTPS widescale.
    - austinheap 7y ago
      There are a lot easier ways to exfiltrate data than wholesale breaking TLS encryption and MITM'ing 295+ tbps of domestic traffic. That said, every super power is working on better decryption capabilities.
- admax88q 7y ago
  Event just a single site from the alexa 100 would be too obvious. I'm sure some security researchers and/or companies are already monitoring the certificates issued from major websites for abnormalities.

filleokus 7y ago

Earlier this would probably have been a somewhat plausible solution, but not even then for mass scale surveillance. Assume NSA et. al had access to trusted CA private keys, then they could generate certificates for arbitrary domains which would be trusted by clients. But if they MITM'ed _all_ connections (or even a large portion) surely someone would have noticed, like in the DigiNotar case [0]. But it's even harder (or better) now, with the advent of Certificate Transparency. Since browsers check certificates, periodically, against the CT logs which would fail for forged certificates [1]. However, stealing private keys from companies themselves is a practice that I can imagine happening on a small scale, like the Realtek signing keys for Stuxnet [2]. But doing that on a large scale is not really sustainable. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar#Issuance_of_fraudulent_certificates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar#Issuance_of_fraudule... [1]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/190096/how-will-certificate-transparency-be-enforced https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/190096/how-will... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Windows_infection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Windows_infection

cjbprime 7y ago

The larger the conspiracy theory is, the higher the risk that someone will simply decide it's worth whistleblowing on. The whistleblowing could even be effectively done anonymously in this case. Secret Government surveillance of end to end encrypted data in the US would be such a huge news story and public interest that it wouldn't be difficult to find engineers willing to take the risk of anonymously providing evidence of it to the press. A "few hundred" gag orders placed on engineers about something deeply outrageous sounds completely implausible as lasting secrecy. Secrets simply can't be kept at that scale. Even NSA employees themselves would eventually refuse to keep such a program secret, as we saw with Snowden.

durpleDrank 7y ago

Baseless? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit I could of sworn there are instances where root authorities had brush ins with the law, maybe I'm just remembering a theoretical rant I heard somewhere.