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The problems is, companies like VeriSign offer LEA services Quoting https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1591033 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa

by maqp 7y ago

The problems is, companies like VeriSign offer LEA services Quoting https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1591033 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1591033 “Verisign also operates a ‘Lawful Intercept’ service called NetDiscovery. This service is provided to ‘... [assist] government agen- cies with lawful interception and subpoena requests for subscriber records.’ If you now try to search for NetDiscovery or LEA services for CAs, you won't find any, but I guarantee you they haven't disappeared anywhere.

tialaramex 7y ago
The CA doesn't have anything that helps you do Lawful Intercept. They just vouch for people's identities. If you can persuade them to fraudulently vouch for your agency as being some other subscriber then this unavoidably produces a smoking gun which everybody can see, just like when Israel produces fake passports so its agents can travel abroad to murder people. It doesn't let them passively intercept. The CA could not, gun to its head, help you do that. The mathematics just doesn't work that way, any more than the US Federal Reserve could intervene to make three dollars twice as many as five dollars.
est31 7y ago
That paper is from April 2010 which is a different age in terms of internet encryption. Just for comparison, Google only started offering an encrypted version of its service in May 2010: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-more-securely-with-encrypted.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-more-securely... They quickly realized the problems that you describe. In Nov 2011, the Certificate Transparency project by Google had its initial commit: https://github.com/google/certificate-transparency/commit/6afe823685a7526e0927db90b037c298dfabea95 https://github.com/google/certificate-transparency/commit/6a... In Chrome they have since enforced CT compliance for certificates: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/ct-policy/wHILiYf31DE/iMFmpMEkAQAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/ct-poli... CT requires that each certificate issued needs to be contained in both a Google log and a non-Google log: https://github.com/chromium/ct-policy/blob/master/ct_policy.md https://github.com/chromium/ct-policy/blob/master/ct_policy.... This means that fradulently issued certificates either won't work, or will be contained in public logs run by Google (or Google needs to be forced by authorities as well).

by maqp 7y ago

tialaramex 7y ago

The CA doesn't have anything that helps you do Lawful Intercept. They just vouch for people's identities. If you can persuade them to fraudulently vouch for your agency as being some other subscriber then this unavoidably produces a smoking gun which everybody can see, just like when Israel produces fake passports so its agents can travel abroad to murder people. It doesn't let them passively intercept. The CA could not, gun to its head, help you do that. The mathematics just doesn't work that way, any more than the US Federal Reserve could intervene to make three dollars twice as many as five dollars.

est31 7y ago

That paper is from April 2010 which is a different age in terms of internet encryption. Just for comparison, Google only started offering an encrypted version of its service in May 2010: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-more-securely-with-encrypted.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-more-securely... They quickly realized the problems that you describe. In Nov 2011, the Certificate Transparency project by Google had its initial commit: https://github.com/google/certificate-transparency/commit/6afe823685a7526e0927db90b037c298dfabea95 https://github.com/google/certificate-transparency/commit/6a... In Chrome they have since enforced CT compliance for certificates: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/ct-policy/wHILiYf31DE/iMFmpMEkAQAJ https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/ct-poli... CT requires that each certificate issued needs to be contained in both a Google log and a non-Google log: https://github.com/chromium/ct-policy/blob/master/ct_policy.md https://github.com/chromium/ct-policy/blob/master/ct_policy.... This means that fradulently issued certificates either won't work, or will be contained in public logs run by Google (or Google needs to be forced by authorities as well).