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Gmail.com being MITM'd by Iran using this certificate
- 0x0 15y agoFound a pastebin with slightly more info: http://pastebin.com/SwCZqskV http://pastebin.com/SwCZqskV
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- packetlss 15y agoIn order to mitigate attacks like this Firefox users can use: http://convergence.io/ http://convergence.io/
- sp332 15y agoInteresting, but how do you use it?
- orillian 15y agoconvergence is not compatable with FF 6.0 btw. You'll need to manually check if your using 6.0. O.
- windexh8er 15y agoThere's also another, similar, project called Perspectives: http://perspectives-project.org/ http://perspectives-project.org/ The Syrian government was doing this recently as well: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/syrian-man-middle-against-facebook https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/syrian-man-middle-agai... Oh and don't forget about the EFF's SSL Observatory: https://www.eff.org/observatory https://www.eff.org/observatory
- J_Dalton 15y agoHow easy is it to MITM the convergence requests themselves? And does it send all of my web-browsing habits to the notaries? How much money would I have to pay for someone to run a notary for me and would that be safe?
- sp332 15y agoOK, how do we remove this CA from our computers?
- koenigdavidmj 15y agoFirefox extension to do the trick is linked below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938623 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938623
- yuhong 15y agoIn Firefox, go to Edit->Preferences, click the Advanced icon, go to the Encryption tab, and then click View Certificates.
- sp332 15y agoThanks, I remembered it was something easy but my Google-fu was failing me. And what about Chrome/IE/Safari?
- drtse4 15y agoIn chrome looks like you can't remove it, but at least you can disable the use of that CA to identify sites,ecc... from preference>manage certificates.
- wonderzombie 15y agoChrome uses whatever the OS uses, as far as I can tell. Preferences > Manage Certificates just opens up the Keychain Access app. Upthread are instructions for how to do it from there.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- evgen 15y agoOn a Mac, go to Keychain Access, hit the padlock in the upper left to unlock the system keychain with an admin account, select System Roots from the list of available Keychains in the upper left, find and select DigiNotar Root CA, get info (command-I or hit the i in the bottom area of this window), open the Trust section, for "When using this certificate" select Never Trust.
- zrail 15y agoI checked and the cert from gmail.com for me is from Thawte. Is this a targeted attack toward only those in Iran?
- yuhong 15y agoI think so. This kind of thing are almost always targeted attacks.
- uxp 15y agoThe Thawte certificate is the certificate issued to google by request of google. This certificate is apparently being used to MITM connections to gmail that originate inside Iran. Outside of Iran BGPing a major ISP into routing through them, or setting up a standard "phishing" mirror site, no one outside of Iran should worry much. It still is a good idea to blacklist that root certificate on your internet devices though. If this certificate is being used, who knows what other websites it has issued legitimate but malicious certificates for.
- ajross 15y agoNo one outside of Iran should worry about this particular google cert, you mean. The obviously compromised root CA shipped by default in every computer in operation is something we very much should worry about. Who else has access to DigiNotar's cert? Surely there are players out there willing to pay more than Iran is...
- marshray 15y agoOf course you should worry. The attacker may have sold the cert to other parties, not just Iran. Or if it was Iran directly, they may sell the certs to other parties to make a pretense of deniability.
- drtse4 15y ago...and issued directly by google for *.google.com
- wxs 15y agoIf you want to disable diginotar's root CA on your Mac (for Safari/Chrome) you can open Keychain Access, select the "System Roots" keychain at the top left, find the diginotar certificate in the list, and delete it (or disable it, which is what I did). EDIT: This definitely works for Safari, not 100% sure if it does for Chrome after all.
- technomancy 15y ago$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates # for debian-based systems
- andreasvc 15y agoI've always wondered what that package is actually used for, because programs like firefox, chromium, &c, maintain their own list of root CAs.
- deweller 15y agoSo help me understand... A government agency in Iran has obtained the private key of the root certificate for the DigiNotar Certificate Authority. And with that, they can decrypt and re-encrypt SSL traffic by pretending that they have the valid SSL certificate for *.google.com. Is that the way this works?
- ammmir 15y agoessentially, they would be MITMing the connection and presenting an SSL cert issued by DigiNotar (instead of the actual CA that issued the cert to *.google.com). because the compromised CA is in the browser's trusted CAs list, it probably produces no user-visible warning.
- marshray 15y agoMore than likely someone hacked or socially engineered the DigiNotar CA into issuing just that cert, or some limited set of certs.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoEither that or they've got the cooperation of someone who has access to that private key, potentially the CA itself. But a compromise seems more likely in this case.
- modeless 15y agoThat's one possibility, and quite scary because someone with that private key could hijack any SSL connection to any site, not just Google. More likely is that Iran caused DigiNotar to issue them a valid .google.com certificate via social engineering, bribery, or hacking. This is slightly less scary because only .google.com would be affected. Either way, IMHO DigiNotar's root certificate should be revoked and they should be barred from participating in the CA system ever again. The seriousness of SSL MITM attacks is such that a "one strike and you're out" policy is warranted. With so much commerce running over SSL these days, possession of the private key of a CA's root certificate would allow you to implement plots worthy of a James Bond supervillan.
- deleted 15y ago
- JoshTriplett 15y agoA quick check of Bugzilla didn't turn up a bug directly about this issue, but https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681902#c6 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681902#c6 from one of the people who deals with CA issues at Mozilla mentions "the current DigiNotar incident", so they clearly know about it.
- sp332 15y agoIt took 3 months to get their customers transferred over to this new cert. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=622589 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=622589 I wonder if the CA was compromised since earlier this year, or if it's more recent?
- JoshTriplett 15y agoSee also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682956#c2 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682956#c2 , an explicit acknowledgment.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- rmc 15y agoAssuming this certificate stuff is legit, how do we know this is being done by Iran? What makes anyone think this is Iran?
- marshray 15y agoThis is perhaps the earliest-dated public indication of the attack: https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da6158b094b225a&hl=en https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da6... Hi, Today, when I trid to login to my Gmail account I saw a certificate warning in Chrome . I took a screenshot and I saved certificate to a file . this is the certificate file with screenshot in a zip file: http://www.mediafire.com/?rrklb17slctityb http://www.mediafire.com/?rrklb17slctityb and this is text of decoded fake certificate: http://pastebin.com/ff7Yg663 http://pastebin.com/ff7Yg663 when I used a vpn I didn't see any warning ! I think my ISP or my government did this attack (because I live in Iran and you may hear something about the story of Comodo hacker!)
- JoshTriplett 15y agoThe claims reported in various places suggest that people in Iran have actively observed this certificate used in MITM attacks on gmail connections. No hard evidence yet, and no idea what original source people keep repeating (possibly the pastebin itself).
- dhbanes 15y agoIt's weird, isn't it? From zero to accepted fact on the basis of some guys assumption mentioned in the title of a pastebin dump. The only other original source I've been able to find is this: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da6158b094b225a http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da61... He even invokes the Comodo incident, which as we know turned out to be the work of a single individual and NOT Iran. Propaganda spreads quickly, even in the HN circle where people usually pride themselves on requiring evidence as a prerequisite to belief.
- microkernel 15y agoAnyone can tell us if this is for real or a hoax? I am lacking sufficient ssl knowledge here...
- koenigdavidmj 15y agoMikko Hypponen of F-Secure seems to think that it is real: http://twitter.com/#!/mikkohypponen http://twitter.com/#!/mikkohypponen
- sp332 15y agoHere's a bug report from the user who originally noticed it: http://www.google.co.uk/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da6158b094b225a&hl=en http://www.google.co.uk/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da...
- gmaslov 15y agoThis type of compromised-CA attack is why I never understood why browsers don't use the OpenSSH model: accept and store (prompting for confirmation) the certificate the first time you connect to a site, then throw up enormous red flags if the certificate ever changes. The Firefox root CA list has dozens and dozens of organizations on it. Could a compromise of any one of them mean that this attack could be repeated?
- recampbell 15y agoBut wouldn't the red flags go up when the certificate is renewed?
- ajross 15y agoOr just when the host is migrated. This technique "works", I guess, but the false postive rate is staggeringly high. I see these errors daily (generally due to DHCP reuse of my test boxes' addressess). In decades of use, I don't believe I've ever once been MitM'd over ssh. SSH users understand the issue and are happy to triage a "not in known_hosts" error. The general public won't have a clue.
- kevinpet 15y agoThat security model is called TOFU/POP for Trust On First Use / Persistence Of Pseudonymity.
- tptacek 15y agoA more general description for the same idea is "key continuity".
- sp332 15y agoYup. http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2011/03/how-the-comodo-certificate-fraud-calls-ca-trust-into-question.ars http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2011/03/how-the-comodo-... and then http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=comodo&sortby=points+desc http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=com...
- pointyhat 15y agoSSL snake oil. SSL and the percieved trust around it has to die. It's a big lie, especially with broken CAs, lax security, poor encryption due to international policy and several technical and conceptual flaws. Some critique here to back me up: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/11/state_of_ssl_analysis/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/11/state_of_ssl_analysi...
- ebiester 15y agoOkay, so SSL dies. it's gone. Kaput. Now what? I get that a false sense of security is worse, but we haven't yet figured out a better way that is still decentralized and works with a wide variety of user skill levels. Because people who aren't expert users deserve security too. And they deserve functionality.
- pointyhat 15y agoSSL was never decentralised. It was always centralised with CA's which is the issue. We need a reputation based, distributed public key architecture.
- tptacek 15y agoSo build one. Your preference actually has very little to do with the X509 CA architecture. Today we have a complex little forest of fiat CAs. No part of the TLS architecture prevents you from replacing that with an even more complex and more full-featured web of smaller CAs. I'm not being sarcastic. Your decentralized reputation scheme could very well be better than our severely compromised system of central CAs.
- pnathan 15y agopeople who aren't expert users deserve security too. And they deserve functionality. Well, SSL certainly isn't giving serious security in the "My ISP has been intruded" attack model. You can't have both security and ignorance. If you really want to be secure, you're going to have to learn how to be secure, and then to know how to implement it.
- vilhelm_s 15y agoChrome users should be protected from this by the public key pinning feature [http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/05/04/pinning.html http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/05/04/pinning.html], right?
- ajross 15y agoSounds like it. But this isn't an architectural solution. All this does is layer an additional level of "trust" requirements onto the existing protocol. The "pinning whitelist" is isomorphic to the root CA list and can be compromised in exactly the same way.
- bwblabs 15y agoDo we actually know how many SSL certs Google uses, and for what? From what I can see: - Google Search & Google+ (https://encrypted.google.com/ https://encrypted.google.com/ https://plus.google.com/ https://plus.google.com/) are using a *.google.com from GeoTrust/Google Internet Authority - Google Mail (https://www.google.com/accounts/ https://www.google.com/accounts/) is using a www.google.com from VeriSign/Thawte Ofcourse I'm also afraid that this is indeed a MITM attack against Iranian users. With SSL certs that costs less than $15 you can expect that things cannot be thoroughly checked, however a Wildcard DigiNotar SSL cert is costing you € 750 a year (in a 4 year contract http://diginotar.nl/OnlinePrijsindicatie/tabid/1417/Default.aspx http://diginotar.nl/OnlinePrijsindicatie/tabid/1417/Default....), you would expect that these things would not be possible. If they however hacked the root CA, it's even more scary, also Vasco (the mother company) makes virtually every Two-factor authentication used for Dutch Banking..
- blauwbilgorgel 15y agoScary indeed. Also responsible for authentication of DigiD, online taxes, pension funds, Chamber of Commerce, Ministry of Security and Justice, local governments, etc.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoDidn't check it myself, but apparently DigiD for instance is on a different CA/root. DigiD is the Dutch "unified account" for all online government services: you can take out student loans, submit taxes, etc.
- blauwbilgorgel 15y agohttp://www.diginotar.nl/Aanvragen/Lopendeprojecten/DigiDMachtigen/tabid/2059/Default.aspx http://www.diginotar.nl/Aanvragen/Lopendeprojecten/DigiDMach... They have this listed as an active project, so they are definitely involved. Could still be on a different CA though. And of course _if_ they were hacked.
- VladRussian 15y agoif root is compromised it sounds promising : http://www.vasco.com/company/press_room/news_archive/2011/acquisition_diginotar.aspx http://www.vasco.com/company/press_room/news_archive/2011/ac... "...DigiNotar is an official Dutch certification authority, capable of issuing, validating and registering certificates (identities) of Dutch nationals and entities that are recognized throughout the European Union and are used to authenticate government applications. As such, DigiNotar provides VASCO with a strong foothold in the Dutch eGovernment market with the potential to expand the product line to government applications in other countries. Currently, DigiNotar’s market scope for its CA activities is limited to the Netherlands. VASCO may decide to introduce DigiNotar as a certification authority in other EU countries...." all that security was riding on 10M euros (with such [meager] amounts in play, one would think that it would be easier for a player like Iran just buy an authority than to crack/hack it, though seems like VASCO was faster (if of course VASCO isn't in the game as well) :) : "...VASCO acquired DigiNotar in stock and asset purchase for aggregated cash consideration of Euro 10.0 million..." what is the cost in Netherlands to have a reasonably secure office building with some access controlled areas suitable for CA authority core operations? Sounds like very cheap.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoYou forget their possible debt...
- VladRussian 15y agonope. VASCO is a NASDAQ-ed "Inc" and would have mentioned any additionally assumed materially important liabilities in the official press release.
- mkramlich 15y ago> to expand the product line to government applications in other countries. ... and so they have
- emilsedgh 15y agoPosting from Iran, Im really worried about the current security status. Iran's opposition mostly exists on internet these days and its very seriously flawed. Man In The Middle attacks are increasing and users usually ignore error messages about them. (Firefox throws an error dialog but it has an 'I understand the risks' button. People just ignore the error). Also, last year many Iranian FriendFeed users were arrested and the goverment knew about all their private discussions on FriendFeed. (FriendFeed has been censored since the beggining. But it suddenly became uncensored for a day or two. On the other hand, FriendFeed generates an 'auth' key for each user and lets him see his RSS feed using that key. And puts the auth key in every page: goverment probably collected auth keys and used it to read discussions of people they arrested) Goverments using internet to spy on their civilians is not a myth. Anonymity, trusting the cloud and related issues seem far more important when you suddenly find out a friend of yours has been arrested and his location and charges is unknown.
- cookiecaper 15y agoUnder such conditions it is obviously unsafe to trust any private communications on the open internet (including sites that use SSL to encrypt data on the wire). You should ONLY use systems that ensure your content is encrypted for a key that YOU (not your browser) explicitly trust. This means using GnuPG and exchanging keys in a reliable offline medium with anyone with whom you want to communicate, basically. Alternatively, you can use i2p and i2p outproxies, but i2p may be vulnerable to similar poisoning attacks if the government had an interest in perpetrating them. That said, it's probably much safer to use an i2p outproxy for your browsing anyway, and definitely much safer to use eepsites.
- emilsedgh 15y agoHow could one technical individual protect himself is one thing, having a secure-by-design communication channel is another thing. Whole country is being spied like that and most people dont even know/care about it. They just want to use Facebook or some 'cool' service.
- 15y ago
- sliverstorm 15y agoWhat are the implications of this? It is potentially unsecured to visit gmail.com from anywhere? Is this web-interface only, or is IMAP/POP access also vulnerable?
- cookiecaper 15y agoThe consensus seems to be that Iran is poisoning intra-country connections to attach this certificate to gmail.com instead of the real certificate, so this would only be occurring where Iran controlled the network infrastructure. Since the certificate is signed by a trusted CA, no warning is provided to the user that the certificate may be unsafe. GMail still shows a certificate issued by Thawte for me (in the USA).
- VladRussian 15y ago>The consensus seems to be that Iran is poisoning intra-country connections more precisely they can poison any traffic (CA-ed by Diginotar) that passes through the routers/wires under Iran's control, that can be anything what they have already hacked into before as well as just redirected traffic using BGP similar like this http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/nov/15/internet-traffic-was-routed-via-chinese-servers/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/nov/15/internet-tra... Btw, aren't China and Iran collaborating usually? There is potential for synergy.
- lawnchair_larry 15y agoI'm confused about how this was detected. The original report provided this screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/hs0H4.jpg http://i.imgur.com/hs0H4.jpg If it is a case of a root CA signing a cert for someone else, this shouldn't have actually produced an error. What did the MITMers screw up here?
- stock_toaster 15y agoChrome feature, as noted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938905
- levigross 15y agoThis attack could of hit people in other countries as well. Small well places malicious BGP updates can reroute traffic into Iran.....
- 0x12 15y agoIf your communications can land you in jail or get you killed don't use the internet (or even a computer, keystroke loggers are easy to install and very hard to detect), no matter how clever you think you are, and no matter how many 'lock' icons appear in your browser. In such cases paranoia is perfectly justified. It's a real pity this requires a code update because that means that the change will take long to propagate and will likely never be really complete, at the same time I'm sure there are good reasons for that and that an automated process to revoke just any certificate could itself probably be used as an attack vector. What would happen if they simply revoked the root certificate that was used to sign this fake?
- mebesilly 15y agoMost governments use MITM attacks. That includes the USG.
- iscrewyou 15y agoI am no hacker so I have almost no idea what's going on. MITM = Man In The Middle. Does this mean that Iran is eavesdropping on gmail users IN Iran? Or outside their country too? Does anyone mind sharing what this means to the end user? I did block the certificate on my Air as wxs mentioned. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938755 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938755
- marshray 15y agoYes, this fraudulently-issued certificate is being reported seen in the wild from users of Iranian ISPs. It has not been reported anywhere else. If you were using an Iranian ISP to log in to *.google.com, you may have been hacked.
- iscrewyou 15y agoThanks for explaining that, kind sir.
- abraham 15y agoThe consensus seems to be that this only effects users in Iran who are not using Chrome. The result is any information sent to or from a secure Google domain could be silently intercepted and modified.
- iscrewyou 15y agoAwesome. Thanks for explaining that.
- jsavimbi 15y agoSo Google wrote Stuxnet?
- blauwbilgorgel 15y agoUpdate on Dutch news site nu.nl (without references or sources, so I can't confirm where they got this information from). http://translate.google.com/translate?tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nu.nl%2Finternet%2F2603449%2Fmogelijk-nepsoftware-verspreid-naast-aftappen-gmail.html http://translate.google.com/translate?tl=en&u=http%3A%2F... Fraudulent certificates were given out for: ().mozilla.org (backdoored software?) ().wordpress.com ().torproject.org ().yahoo.com And Baladin (an Iranian social network)