4 ms·

My thoughts exactly. DNS spoofing on open wi-fi is shockingly easy. Most people just "trust" certificates without looking at the details too. If I got a cert fo

My thoughts exactly. DNS spoofing on open wi-fi is shockingly easy. Most people just "trust" certificates without looking at the details too. If I got a cert for facebook1234.com (just an example) and setup my server to grab credentials then send you to the real FB, nobody would notice. HTTPS is only good when you know what you're connecting to.

gohrt 13y ago
Maybe, but that requires the user reading this message in big red letters "This is probably not the site you are looking for!" and then clicking "Proceed anyway"
- mikeash 13y ago
  And clicking "proceed anyway" is exactly what a lot of users will do.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    True.. Especially because users get conditioned to regularly. As an example: London Underground have partnered with a variety of commercial providers to offer free wifi at Underground and Overground stations. At least one of those providers forcibly redirects all traffic to plain http to show some "welcome" page, and won't let you use ssl at all. So users might get surprised once, see that the page they get finally get to is an official looking page, and then just shrug and continue. (which in this specific situation also creates the perfect setup for MITM'ing people without even have to go through the trouble of a cert: A portable base station, a higher powered antenna, a little setup to fake the same setup with a copy of their page, and voila you have a bunch of commuters happily tolerating surfing without SSL to get their free wifi while you intercept all their traffic)
- thirsteh 13y ago
  It doesn't require that at all. You could simply strip the SSL and present a HTTP version of the page, and most people would be none the wiser. Or you could redirect to e.g. www.facebook23.com and have them log in there, with a nice little padlock. At no point would they get a certificate warning. They wouldn't get a certificate warning if you had compromised one of those 650+ CAs either, unless the site in question used certificate pinning (almost no sites do, currently.)
  - e12e 13y ago
    > ... unless the site in question used certificate pinning (almost no sites do, currently.) Is there any semi-standard way to do pinning? That is/will be supported by at least the next (preferably current) version of the major browsers? Or do you mean "manual" pinning (eg: convergence et al)? I'm no aware of anything a site administrator can do to unilaterally enable/force certificate pinning? The best I could find was: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Certificate_and_Public_Key_Pinning but as far as I can see (skimming) -- there's nothing there about standard software doing pinning -- it's all about when you're deploying (part of) the client as well?
    - thirsteh 13y ago
      Chrome supports public-key pinning via HTTP responses: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=78369 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=78369. I'm not sure about the other browsers. https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-websec-key-pinning-06#section-2.3.1 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-websec-key-pinning-06...
      - e12e 13y ago
        Thank you for the links - exactly the kind of thing I was looking for :-)

gohrt 13y ago

Maybe, but that requires the user reading this message in big red letters "This is probably not the site you are looking for!" and then clicking "Proceed anyway"

mikeash 13y ago
And clicking "proceed anyway" is exactly what a lot of users will do.
- vidarh 13y ago
  True.. Especially because users get conditioned to regularly. As an example: London Underground have partnered with a variety of commercial providers to offer free wifi at Underground and Overground stations. At least one of those providers forcibly redirects all traffic to plain http to show some "welcome" page, and won't let you use ssl at all. So users might get surprised once, see that the page they get finally get to is an official looking page, and then just shrug and continue. (which in this specific situation also creates the perfect setup for MITM'ing people without even have to go through the trouble of a cert: A portable base station, a higher powered antenna, a little setup to fake the same setup with a copy of their page, and voila you have a bunch of commuters happily tolerating surfing without SSL to get their free wifi while you intercept all their traffic)
thirsteh 13y ago
It doesn't require that at all. You could simply strip the SSL and present a HTTP version of the page, and most people would be none the wiser. Or you could redirect to e.g. www.facebook23.com and have them log in there, with a nice little padlock. At no point would they get a certificate warning. They wouldn't get a certificate warning if you had compromised one of those 650+ CAs either, unless the site in question used certificate pinning (almost no sites do, currently.)
- e12e 13y ago
  > ... unless the site in question used certificate pinning (almost no sites do, currently.) Is there any semi-standard way to do pinning? That is/will be supported by at least the next (preferably current) version of the major browsers? Or do you mean "manual" pinning (eg: convergence et al)? I'm no aware of anything a site administrator can do to unilaterally enable/force certificate pinning? The best I could find was: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Certificate_and_Public_Key_Pinning but as far as I can see (skimming) -- there's nothing there about standard software doing pinning -- it's all about when you're deploying (part of) the client as well?
  - thirsteh 13y ago
    Chrome supports public-key pinning via HTTP responses: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=78369 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=78369. I'm not sure about the other browsers. https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-websec-key-pinning-06#section-2.3.1 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-websec-key-pinning-06...
    - e12e 13y ago
      Thank you for the links - exactly the kind of thing I was looking for :-)