4 ms·

I agree with your answer, but I don't recall ever seeing a post mortem write-up of such an attack. Are people who have seen them in the wild all bound my NDAs o

by rch 12y ago

I agree with your answer, but I don't recall ever seeing a post mortem write-up of such an attack. Are people who have seen them in the wild all bound my NDAs or something?

stcredzero 12y ago
I agree with your answer, but I don't recall ever seeing a post mortem write-up of such an attack. So, if you know how MITM operates, tell me: How would the server operator ever know?
- rch 12y ago
  Reports of user data being compromised could lead to a consultant being hired to figure out where the security problem is, for instance. (I'm assuming the site requires a login or perhaps even takes CC information - the kind of stuff a user might notice a third-party using)
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    Reports of user data being compromised could lead to a consultant being hired... So right there, there's a good chance that it wouldn't get reported and there's less of a chance that management would understand the implications and hire the consultant.
- cowbell 12y ago
  http://www.scmagazine.com/researchers-detect-ssl-mitm-attacks-method-implemented-by-facebook/article/346994/ http://www.scmagazine.com/researchers-detect-ssl-mitm-attack... About 0.2% for Facebook is MITM. And they are not using self signed certificates.
  - yaur 12y ago
    I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the vast majority of that 0.2% are people sitting behind corporate proxies with a fake CA cert installed and pushed out to workstations via Group Policy. A hostile (and targeted) MITM could remove or alter the JavaScript that posts the fingerprint back to the server in which case it would be very difficult to detect. The problem with Self Signed Certs in a practical sense is that they enable a much broader range of attacks. Neither of them protect you from LEO and NSA. Neither of them protect you from the people that own and/or can run code on your PC. CA issued certs will protect you from the carder that is connected to the same public WiFi, but self signed certs wont.
    - chimeracoder 12y ago
      > The problem with Self Signed Certs in a practical sense is that they enable a much broader range of attacks. Neither of them protect you from LEO and NSA. This phrasing is misleading. Self-signed certs will protect against passive attackers, assuming the certificate can be verified out-of-band[0]. If the validity of a self-signed certificate cannot be verified, yes, it could be issued by a MITM. But it still protects against passive attackers, and the NSA (so far) has predominantly been considered to be a passive attacker. Self-signed certificates are arguably more secure against LEO/NSA, because (again, assuming the validity of the cert can be verified), it is harder to MITM clients without the server admin finding out. With a CA, they can serve a subpoena to a third party (the CA) and force them to present a compromised certificate as "valid". For the LEO/NSA to masquerade as the legitimate server, it would have to subpoena the server administrator. [0] Which is always required with SSL. CA-issued certificates are also verified out-of-band, just indirectly (via the chain of trust).
      - YZF 12y ago
        The problem is that the people who can understand what you said don't ask questions about self signed certificates and the people who don't understand will somehow interpret this as support for using self signed certificates when you don't have an out-of-band method of getting your public key out. It's not harder to MITM a self signed cert when it's validty can't be verified which is 99.99% of the use cases where they're used...
        chimeracoder 12y ago
        > It's not harder to MITM a self signed cert when it's validty can't be verified which is 99.99% of the use cases where they're used... No, but it's not easier, either - without verification, it's exactly the same. It's not meaningful to try and make SSL secure in the situation in which out-of-band verification cannot be done. If there is no out-of-band verification, all SSL fails to protect against MITM. At the very least, it protects against passive snooping (ie, the NSA).
        12y ago
stretchwithme 12y ago
Not many postmortems on people discovering the NSA was reading all their email either.

by rch 12y ago

I agree with your answer, but I don't recall ever seeing a post mortem write-up of such an attack. Are people who have seen them in the wild all bound my NDAs or something?

stcredzero 12y ago

I agree with your answer, but I don't recall ever seeing a post mortem write-up of such an attack. So, if you know how MITM operates, tell me: How would the server operator ever know?

rch 12y ago
Reports of user data being compromised could lead to a consultant being hired to figure out where the security problem is, for instance. (I'm assuming the site requires a login or perhaps even takes CC information - the kind of stuff a user might notice a third-party using)
- stcredzero 12y ago
  Reports of user data being compromised could lead to a consultant being hired... So right there, there's a good chance that it wouldn't get reported and there's less of a chance that management would understand the implications and hire the consultant.
cowbell 12y ago
http://www.scmagazine.com/researchers-detect-ssl-mitm-attacks-method-implemented-by-facebook/article/346994/ http://www.scmagazine.com/researchers-detect-ssl-mitm-attack... About 0.2% for Facebook is MITM. And they are not using self signed certificates.
- yaur 12y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the vast majority of that 0.2% are people sitting behind corporate proxies with a fake CA cert installed and pushed out to workstations via Group Policy. A hostile (and targeted) MITM could remove or alter the JavaScript that posts the fingerprint back to the server in which case it would be very difficult to detect. The problem with Self Signed Certs in a practical sense is that they enable a much broader range of attacks. Neither of them protect you from LEO and NSA. Neither of them protect you from the people that own and/or can run code on your PC. CA issued certs will protect you from the carder that is connected to the same public WiFi, but self signed certs wont.
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    > The problem with Self Signed Certs in a practical sense is that they enable a much broader range of attacks. Neither of them protect you from LEO and NSA. This phrasing is misleading. Self-signed certs will protect against passive attackers, assuming the certificate can be verified out-of-band[0]. If the validity of a self-signed certificate cannot be verified, yes, it could be issued by a MITM. But it still protects against passive attackers, and the NSA (so far) has predominantly been considered to be a passive attacker. Self-signed certificates are arguably more secure against LEO/NSA, because (again, assuming the validity of the cert can be verified), it is harder to MITM clients without the server admin finding out. With a CA, they can serve a subpoena to a third party (the CA) and force them to present a compromised certificate as "valid". For the LEO/NSA to masquerade as the legitimate server, it would have to subpoena the server administrator. [0] Which is always required with SSL. CA-issued certificates are also verified out-of-band, just indirectly (via the chain of trust).
    - YZF 12y ago
      The problem is that the people who can understand what you said don't ask questions about self signed certificates and the people who don't understand will somehow interpret this as support for using self signed certificates when you don't have an out-of-band method of getting your public key out. It's not harder to MITM a self signed cert when it's validty can't be verified which is 99.99% of the use cases where they're used...
      - chimeracoder 12y ago
        > It's not harder to MITM a self signed cert when it's validty can't be verified which is 99.99% of the use cases where they're used... No, but it's not easier, either - without verification, it's exactly the same. It's not meaningful to try and make SSL secure in the situation in which out-of-band verification cannot be done. If there is no out-of-band verification, all SSL fails to protect against MITM. At the very least, it protects against passive snooping (ie, the NSA).
        12y ago

stretchwithme 12y ago

Not many postmortems on people discovering the NSA was reading all their email either.