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Kazakhstan to MitM all HTTPS traffic starting Jan 1

telecom.kz

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Re: Kazakhstan to MitM all HTTPS traffic starting Jan 1

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious. How do you go about (trivially) defeating asymmetric encryption? EDIT: or do you mean to replace "all" (content + js)?

No, just inject some JS that reads the required keys.

Okay, so it's (just) for reading the delivered data. Somehow I keep considering MitM a harmful attack (i.e. manipulating the data before it hits the user). My bad :)

Re: Kazakhstan to MitM all HTTPS traffic starting Jan 1

#54
post #19
post #14

> secure protection of Kazakhstan users when using coded access protocols to foreign Internet resources. I guess "coded" here means VPN as well... Wonder how other countries' embassies will be connecting if they block all the encrypted connections? Everything through a satellite connection presumably.

They're unlikely using plain HTTPS for sensitive traffic, as that still divulges what sites you're visiting.

Technically it only divulges which IP addresses you're accessing. The URL, including domain name, in the request is encrypted.

Re: Kazakhstan to MitM all HTTPS traffic starting Jan 1

#56

Wondering about a turtles-all-the-way solution: A web-socket based protocol that opens up a new SSL session with non-MITM'd certificates. So you'd open up the snoop-me HTTPS/1.1 connection, do some GETs, then say "GET /busy, yo", and start what looks like a video-chat conversation that is in fact a regular SSL connection with uncompromised certs. (some protocol) over SSL over Web-Socket over bad-SSL over TCP/IP

Once it happens enough to be on the radar, it will be blocked or MiTM'd. Probably the former, possibly with a free symposium on the application of rubber hoses.

Re: Kazakhstan to MitM all HTTPS traffic starting Jan 1

#57
While there are probably 100 different ways to avoid this and retain secure traffic, I would venture to guess that the average Internet savvy-ness of Kazakhstan is pretty low, so using any of them would single you out for additional government attention (whether you're actually doing anything illegal or not).

That said, there's a remarkable tendency in countries as corrupt as Kazakhstan for a "shadow" telecom network to pop up. Just run in some fiber from a neighboring country on the down-low and distribute locally via microwave dish. Yeah, it's not exactly difficult to locate a powerful dish, but it's also not glaringly obvious so you can usually pay someone to look the other way. After all, the government officials want to look into everyone's communication, but if their own communication was ever intercepted, they would be the target of blackmail! They want to use the information they gather to blackmail citizens like the Stasi, not the other way around.

Of course, the flip side of that are the mobile phone networks operated by the Mexican drug cartels and ISIS. But the only surefire way to avoid government surveillance of this sort is to bypass government regulated telecoms entirely.

Re: Kazakhstan to MitM all HTTPS traffic starting Jan 1

#58
post #37

And everyone made fun of Netflix for implementing a secure protocol on top of http. Suddenly that seems really useful for people in Kazakhstan. http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-m... https://github.com/Netflix/msl

If the js asset cant be trusted, what would stop an adversary from mitm-ing the application level implementation?

Re: Kazakhstan to MitM all HTTPS traffic starting Jan 1

#60
post #40
post #37

And everyone made fun of Netflix for implementing a secure protocol on top of http. Suddenly that seems really useful for people in Kazakhstan. http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/message-security-layer-m... https://github.com/Netflix/msl

If the protocol is delivered over HTTP and runs in Javascript DOM context, it will be straightforward for an adversary that MITMs all traffic to defeat it.

Pretty sure that Netflix loads a Flash client (or some other trusted code module) to prevent this. But you're right; the browser isn't secure enough to enable client-side encryption over HTTP as it would be trivial to MITM and sideload JS code to defeat it.
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