21–30 of 471 posts
And now the government found a very simple non-technical workaround. Send a message to everyone requiring a government root CA with an easy install, or their internet won't work.
Now "us techies" have to find a new technical solution to a very social problem.
It never ends. :(
They should just put a red dot on the browser bar somewhere indicating a non-normal root cert is being used (this would also help in dev / test scenarios).
I have custom root certs for internal dev sites for my company. That's fine, but I'd like to add the root with a caveat that I control saying "I trust this root for *.mycompany.com,mycompany.org", but that I know means they wouldn't be able to proxy "mybank.com". I don't think Firefox or Chrome can do that can it?
To the best of my knowledge, no browser can do this today, and I don't know of any other software that can do that either. (I'd want to have it in the system certificate store with the same constraint, as well.)
Name Constraints, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, wouldn't solve the problem, for two reasons: most software doesn't support them (and silently ignores them rather than correctly failing closed), and they require the CA certificate to contain the constraints rather than system configuration adding the constraints.
We need a mechanism to place certificates in a certificate store (browser or system) with specific domain constraints configured by the administrator. To avoid the failure mode of Name Constraints, those certificates shouldn't be accessible to software that doesn't know to enforce domain constraints.
That would also require updates to various SSL libraries (and to browsers) to handle this new certificate store and enforce the constraints.
Question to local readers: Is Kazakhstan also blocking VPNs and SSH?
I find the social aspect of this interesting. Us "smart tech people" have been pushing https everywhere for a few years now as a way of protecting internet privacy "for the masses". And now the government found a very simple non-technical workaround. Send a message to everyone requiring a government root CA with an easy install, or their internet won't work. Now "us techies" have to find a new technical solution to a…
Could someone explain to me what this means and/or why it's bad?
When you connect to a website via HTTPS, your browser downloads the certificate from that website and validates it by checking that the website's certificate was cryptographically signed by an entity that the browser trusts. If the certificate is valid, then you can assume that your data will only be decrypt-able by the website owner, so the connection is secure. Your browser will display a happy green banner showing…
Is this voluntary? If I bring a device into the country without this certificate (or if the local removes it from their machine) do things go back to normal?
I find the social aspect of this interesting. Us "smart tech people" have been pushing https everywhere for a few years now as a way of protecting internet privacy "for the masses". And now the government found a very simple non-technical workaround. Send a message to everyone requiring a government root CA with an easy install, or their internet won't work. Now "us techies" have to find a new technical solution to a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you connect to a website via HTTPS, your browser downloads the certificate from that website and validates it by checking that the website's certificate was cryptographically signed by an entity that the browser trusts. If the certificate is valid, then you can assume that your data will only be decrypt-able by the website owner, so the connection is secure. Your browser will display a happy green banner showing…
> What Kazakhstan has done is create their own root certificate and asked people who live there to install it in their browsers. Is this voluntary? If I bring a device into the country without this certificate (or if the local removes it from their machine) do things go back to normal?
Who's to say that this isn't happening in the US as well? The US has invested billions of dollars in dragnet surveillance that is allegedly useless for anything other than metadata in the context of HTTPS.
Is it out of the question to ask whether our secret courts could issue gag orders and claim that national security mandates CA root keys? Such a gag order would only be served to a small group of engineers at large companies, and those engineers would have no right to report on it. We're talking about only a few hundred FISA gag orders, and thousands are served annually. It would make their multibillion dollar infrastructure useful again, wouldn't surprise me if some (unnamed, anonymous) judge bought the argument.
To employees at vulnerable companies, what's your PKI like? Is anyone aware of a company that implements strong multi-party checks on accesses to important private keys? If the NSA wanted your keys, how many employees would need to be served gag orders? Is it on the order of dozens or hundreds?