I'm from Kazakhstan using the biggest Internet provider (Kazaktelecom) and that's not true for me. No MITM here. May be not yet. Also checked mobile provider (Activ) and no MITM here too. But I saw local news, so probably not fake, though I'm not sure if it'll be mobile internet only or all providers.
MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
71–80 of 471 posts
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#72Earlier 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 prevents us from having to trust Verisign (or its employees) or a government warrant, etc. to not do the same? Can we leverage signed DNS records to add another layer of control needed? Do we also need encrypted DNS where we can choose who to trust? Are we stuck with the CA trust model?
> What prevents us from having to trust Verisign (or its employees) or a government warrant, etc. to not do the same?
Certificate Transparency. Current browsers are moving to not trust any certificate whose issuance wasn't publicly logged. That doesn't prevent an attacker from issuing an MITM certificate, but doing so would permanently burn a CA. (At least, once the policies are in place and enforced.)
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the NSA was using their own certificates to MITM all HTTPS traffic it would be easily noticed by security researchers. Its not like they obtain the private keys of every US company. They'd have to make their own replacement certain for every site they wish to intercept. That could easily be noticed by security professionals and targeted companies by monitoring.
What about just for the Alexa 100?
Far too many people would be able to notice. Someone in one of the companies would whistleblow.
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#74Earlier 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 prevents us from having to trust Verisign (or its employees) or a government warrant, etc. to not do the same? Can we leverage signed DNS records to add another layer of control needed? Do we also need encrypted DNS where we can choose who to trust? Are we stuck with the CA trust model?
Trusted certificate authorities log issued certificates to verified certificate transparency logs.
Site owners can monitor these logs for rogue certs issued for their own domains.
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need new measures to not allow these certificates to be installed unless they're verified, or at least the OS shows a massive giant warning "DO NOT DO THIS unless you accept this cert gives $identity access to all your data". Seems a very solvable problem.
I mean, the choice being presented is to install the MITM cert, or to not use the internet at all. The latter is an answer , certainly, but not what I would call a very good solution.
The government is forcing people to find a third choice and they might not like what they pick.
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#76The best solution would be to blacklist rouge SSL certs.
Aw, let them use whatever color they like.
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#77Warning: what follows is completely baseless speculation, and let's concede that right off the bat. 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…
The larger the conspiracy theory is, the higher the risk that someone will simply decide it's worth whistleblowing on. The whistleblowing could even be effectively done anonymously in this case. Secret Government surveillance of end to end encrypted data in the US would be such a huge news story and public interest that it wouldn't be difficult to find engineers willing to take the risk of anonymously providing evidence of it to the press.
A "few hundred" gag orders placed on engineers about something deeply outrageous sounds completely implausible as lasting secrecy. Secrets simply can't be kept at that scale.
Even NSA employees themselves would eventually refuse to keep such a program secret, as we saw with Snowden.
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#78Does such a certificate compromise non-browser traffic as well? Like SSH tunnels, mobile apps, Telegram etc.
SSH doesn't depend on certificate authorities, it's up to you to manage your own keys, each end point also has a uniquely generated signature which avoids MITM after first time auth (including by taking over domains). This is a HTTPS only issue and fundamentally it's the same problem as control over domains (ease of manipulation through centralisation).
So that means apps like Instagram are safe to chat in?
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, although the root itself could be scoped that way with an X.509 name constraint. But if you add the root then I believe there's no browser policy to otherwise limit the names for which it can be trusted.
On a tangent, do you know off-hand what browser support for name constraints is like? The last time I looked was a few years ago and at the time it wasn't well supported but if that's improved it'd be a good step for intermediate certs.
It must have been many many years ago, more than 10 at least.
Any way to avoid or bypass name or path constraints would be considered a huge and monumental vulnerability today.
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#80Question to local readers: Is Kazakhstan also blocking VPNs and SSH?
Kazakhstan is blocking some websites, including home pages for Tor and popular VPN services. Also it uses some sophisticated Tor blocking: it establishes TCP connection but no bytes going there, so Tor client just hangs there without error or traffic, I wasn't able to unblock it, though I did not try hard enough. I think that they are blocking connections to popular VPN services as well, but I don't really know. Without access to their home pages it's hard to connect anyway. I know that people successfully using some mobile apps as VPNs, so while they are trying to block VPN, they are not trying hard enough.
I never had any problems with SSH and I operate my own OpenVPN on VPS using standard port and I never had any problems with it as well.