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MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

bugzilla.mozilla.org

121–130 of 471 posts

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#121
post #15

Would someone with network access in Kazakhstan check if Caddy's MITM detector catches this please? https://caddyserver.com/docs/mitm-detection - or https://mitm.watch (Cloudflare's unofficial deployment of the same tech). If it does not, could you file a bug report with a complete packet capture (and exact browser version - multiple browsers are preferred)? https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues (Edit: Reported…

I just tested with ExpressVPN via their Kazakhstan endpoint. On 46.244.29.XXX on the ISP A2B IP B.V. I don't seem to be MITM'ed at all, so I can't report anything about the MITM-detector.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#122
post #21

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…

> Now "us techies" have to find a new technical solution to a very social problem.

Cert pinning does mitigate it for apps, doesn't it? The end-user doesn't need to really worry abt rouge root CAs, if my understanding is right.

Traditional VPNs, P2P VPNs, Tor as a Proxy (decentralised net? dat/i2p/freenet/ipfs) could solve it generally across various use-cases, of which, VPNs are already mainstream.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#123
post #102

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).

This is actually the subject of some debate, believe it or not, there is a good argument against it. Here is the crux of the issue, many TLS middleware providers install their own root certificate for network monitoring, data loss prevention, security scanning and so on. I personally would like them to stop doing that or at least make it obvious to end users it's happening. However, in order to modify the root store,…

hiyy

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#124
post #103

What is interesting is that some local internet providers in Kazakhstan used to inject their own ads into http websites their users visit. I wonder if they will start doing the same with https now. I noticed this behaviour last February with Kazakhtelecom (telecom.kz) internet provider. When I opened an http website in my browser and started clicking randomly on the parts of the page which are usually not clickable,…

This is so bad. I'm from India and at my parents place we have the government run internet provider. They MITM and inject advertisements all the time showing annoying popups whenever you open an http link. I don't know how this is legal even.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#125
post #103

What is interesting is that some local internet providers in Kazakhstan used to inject their own ads into http websites their users visit. I wonder if they will start doing the same with https now. I noticed this behaviour last February with Kazakhtelecom (telecom.kz) internet provider. When I opened an http website in my browser and started clicking randomly on the parts of the page which are usually not clickable,…

I wonder if they also proxy stuff like the Google endpoints where chrome does key pinning, or if they whitelist those. I imagine other large systems like those of facebook (when using the app) and Apple are actively remembering what the keys are supposed to look like. That would mean that even a custom CA wouldn't allow carte blanche MITM.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#126
Can we, endpoints outside Kazakhstan, detect when a MITM client is connected and serve a boiler plate message "Untrusted connection"?

If enough high level sites do this (Google, Cloudflare, Wikipedia etc) it might force the hand of the government since they are the ones effectively breaking the internet.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#128
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For mobile apps, though, you can bootstrap HPKP with a key built into the app. I worked on an app doing this, and it would certainly fail to connect in this scenario.

A lot of internal enterprise networks use MITM, so your app won't work there as well. It might be a good thing or not, depending on your use-case.

Yeah, I considered this a feature. As mentioned elsewhere in these comments, we should have a way to limit the scope of corporate certs.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#130

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.

This comment on the mozilla.dev.security.policy mailing list says that right now it's only for users in the nation's capital: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.security.policy/...

> At the moment, providers started to use the certificate in the capital of Kazakhstan - Nur-Sultan (ex. Astana).

So it may not be nationwide yet.

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