MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan • Hacker News Board

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#251

Post by jeroenhd » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

taftster wrote: post #145

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #114

> I think this CA should be blacklisted by Mozilla and Firefox should not accept it at all even user installed it manually. > This will save privacy of all Internet users in Kazakhstan. No. This will mean that users would simply switch to chrome, edge, brave, ... , n + 1. In case all of them block this CA, the government will force people to install an older version or will patch any open source browser so that it wo…

Yes, exactly. In the United States, for example, it's legal (even expected?) that corporations can install custom CAs into their user's browsers and prevent internet access to any browser without it installed. Is it Mozilla's job to prevent these CAs from being installed on user's workstations? Should Mozilla reject any certificate from Blue Snort, etc.? Kazakhstan has likewise declared it legal (under their own sove…

American and European companies and organisations put on loads of protest against acts like SOPA and Article 13. I don't see why this is any different.

Just because a nation state decides on something doesn't mean that foreign entities can't protest that decision. Firefox and Chrome can add very scary warnings to users about government sabotage if they want to; they can even start including ads for Tor and comparable services if they want to. Blocking the cert would at most be very consumer-unfriendly to people wanting the certificate to be in place. If they disagree with a particular browser vendor, those people can switch browsers or fork an open source one.

Mozilla's job is to provide a safe and open web. The Kazakh government is opposing that. In this case, it's perfectly in line with Mozilla's mission to warn users as best they can against the scary precedent their government is setting.

Of course this only works well if Google, Microsoft and Apple join the effort to warn users. Google is already showing a constant warning on Android when a device is being MitM'd and many of their apps do certificate pinning. Facebook and Twitter do certificate pinning in their apps as well.

I don't see why browsers couldn't take action as well. Just don't show any green locks during a MitM and show periodic notifications about the users' security being compromised. Block the certificate if you have to; as a party people rely on for choosing what certificate authorities to trust, they can't allow themselves to be compromised by governments enforcing laws endangering the safety of the web.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#252

Post by jasonh3 » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #150

jedberg wrote: 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…

One of our ("tech people") main failures was that, while we made a heavy push for server authentication, we didn't make a similarly strong push for client authentication. With client certificates, MITM like that is not possible, unless the server also trusts the MITM CA to authenticate its clients (and uses a CA for the client certificates in the first place, instead of a direct mapping between users and their certif…

Somewhat related: if there were a shared password between the client and server, Password Authenticated Key Exchange techniques [0] could offer protection even when the server CA was compromised. PAKEs use zero-knowledge proof techniques to assert that each side already had password material (and derive a key from it) without revealing what the actual password was if the other side didn't have it to begin with.

In this case, only connections where a password was already agreed on would be protected vs. general unauthenticated browsing.

There was a draft proposal to add PAKE support to TLS 1.3, but it appears to have unfortunately expired [1].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password-authenticated_key_agr... 1: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barnes-tls-pake-04

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#253

Post by vbezhenar » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

daukadolt wrote: post #37

Does such a certificate compromise non-browser traffic as well? Like SSH tunnels, mobile apps, Telegram etc.

Just don't install that certificate. If something stops working, you'll know that they tried to break that channel. If something's working, then it's OK. And if you need things to work, use VPN.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#254

Post by leevlad » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #169

The pertinent page [1] of a local ISP, Kcell, is interesting - very devious. > Kcell JSC informs its customers of the need to install Security Certificate on personal devices capable of connecting to the Internet > Due to the increase of identity and personal data theft, including stealing money from bank accounts, introduced a security certificate as an effective tool to protect the country’s information space from…

Wow, if only everyone was as smart as Kazakhstan and figured out that this super awersome Security Certificate was "an effective tool" to protect the entire country's information space. And I've been wasting time with strong passwords, 2FA, E2E encryption, full disk encryption, etc. /s

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#255

Post by mdhardeman » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

bcoates wrote: post #243

syn0byte wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So do we make our flagship product useless for the entire country or not?" - The real question

Yes? This isn't that complicated. You break it, and when competitive browser X refuses to do so, you sell the idea that browser X is compromised for all users everywhere (not just in Kazakhstan) Stop thinking about the country with literally less than 1% of world internet users and start thinking of the reputational damage a less than charitable presentation of your collaboration with a totalitarian state against you…

That's fair, but the country doing this will just fork an open-source browser and make it their official browser.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#256

Post by dahfizz » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

break_the_bank wrote: post #124

gnull wrote: 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.

> government run

> how this is legal even.

The government writes and enforces the laws. They'll never self incriminate.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#257

Post by layoutIfNeeded » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #238

GordonS wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more benign uses too - many organisations run an internal PKI, and installing their root CA prevents employees' browsers from displaying warnings about untrusted certificates when accessing internal web apps/sites.

That would be a bad use IMO. Letsencrypt solves any need for legitimate certificates.

Lol. Sure, company sysadmins will run certbot on their mainframes.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#258

Post by mdhardeman » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

lostmsu wrote: post #163

jedberg wrote: 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…

The solution to that problem was invented and reinvented hundreds of years ago. It is called gunpowder.

This is both uncomfortable and correct.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#259

Post by unilynx » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #122

jedberg wrote: 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.

You don’t need to pin against a state. Just deselect Kazachstan as a region where your app is offered, because it’s not going to work anyway if you try.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#260

Post by zrm » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

mdhardeman wrote: post #235

zrm wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethernet can carry protocols other than IPv4. IPv6 is one of them, but there were at one time a whole slew of them, like IPX and Appletalk. But ISPs don't carry them, so they're effectively blocked and have largely died out, and everything uses IPv4 or IPv6. Even if you want to use Appletalk today, you encapsulate in IPv4 or IPv6. There are also a whole bunch of IP transport protocols other than TCP and UDP, but fire…

I'll be 40 years old later this year. I've been interested in communications and communications protocols since I was about 12. I've been a software developer with a focus on network communications for over 15 years. I'm well aware of all that you've said. My point was, they get TLS interception down, and they capture what they want from a target of interest. When they look closely at your traffic and decide all thes…

You're proposing that the penalty for being suspected of subverting the firewall is death. In those cases you're going to want a highly refined system for avoiding detection, and it's also very important that one exist, because regimes that oppressive deserve to be opposed.

Fortunately the more typical case isn't kidnapping and execution but only having your connection blocked, which creates a helpful feedback loop that enables continuous improvement in the ability of secure communications to avoid detection. Which benefits everybody, but especially those in violent authoritarian countries that need it all the more.