321–330 of 471 posts
So it took them only two weeks to take advantage of Firefox's new policy to automatically "fix"[1] man in the middle attacks through enterprise/antivirus CAs. As expected, this "convenience" will make us all less safe :(. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2019/07/01/fixing-antiviru...
Or replace it with a compromised version.
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?
1. The actual browser software has its own rules for what's trusted on top of the root trust store often copy-pasted into other software (e.g. in the Python package Certifi). These rules include name constraints of the sort you're interested in, functionally they're used to constrain roots that might be fine but whose government operators promise they're only for some TLDs under authority of that government, so in a sense for those names the government decides who "really" owns them anyway.
Rather than link a horde of HN readers into Mozilla's poor mercurial server I'll point you more indirectly at a summary from their wiki:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Additional_Trust_Changes
You can fork Firefox and add your own rules to NSS, or if you're feeling really fancy, your own extension mechanism to add rules at runtime.
2. You can spin up a root, and trust it, and use that to sign a suitable constrained intermediate. Then, destroy the private key for the root and continue using the intermediate.
In this scenario Firefox gives total trust to your root, but it can't possibly proxy mybank.com because you destroyed the private keys, it can't do anything further at all. The intermediate, which can still issue, is constrained.
Google (I think? Some big tech firm with know-how) has used this trick for products that do loop-back HTTPS. It mints a root cert during instal, issues one certificate and then destroys the private key, then it can trust the root cert but without any danger you later get MITM'd by the root, because that root's private key no longer exists anywhere.
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…
And compromising HTTPS in places with a functional judicial system (and human rights) would probably be blocked by an end-less series of law suites.
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…
I was certain I read a few years ago that Google would mandate that all OEMs would be forced to use a single unified certificate list, which I thought at the time was a way to pre-empt this sort of thing. But I can't find any new info about that anywhere. I only found an article about how to add new certificates on new Android versions in 2019, so I guess you can still change them. I wonder if Google changed its mind…
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…
The Verisign brand lives on, but it was acquired by Symantec back in 2010, Symantec then sold their CA business to DigiCert back in 2017. So although you may find certificates with "Verisign" branding on them, that has nothing to do with the company named Verisign.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/189647/what-hap...
Guess it wasn't canceled after all.
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,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using CAs to authenticate clients is subject to the same attack. They block communication from any client that won't disclose its private key to the MITM box or use it to encrypt/sign whatever the MITM requires it to. You can't have security if you have a MITM that says "compromise your endpoint or we block you" and you concede to that. The only real solutions are either political or making the encrypted traffic look…
> Using CAs to authenticate clients is subject to the same attack. You don't need to use a publicly available CA to verify client-side certificates. The server could use its own internal CA to sign CSRs from clients and send the reslting certificate back to the client via email or some other means.
> 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…
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…
They’re training their entire population to install things that they get in unsolicited emails that purport to be from a legitimate source.
What could go wrong?