391–400 of 471 posts
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What is the extent of the MITM attack that you can do with this certificate? Can you intercept all https traffic?
Yes, having a root CA certificate like this installed in a client allows the certificate issuer (so in this case KZ government and anything they authorize ISPs to do) to impersonate any and every other domain. So yes, ALL https traffic to and from that client to be subject to intercept.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, having a root CA certificate like this installed in a client allows the certificate issuer (so in this case KZ government and anything they authorize ISPs to do) to impersonate any and every other domain. So yes, ALL https traffic to and from that client to be subject to intercept.
Why does such a certificate exist in the first place?
Anyone can control a (root) certificate - the problem is getting others to trust it. Legitimate use cases might be: You want to intercept (and decrypt) traffic going from your local computer to SSL/TLS endpoints (affects only you) for example. Less clear cut / nice example: Company wants to read your traffic and therefor deploys a cert like this on your computer, now can snoop on anything you do, https or not.
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,…
Several ISPs (including some big national players, not smaller local/struggling/other ISPs) trialled that sort of thing in the UK in the mid/late 00s but there was a big enough ruckus about it that they stopped.
The really egregious thing about what some of them were doing is that they replaced existing ads so were basically trying to take money of the sites (they were at the same time also trying to get sites to pay or be considered "low priority" traffic so were trying to tripple-dip: get paid by their primary consumer, get paid by the sites, and take the sites' ad money).
It doesn't surprise me that it is actively happening in places there is less choice (so "voting with your feet" is not an option for telling ISPs what you think) or public outcry is less effective (or drowned out by more pressing issues the area might have).
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Yes, having a root CA certificate like this installed in a client allows the certificate issuer (so in this case KZ government and anything they authorize ISPs to do) to impersonate any and every other domain. So yes, ALL https traffic to and from that client to be subject to intercept.
Why does such a certificate exist in the first place?
You can make one on your own computer, give the result to your friends, tell them to connect through you as a proxy, and intercept everything. The tricky part is that browsers are hard coded with a list of a few trusted root certificates to trust. In order for the home baked certificate you just made to do any good, people have to explicitly install it and mark it as trusted. That means you have to distribute your newly minted root certificate and get every end point device to accept it manually.
That's what's so sinister about Kazakhstan's approach: by issuing a governmental mandate for citizens install the certificate they generated, and restricting their internet if they don't, they are effectively bypassing the Internet's current trust system entirely and granting themselves cart-blanche access to all their traffic.
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You don't have to serve that website publicly or even set up DNS records. You only need to set up DNS verification to serve one public TXT record for letsencrypt. Everything else could be internal. Letsencrypt certifies that you own domain. You can do anything with that domain.
Sometimes you don't want to make that information public though. For security (you don't want to publish your whole tech stack information) and secrecy (you don't want to publish registration of halflife3.internal.valve.com).
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”all a government has to do is embed within the endpoint” That’s a pretty high bar to clear though.
Not really. NSA requests are backed by LE either directly or... extortion style. https://www.wired.com/2007/10/nsa-asked-for-p/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, having a root CA certificate like this installed in a client allows the certificate issuer (so in this case KZ government and anything they authorize ISPs to do) to impersonate any and every other domain. So yes, ALL https traffic to and from that client to be subject to intercept.
Why does such a certificate exist in the first place?
The challenge is not to make it but to get it trusted by OS and software. The Kazakhstan government solved it by having the ISPs just tell people to install the thing themselves into each and every device you own.
Why does the government want this? To snoop on people. Usually framed as "We need to be able to fight terrorists, criminals and/or foreign enemies who 'abuse' encryption to hide their malicious activities". Tho, a lot of times the government will say all people are potential terrorists, and you just don't know if they are until you start snooping on them.
It's not only a thing with just authoritarian regimes, either. Australia passed a law which basically forces Australian companies and citizens to add backdoors in any products using end-to-end encryption (thereby effectively disabling end-to-end encryption) so the government can read communication if they want to.
The UK has a law ("snooper charter") that requires companies to "remove or disable" encryption when the government shows up with a warrant.
The US similarly are looking into end-to-end encryption busting legislation. And they already compelled companies to effective disable encryption systems, e.g. when a judge ordered lavabit (then the email provider Edward Snowden used) to hand over their encryption keys and install a government provided device capable of logging all traffic. And let's not forget that for a long time US law classified strong encryption as a "weapon" which meant you could not export encryption easily. Or the NSA e.g. pushing their backdoor encryption-busting PRNG (Dual_EC_DRBG) and weak encryption schemes (Speck, Simon).
German politicians recently started demanding end-to-end encryption busting legislation too, except they said "we do not want to make encryption weaker or insecure, we just want that the companies give us the plaintext data", which once more shows that they didn't thought it was necessary to do the most basic research into how this stuff works before talking.
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No, it's not pointless. This attack was detectable because of PKI. Without it the attack would not have been detectable. Being imperfect is different than being pointless. Even if you developed the perfect algorithm for global security infrastructure, the Kazakhstan government could still just break down your door and implant the backdoor into your hardware if they wanted. So by your logic should we just forget about…
An implant is not necessary. Intel ME is embedded with the CPU and has access to everything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, having a root CA certificate like this installed in a client allows the certificate issuer (so in this case KZ government and anything they authorize ISPs to do) to impersonate any and every other domain. So yes, ALL https traffic to and from that client to be subject to intercept.
Why does such a certificate exist in the first place?
It is not uncommon to see this in companies that (for security, regulatory, or other reasons) need to monitor traffic in and out of their network. They have all the company provided computing devices include their self-generated CA certificate and force all HTTPS traffic through a MitMing proxy in order to do the scanning.
A fellow from Kazakhstan here. Banning this certificate or at least warning the users against using it WILL help a lot. Each authoritarian regime is authoritarian in its own way. Kazakhstan doesn't have a very strong regime, especially since the first president resigned earlier this year. When people protest strongly against something, the government usually backs down. For example, a couple of years ago the governme…
That said, I don't see how government would step back. People are uninformed and generally passive, they wouldn't care enough. So, sadly, it might be the only way to push back that decision. But I still don't like it.