Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sarcasm? Not sure. But all a government has to do is embed within the endpoint, post-decryption. "Or else."
This is exactly what Carnivore and PRISM were
And how would Carnivore/PRISM strip off the TLS encryption?
MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
401–410 of 471 posts
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#402A 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…
I really don't like the idea that some third forces would interfere with internal politics of my country. Browser should work according to technical standards, not according to what US citizens decided to be good or bad. If Firefox wants to forbid locally installed roots, I'm all for it, but implement it for everyone. That said, I don't see how government would step back. People are uninformed and generally passive,…
Privacy is not 'what US citizens decided to be good', it's fundamental human right.
I'm not a Kazakh, I'm Russian, but our politics has a lot in common. And I would say, third forces interfering with politics is not as bad (if at all), as local governments interfering with people's privacy.
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#403A 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…
> If Firefox, Chrome and/or Safari block this certificate
For users who are already subject to the MITM, when they try to download a new version of their browser, couldn't the ISP simply serve them a slightly modified version of the new/updated Chrome/Firefox binary which does not blacklist their certificate? It would require a high level of technical expertise, but what could prevent this sort of thing?
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome will disable key pinning for CAs that are user installed rather than system provided (to support companies/schools who want to MITM for slightly less draconian reasons). I do wonder if Chrome will go to requiring CAs for this purpose be deployed via something more “enterprise” (e.g. custom extensions on Windows need to deployed via group policy now).
AFAIK, Chrome on Windows doesn’t manage root certificates, it just utilises Windows’ own cert store (certmgr).
I think you misunderstood the parent comment :)
Regardless of where the cert store is, it came with some CA certs "in the box". Pinning applies to these CAs. Any CA's added by the end user (aka person at the keyboard, or enterprise admins, etc) bypass pinning.
For better or worse, bypassing of pinning is required in some enterprise scenarios to inspect traffic leaving the network. e.g. Is someone attaching all our customer data to a email in gmail? To know that, I need to MITM mail.google.com.
Sadly, this mechanism does get abused :(
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#405Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft need to take a stand here and blacklist these certs. All of the efforts to move to HTTPS, and all of the rhetoric surrounding it, are just wasted time and empty words if we as a tech community allow this kind of behavior to go unchallenged. This sets such a dangerous precedent, and governments need to know that this kind of meddling will not be tolerated.
Hello, To continue using internet, you need to install our government-provided fork of Firefox that doesn't blacklist our government-provided root cert. regards, your Tele2
They don't even need to fork Firefox - there are couple of Russian browsers (https://browser.yandex.com/, https://browser.ru/) that would definitely allow Kazakhstan government to snoop into traffic (and hey even have Kazakh language support already). ISP will just advise clients that bad western companies banned Kazakhstan, so please use good safe Russian browsers.
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#406A 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…
I really don't like the idea that some third forces would interfere with internal politics of my country. Browser should work according to technical standards, not according to what US citizens decided to be good or bad. If Firefox wants to forbid locally installed roots, I'm all for it, but implement it for everyone. That said, I don't see how government would step back. People are uninformed and generally passive,…
Encryption is political. The technical standards around HTTPS are politically motivated. The push for HTTPS everywhere, de-facto required TLS in HTTP/2, eSNI & DoH, were largely a response to the US government's mass surveillance.
However, who makes these changes is interesting. It happened to be mostly developers in Five Eyes' countries acting against Five Eyes.
Do we need to have elected representatives in browser vendors and encryption standards bodies? Or given that the elected representatives are for mass surveillance, would that be any good?
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
In this case though, it seems like the government has no problem with telling people they're being monitored. The fact that they're willing to tell people to install a TLS certificate is indicative of that. I think companies in the US are legally required to provide similar disclosure when monitoring their employees, so I don't see why they'd have a problem with a persistent indicator like that.
In this case though, it seems like the government has no problem with telling people they're being monitored
Not at all. They spin it as providing security:
"Due to frequent cases of theft of personal and credential data, as well as money from bank accounts of Kazakhstan, a security certificate was introduced that will become an effective tool for protecting the country’s information space from hackers, Internet fraudsters and other types of cyber threats.
...
What is a security certificate?
A security certificate is an electronic certificate that allows to protect Internet users from content that is prohibited by the laws of the Republic of Kazakhstan, as well as from malicious and potentially dangerous content. The security certificate is intended to provide subscribers of cellular communication in Kazakhstan with Internet access in the most secure manner."
(source: https://www.kcell.kz/ru/product/3585/658 -- but this text seems to be coming from government, since it's quoted by all providers).
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK, Chrome on Windows doesn’t manage root certificates, it just utilises Windows’ own cert store (certmgr).
I think you misunderstood the parent comment :) Regardless of where the cert store is, it came with some CA certs "in the box". Pinning applies to these CAs. Any CA's added by the end user (aka person at the keyboard, or enterprise admins, etc) bypass pinning. For better or worse, bypassing of pinning is required in some enterprise scenarios to inspect traffic leaving the network. e.g. Is someone attaching all our cu…
”Any CA's added by the end user (aka person at the keyboard, or enterprise admins, etc) bypass pinning.”
But how would Chrome know if a root cert from Windows’ cert store was added by the user or not? They would all be located in the ”Trusted Root Certification Authorities” container.
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Then just use a wildcard cert.
Wildcard certs are a security ops nightmare. You really don't want to throw the private key for that around to every small project, and you need some good, automated way of rolling them across multiple services. Doable, but if you can avoid this, it's a better to avoid.
Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
#410What makes everyone so sure this isn't happening everywhere already? The problem Kazakhstan had was that there was no existing CA they could already force to issue certs. So they had to make a new one. It would be foolish to assume that none of the many trust anchors your browser already trusts haven't already been compelled by your local government to do exactly this. Also, DANE and DNSSEC solves this problem.
Certificate Transparency would make it blatantly obvious if any existing CA were being compelled by governments to issue fraudulent certs. DANE is, unfortunately, not viable to implement in browsers right now for a variety of reasons: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/01/17/notdane.html
> Certificate Transparency would make it blatantly obvious if any existing CA were being compelled by governments to issue fraudulent certs.
CT makes such an attack obvious, but the harm can't be undone.
A case study: root certificates for the GPKI, the South Korean governmental CA primarily used for public institutions, are not included in most browsers except for maybe IE [1] but frequently trusted due to (still) prevalent uses of ActiveX controls. It is of course subject to CA/B Forum baseline requirements [2] and publishes CT records, so you may guess their "accidentally" invalid wildcard certificates [3] are quickly spotted... Heck no! It was only noticed 3 years later [4]. No one knows what happened in this period.
[1] For example, Firefox doesn't include it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1377389
[2] https://cabforum.org/baseline-requirements-documents/
[3] For example, https://crt.sh/?id=6990343 contains a public suffix `.co.kr` (comparable to `.com`). Note that the BR contains very strong requirements for such public suffixes, which the GPKI didn't follow.
[4] https://www.mois.go.kr/frt/bbs/type001/commonSelectBoardArti...