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MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

bugzilla.mozilla.org

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Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#411

Post by tialaramex »

mikorym wrote: post #376
nurbo wrote: post #361

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…

What is the extent of the MITM attack that you can do with this certificate? Can you intercept all https traffic?

If a user trusts this root CA (~ "installs the certificate") then someone who controls the root can now make their MITM look like the real deal, because it's trusted. After all you've said you trust them. Whether you _should_ trust the authoritarian government of Kazakhstan is a policy issue.

On its own the root does not magically intercept the traffic, so Kazakh ISPs will need to do a bunch of (potentially quite expensive) work to actually MITM traffic for the Kazakh government, but with the root once that work is done it doesn't get flagged as a problem.

Because this exact same strategy (root that is not trustworthy is installed) is used in corporate setups to do anti-exfiltration, porn filtering and dozens of other things of dubious value, browsers are designed to let you, or the computer's administrator, choose to trust root CAs and indeed lots of counter-measures that protect ordinary users from bad guys are deliberately _disabled_ in the scenario where you've told it to trust some third party. You know best.

If you imagine a hypothetical system which just doesn't trust this root, say somebody has a Raspberry Pi they smuggled across the border, or more prosaically, they just said "No" and refused to install the root certificate -- such a system just will treat the MITM as an error, your secure web browsing won't work because it can't make a secure connection.

Or contrariwise, suppose you install the root in an otherwise ordinary PC in New York connected to AT&T, it will have no effect because the Kazakh government obviously isn't in New York MITMing your connections to other stuff.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#412

Post by tialaramex »

cpach wrote: post #408
kiallmacinnes wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, no. This is Windows.

"The" Trusted Root Certification Authorities store isn't a real thing, it's just a view onto a bunch of different stores that are actually separate, including a local machine store and per-user stores plus of course stores added by your membership of a domain or other grouping.

So Chrome gets to distinguish between certificates that Microsoft added and the ones added by Group Policy or whatever else to your system.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#414

Post by ilaksh »

rndgermandude wrote: post #397
amelius wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does such a certificate exist in the first place?

It exists to intercept https and potentially other TLS traffic. It exists because everybody can make such a certificate. I made such a CA certificate for my personal use, not to MITM myself, but to issue certificates for some internal services that are out of scope of letsencrypt. Every major desktop OS comes with tools that let you make a CA certificate, Windows does, macos does, linux distro usually ship openssl/gn…

It seems like this is material movement toward actual authoritarianism to me.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#415

Post by cpach »

tialaramex wrote: post #412
cpach wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”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.

Yeah, no. This is Windows. "The" Trusted Root Certification Authorities store isn't a real thing, it's just a view onto a bunch of different stores that are actually separate, including a local machine store and per-user stores plus of course stores added by your membership of a domain or other grouping. So Chrome gets to distinguish between certificates that Microsoft added and the ones added by Group Policy or what…

Oh! I should’ve known it was all stored in the registry. As you say, this is Windows after all. Found some MS docs that look relevant: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/seccrypto/sys...

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#416

Post by _zbkl »

mkagenius wrote: post #194
break_the_bank wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't know how this is legal even. Legality is secondary when you are punching up in a 3rd world country. (I am from India)

1. Please stop self-generalizing. This only leads to hopelessness, which is unwarrented since there's a huge amount of Internet-related activism in India, even more than the Western countries.

2. Plese stop using the label "Third-world". You are your own "first-world". There's better labels to describe yourself, namely "developing".

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#418

Post by evrydayhustling »

vbezhenar wrote: post #400
nurbo wrote: post #361

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…

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,…

Consistently applied standards are good. But if a developer change can interfere with a country's politics, it's because political actors have coopted the developers' work for leverage in their own system. Dev teams like Mozilla's are under no obligation to give a stable platform to anybody's political goals.

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#419

Post by maxheadroom »

winter_blue wrote: post #403
nurbo wrote: post #361

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…

> 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?

>...but what could prevent this sort of thing?

If it's on Windows, probably the digital signature[0] of the installer bundle will flag for invalid/unknown signature. For nix you could verify checksums but for Apple, if it's not in the store, I think it's nigh* impossible to do.

[0] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/packaging/sign-...

Re: MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

#420

Post by tialaramex »

darkhorn wrote: post #364
isostatic wrote: post #2

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?

> CAA creates a DNS mechanism that enables domain name owners to whitelist CAs that are allowed to issue certificates for their hostnames. https://blog.qualys.com/ssllabs/2017/03/13/caa-mandated-by-c...

CAA isn't relevant here.

CAA is a mechanism for trustworthy CAs to agree not to issue certificates to people who don't want them.

So if you set CAA to insist you only want Comodo certificates in darkhorn.example, Let's Encrypt will refuse to issue certificates for names under darkhorn.example

But no matter how you set CAA for darkhorn.example, my private CA can issue certificates for it no problem. Let's Encrypt aren't _prevented_ from issuing, they are _declining_ to issue by policy, and that policy is part of why the world trusts them. But the world doesn't trust my private CA, so I don't have to follow that policy.

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