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New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services

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Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services

#101

Post by StavrosK »

moxie wrote: post #72
MichaelSalib wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your tack.io proposal looks great. Do you have any sense as to whether or when it will be adopted?

We have some large websites on board to deploy it, and Trevor has been working with browser vendors to get it integrated. The latter has been pretty slow going, but there is interest.

This isn't a promise or official or anything, but I'm fairly sure that Silent Circle will be interested in deploying TACK. I can put it on the table, if you want, but anything that increases security will be welcome.

Also, how does TACK relate to certificate pinning? The introduction has a few differences (e.g. tack expiration), but the two techniques seem pretty similar, am I missing something?

Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services

#102

Post by txutxu »

stordoff wrote: post #96
txutxu wrote: post #87

Wait. They access google directly... without depend on routing your traffic and tramp your SSL to get a lot of compressed js and ajax traffic. So... maybe this was only needed or relevant before have direct access ?

MITMing a Google server doesn't _necessarily_ mean that they want the info Google has. Google host a number of libraries such as Analytics and jQuery which are widely used on other sites. The attack could have been to send a modified version of those so that websites (other that Google) transmit information that is normally kept on the client (e.g. sending the key to the NSA in an app that normally does client-side e…

Great point.

Then I understand better the relevance. Thanks.

Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services

#103

Post by vabmit »

andrewcooke wrote: post #58
semenko wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HSTS commits /maybe/ suggest that Google thinks a Verisign intermediate was signing MITMs for Google properties. They just blacklisted "VeriSignClass3SSPIntermediateCA" See: https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com/23523051 Note that the associated bug is private ( https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=173460 ). There's a good explanation of the "bad_static_spki_hashes" parameter here: http://ritter.v…

if that's the case, how did they get the private key from verisign? was it stolen? did verisign simply give them it? or was it obtained under some kind of legal process? if it was under a legal process, doesn't this raise additional questions about the judicial overview - did they realise how broad this was?

Didn't Assange say in a (secretly?) recorded video where he was talking with Schmidt and another person that while the Americans got trusted root keys from Diginotar, the Chinese hacked Verisign and grabbed their root keys? I'll see if I can find the video.

Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services

#104

Post by Element_ »

__alexs wrote: post #35
josteink wrote: post #20

If this is true, and that NSA has been MITMing providers like Google, they are undermining the already shabby trust the US cloud-industry has attempted to build. I doubt Google and friends are very happy about that, since that's their one big basket where all the money comes in. NSA in their eagerness to do rampant spying on everyone have had quite some collateral. They have decided to compromise the one thing which…

> Right now we need to find out which (root?) CAs are compromised by the NSA. Given that basically all CAs people actually use (even in Europe) are owned by US companies, I would estimate something close to 100% of them have cooperated with the NSA at some point. Obviously there are non-US CAs like China's CNNIC but most of them won't actually sell you a certificate.

If the NSA is doing this "legally" via secret courts etc... Then you have to assume every company subject to US law can't be trusted.

Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services

#106

Post by arbitrage »

coldcode wrote: post #81

Eventually we will find out enough about what the NSA can do that the entire internet is as good as screwed. If they can get away with MITM against just about any secure site then how does the internet economy function any more?

consider that, if there have been undetected rampant MITM attacks, the economy never noticed or cared.

the economy side of things will be fine. the economy of what the internet is used for isn't really the concern, here. arguably, even with rampant MITM attacks going on, e-commerce is loads more secure that what we've had for in place for the past 5,000 years.

this is much more than an economic issue.

Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services

#107

Post by newman314 »

moxie wrote: post #65

Trevor Perrin and I have been working on a dynamic certificate pinning proposal called TACK to help mitigate these types of attacks: http://tack.io In the current state of the world, we're all dependent on CA signatures for each connection we make to a website. TACK is a layer of indirection away from CA certificates, such that we'd only be dependent on CA signatures the very first time we contacted a website. It doe…

Moxie, have you had any success with getting TACK into OpenSSL builds with the various distributions?

It's not a big deal to rebuild nginx/apache but I would think that getting TACK to ship default with OpenSSL would go a long way in getting more adoption.

Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services

#109

Post by sillysaurus2 »

leef wrote: post #34

Applied Cryptography mentions the 'Interlock Protocol' [1]. Why is something like this not used in today's protocols to try and detect MITM attacks? 1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlock_protocol

It sounds like the interlock protocol only protects against MITMs that try to modify the conversation. It seems likely that most MITMing is for the purpose of merely reading a conversation, not modifying it. The wiki page also describes an attack against the protocol, so it might not be very effective.

Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services

#110

Post by trevp »

newman314 wrote: post #107
moxie wrote: post #65

Trevor Perrin and I have been working on a dynamic certificate pinning proposal called TACK to help mitigate these types of attacks: http://tack.io In the current state of the world, we're all dependent on CA signatures for each connection we make to a website. TACK is a layer of indirection away from CA certificates, such that we'd only be dependent on CA signatures the very first time we contacted a website. It doe…

Moxie, have you had any success with getting TACK into OpenSSL builds with the various distributions? It's not a big deal to rebuild nginx/apache but I would think that getting TACK to ship default with OpenSSL would go a long way in getting more adoption.

We have support for a"ServerInfo" file checked into OpenSSL. This is a file with PEM blobs that can specify TACK and similar data (e.g. Certificate Transparency) that an OpenSSL server will return to clients if requested. This is a generic mechanism for TLS Extensions instead of TACK-specific, but it's what we need.

It will hopefully appear in OpenSSL 1.0.2. We'll be submitting Apache patches for it shortly. Daniel Jackoway (in this thread somewhere) is working on the NSS (client-side) corollary.

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