41–50 of 81 posts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_Sky_Global#Communi...
EDIT: Based on German law this certainly is not a lawful interception but one made by an intelligence agency.
I thought certificate transparency was the thing that was supposed to prevent exactly what this article is describing. What if anything is incorrect about my model of the world in this respect?
If you're a CA you can just issue a cert and not publish it in the CT logs. You're not supposed to do that, but there is nothing stopping it. And the attack isn't stopped even if they do publish in CT. And you have to monitor for it anyway. Every single mitigation for known Web PKI vulns can be worked around (if people use them, which virtually nobody does).
Browsers have mandated CT logging for years and will not accept such a certificate.
Why is it so common to incorrectly assume that the people who came up with CT were stupid?
This is a reminder why you should use E2EE messengers only.
One day that'll be illegal. End to end encryption? That obviously means you're a drug trafficking money laundering pedophile terrorist. Off to jail with you despite zero evidence. Maybe they'll declare your efforts to protect yourself as being in contempt of court and then jail you indefinitely until full decryption.
To absolutely no sane person's surprise, the main audience of e.g. anti-censorship platforms is exactly people who typically feel or find themselves censored, which in a harmonious or at least well-functioning society will not be a particularly cheritable set of individuals. In one where that's not the case, the audience would change alongside too, sure, but clearly these narratives mismatch reality, at least for now.
Conversely, (actually) high privacy platforms will be primarily seeked out and leveraged by those who value precisely that. While the privacy scares have been pretty serious for a while, for now that is still both evidently, and indeed obviously, in good part criminals or other high risk individuals.
It's like trying to pretend people are shopping for regular items on .onion webshops rather than for contraband. I'm sure that crowd exists, but like, who are we trying to fool here exactly?
Performative victimhood only works so well, and until such blatantly deceptive narrative is being pushed, you may very well see your doomsday scenario realized. It's a trivially vulnerable position, so much so that it feels like a rhetorical trap almost. Like a poet self-sabotaging the monetization of their work, while waxing poetic about how they're (financially) un(der)appreciated. Although people have been getting into anti-government conspiracies pretty hard in the past few years, and governments have been working hard to demolish whatever good standing they have in parallel, so that does help your case I suppose. One may even recognize this miraculously well oiled process and nosedive in social trust as uncoincidental, in fact. But I digress. I wouldn't wanna spread conspiracy theories after all, would I?
Yes this is to be expected. I've mentioned multiple times over the years that TLS CA issuance & validation's many security holes (>=14 at last count) could be solved by changing how certificates are issued. I've never had the kind of clout to get that message wide enough that anyone would take it serious. One of Web PKI's security holes is the fact that any CA can issue valid certs for any domain. The only official "…
This would very easily be susceptible to MITM attacks. Any DNS security to prevent MITM attacks is going to have the same CA issue we currently have.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One suggestion for anyone concerned about this weakness. You can use the CAA record to pin the domain to a specific certificate authority, issuance method, and account. This is imperfect, as CAA record validation (edit: of CAA extensions) is not mandatory yet. But by March 2027 all the CAs a supposed to have support. Sprinkle some DNSSEC on the CAA record too, if you'd like.
Just be careful, if you host your DNS at Cloudflare (maybe others?), they will rewrite your CAA record[0] if you use TLS with them. This is in the name of convenience but it was surprising when I first learned. [0]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/edge-certificates/caa-...
Yes this is to be expected. I've mentioned multiple times over the years that TLS CA issuance & validation's many security holes (>=14 at last count) could be solved by changing how certificates are issued. I've never had the kind of clout to get that message wide enough that anyone would take it serious. One of Web PKI's security holes is the fact that any CA can issue valid certs for any domain. The only official "…
Yes this is to be expected. I've mentioned multiple times over the years that TLS CA issuance & validation's many security holes (>=14 at last count) could be solved by changing how certificates are issued. I've never had the kind of clout to get that message wide enough that anyone would take it serious. One of Web PKI's security holes is the fact that any CA can issue valid certs for any domain. The only official "…
In case you were not aware, Moxie Marlinspike spoke about this at length back in the early 2010s[1]. His view was that the problem is that certificate authority trust is controlled by the wrong people (web hosts, not users -- or browsers, as a proxy for user wishes) and is not possible to revoke because once a web host uses a particular CA you are stuck trusting them forever otherwise the internet will break.
> The solution to that is to rearchitect the Web PKI ecosystem to use domain registrars as the sole source of truth for which CA is allowed to issue valid certs, in addition to cryptographic fingerprints of the source of the originator and issuer. I won't rehash it here but it's not technically difficult and would make it so only the domain owner could issue certs, and valid certs could only come from the CA the domain owner authorizes.
Unfortunately, this is problematic for a bunch of other reasons. Yes, this means that a classic Comodo or DigiNotar attack might be blocked (though it is also just as likely they would've been included on the allow-list for American websites), but it also means that registrars could force you to use VeriSign and you would have no choice in the matter -- that is what originally happened with TLS and was what originally happened with DNSSEC too. It seems prudent to me to avoid creating schemes that allow that kind of institutional capture.
There is also in my view a mistake to assume that anyone with a ".com" or ".us" address would want to have the US government decide who they can get certificates from, ditto for any national TLD (let's not forget all of the Rust projects with ".rs" which is controlled by Serbia, tech websites with ".io" that is controlled by the UK, and so on).
If you really wanted to do this, DANE would allow website owners to do this by pinning the CA root and intermediate certificates hashes via DNSSEC -- basically acting as a client-side (and more strict) version of CAA (which I'm guessing is what you were referring to in your comment). Unfortunately it's not supported by Chrome and Firefox, and it would be quite fragile. It would be nice to have this as an option, and I am quite disappointed with the fact that clients are expressly forbidden from parsing CAA by RFC 8659.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One day that'll be illegal. End to end encryption? That obviously means you're a drug trafficking money laundering pedophile terrorist. Off to jail with you despite zero evidence. Maybe they'll declare your efforts to protect yourself as being in contempt of court and then jail you indefinitely until full decryption.
Sounds heartwrenching until you see a story like this: https://youtu.be/hKLIxxBrM-o To absolutely no sane person's surprise, the main audience of e.g. anti-censorship platforms is exactly people who typically feel or find themselves censored, which in a harmonious or at least well-functioning society will not be a particularly cheritable set of individuals. In one where that's not the case, the audience would change…
First, the secure end-to-end encryption was broken by international police and messages were read without making it illegal.
Second they suggest reading hundreds of thousands of people’s messages to catch a dozen or so gang members - not supporting your claim that only crooks use it.
Third, the video ends by the gang leader saying he was working for the President; not supporting your implication that criticism of government is all baseless conspiracy theories.