"Google directly by performing a man-in-the-middle attack to impersonate Google security certificates."
Which CA did they use to get those certs, they should be obliterated from trust networks.
New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
61–70 of 149 posts
Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
#62A bit surprised at the shock here, CAs are, for the most part, in the lawful intercept business and have been as long as they've existed.
Moxie Marlinspike and others have been talking about this for years. Its a recognized problem, and thats why apps that are serious about protecting communications have been moving to a pinning model.
Obviously this sucks at the browser level, though Chrome protect does this with Google properties (and others?) at the CA level now, but at the app level it's very doable and should be something you're implementing.
Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
#63Holy shit. This means that The Netherlands was a high-level target with Diginotar, and they hit the frickin' jackpot. Just for reference, read this: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_bij_DigiNotar The Diginotar hack basically exposed all of the information about the Dutch that NSA could ever want to digg through: Information about licenseplates (RDW) Tax info (DigiD) Phone records (OPTA) and the complete dutch encryp…
I still don't have a DigiD (which is a real pain in many ways) simply because I don't think they have the technical expertise to create a system with information like that that I would trust. It's just too juicy a target.
Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
#64If I had to design a system to break TLS (and I had the authority of a secretive government agency), selected MITM attacks would be exactly what I would use. Large-scale MITM attacks, i.e. ones against a huge section of the population, really have a lot of disadvantages. First, there are always cautious people who check certs religiously, sometimes with browser addons to help (in fact I see that peterwwillis linked t…
If a MITM attacker is confident they control all paths between a server and a victim, they need not alter IP addresses on packets in transit. To pull this off, the attacker must be near the victim (e.g. compromise a broadband router), thereby reducing the number of targets, or near the server (e.g. compromise every link into a multihomed datacenter), thereby reducing the number of sites intercepted.
Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
#65Trevor 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 doesn't introduce any new authorities or change the default UX at all.
After the Comodo breaches a few years ago, I put together a talk about these types of attacks, where the fundamental problems lie, and why approaches like DANE are similarly ineffective:
Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what makes any smaller providers any more safe?
A smaller provider with fewer clients probably provides a lower ROI for the NSA because of the economy of scale, although if they are specifically targeting you, it may still not make a meaningful difference.
There is a trade-off here, sure there are fewer people that they can listen in on like that but presumably a smaller provider will also be a softer target, possibly much softer.
Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
#67Flying Pig - I wonder if it has something to do with the "With sufficient trust pigs fly just fine". Seems to summarize very well the NSA approach towards its mandates.
Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
#68Trevor 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…
Your tack.io proposal looks great. Do you have any sense as to whether or when it will be adopted?
Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
#69Earlier 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?
Sounds like it could be any of those things: they use all those tactics.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet...
Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.
N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages. If the necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.
How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored. To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means. “Approval to release to non-Sigint agencies,” a GCHQ document says, “will depend on there being a proven non-Sigint method of acquiring keys.”
Sounds like there are plenty of possibilities: they have agents working at verisign/they broke into verisign (either physically or electronically)/they just asked and verisign said ok/they used legal processes.
Re: New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
#70One more reason to not use any of the giant email providers like Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail.
Your small email providers (or your datacenter or ISP if you host your own) are still subject to the laws of the country in which they reside and will comply with legally valid court orders. Alternative email providers will not protect you. Only encryption can do that. (Or better legal protections for emails.)