71–80 of 91 posts
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I'm not sure what that would solve. You would still need some central entity to sign the DNS TXT record, to ensure that the HTTPS client does not use a tampered DNS TXT record.
If someone can tamper with your DNS TXT records now they can get a certificate for your domain.
Besides, if someone has access to your TXT records then chances are they can also change A records, and you've lost already.
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Ah but then how would nations spy on people by compromising the root certificate?
You're insinuating that the Let's Encrypt roots are compromised? https://letsencrypt.org/repository/#isrg-legal-transparency-...
To play the devils advocate: TLS on websites where you are not logged in is the greatest security hogwash of all times. For example the cookies of the NYT: - Store and/or access information on a device 178 vendors - Use limited data to select advertising 111 vendors - Create profiles for personalised advertising 135 vendors - Use profiles to select personalised advertising - Understand audiences through statistics or…
To play the devils advocate: TLS on websites where you are not logged in is the greatest security hogwash of all times. For example the cookies of the NYT: - Store and/or access information on a device 178 vendors - Use limited data to select advertising 111 vendors - Create profiles for personalised advertising 135 vendors - Use profiles to select personalised advertising - Understand audiences through statistics or…
> The NSA is no longer listening because there is TLS everywhere? Sure, and the earth is flat. I’d be very surprised if they haven’t had several of the root trust entities compromised from day one. I wouldn’t rely on TLS with any of the typical widely-deployed trust chains for any secrecy at all if your opponent is US intelligence.
Has anyone considered the possibility that a CA such as Let's Encrypt could be compromised or even run entirely by intelligence operatives? Of course, there are many other CAs that could be compromised and making money off of customers on top of that. But who knows... What could defend against this possibility? Multiple signatures on a certificate?
The actual communication is secured by a public/private keypair which is separate from the CA certificate.
Browsers have a set of certificates "pre-accepted", these are the default root certificates. There have been issues with some of them over time (e.g. DigiNotar) and they hav changed over time. If you hear of someone speaking about the "CA cartel" this is what they mean.
So a compromised CA can make you think you are talking to someone, like your bank, when you are not. But it doesn't enable snooping on traffic on the wire.
A CA can protect from this compromise by keeping the root private key entirely offline and signing a couple intermediate CA certificates. Then, if one of those intermediate CAs gets compromised, it can be revoked and a new intermediate CA created. You as a user of the CA can't do much though-either you choose to trust it (or delegate that trust) or don't.
You can create your own self-signed root CA certificates and client/server certificates signed by that CA fairly easily. But you then have to add the root CA as a trusted certificate into every device you want to use it, including those of your friends, employees, etc. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds, the last time I checked even phones would install a new root CA certificate if you opened a .crt file, and deploying CA certificates via Microsoft Group Policy is a thing.
I’m sorry, who the heck wrote this and why should I trust them? Very poorly written, also. It’s bizarre. There is a photo at the top, no name, no site title. No about page. Extremely untrustworthy.
No! It's not bizarre. Scroll down to the footer--> click on "Homepage" Then you will get to his homepage: https://www.brocas.org/
Ironic that someone specializing in security doesn't understand how to make their information trustworthy. But I suppose it's easier and more fun to try and understand machines than other human beings.
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Ironically, the inability to cache TLS on the edge of my network makes the Internet more surveillable since everything has to pass through the Room 641As of the world and subjects us all to more network behavior analysis. The TLS-everything world leaks so much more metadata. It's more secure but less private .
You can do it if you're happy to deploy your CA to your network, can't you? Deploying CA certs sucks, though. I wish it was easier.
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Even funnier, if one SIGINT team built a centralized "encryption everywhere" effort (before sites get encryption elsewhere), but that asset had to be need-to-know secret, so another SIGINT team of the same org, not knowing the org already owned "encryption everywhere", responded to the challenge by building a "DoS defense" service that bypasses the encryption, and started DoS driving every site of interest to that se…
Sounds like Cloudflare honestly. There are many issues with CA trust in the modern Internet. The most paranoid among us would do well to remove every trusted CA key from their OS and build a minimal set from scratch, I suppose. Browsers simply make it too easy to overlook CA-related issues, especially if you think a CA is compromised or malicious.
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Not tamper with the record directly, but MitM it on the way to a target.
That should be prevented by dnssec no?
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You're insinuating that the Let's Encrypt roots are compromised? https://letsencrypt.org/repository/#isrg-legal-transparency-...
No, but it’s a well-established fact that some CAs are run by governments, some of which are publicly trusted by browsers.