* https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/869-How-Kaspersky-makes-you-...

* https://media.ccc.de/v/camp2015-6833-tls_interception_consid...

Of course that being able to peek into https traffic gets them more data (specific urls, not just whole sites).

Does anybody else know your search history? Besides the NSA, whom I assume have access to all US-hosted data, no. And not even Google knows my most sensitive searches, because my private mode is a Tor Browser connecting to DuckDuckGo, answering for my porn needs mostly.

And I trust Google to keep my data safe more than I trust shady AV companies, because Google has hired a lot of security researchers, at their size all eyes are watching them and their behavior has been acceptable compared with that of others like Facebook.

Information security is all about compartmentalization ;-)

Not because there are no potential issues to discuss around ad-funded free services and data aggregation, but more because it's like clickbait (in that it oversimplifies a complex issue for emotional effect and makes discussion of actual issues more difficult).

Using algorithms to build a general profile in order to increase relevance is not the same as "selling your data". They sell access to your eyeballs in much the same way as a broadcast TV station or free alt-weekly does. The main difference is that by getting some sense of who you are and what you might be interested in, they can decrease (in theory) the amount of irrelevant ads that end up on your screen versus the traditional methods of just blanketing things with general ads or using cruder demographic info.

Lots of companies flat-out do sell your data, either in aggregate and somewhat anonymized or in full. I've not found anything yet that leads me to believe this is how Google runs their advertising business. To this day, my main concern with Google isn't so much with Google as it is with a malicious third party somehow gaining access to the info Google has on me.

That's not the point. The point is there is a dark market trade in your personal identifying data and metadata, with the ultimate goal of knowing everything about you. The more they know about you, the better they can advertise to you.

Advertisements on the Internet are bought and sold algorithmically on high speed marketplaces. Omniscience leads to better decisions in this environment. Therefore your data is precious to whomever owns it.

I totally agree with that part, including the last sentence of your post. However, I don't quite see the difference between "you are the product" and "access to your eyeballs is the product", it's just describing the same thing differently. That others are worse doesn't really change that, the ones who are better are the standard as far as I'm concerned.

As the target of such surveillance and data collection, you just never really know how that data will be used or who by. It's optimistic, to put it mildly, to expect that data will only be used for purposes you don't object to by good people with the best intentions.

If you have the time, would you mind expanding on why you consider Google's behavior better than Facebook's? I find myself very wary of FB but much less so of Google, but I can't really explain why.

Facebook manipulates the emotions of its users: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-...

MasterCard to access Facebook user data in order to make you spend more: http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/business-it/mastercard-to-ac...

Facebook ads use your face for free: http://www.itworld.com/article/2746556/networking-hardware/f...

Facebook is inventing phony likes to promote stories you've never seen to your friends: https://web.archive.org/web/20161215092610/http://www.forbes...

Facebook guesses your race and uses it for targeting: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/faceb...

Facebook has been the main promoter of bogus news and misinformation in 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-...

Facebook has started to collect WhatsApp data, in spite of the app's original policy: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/25/whatsapp-...

Facebook collects the texts that you don't send: https://arstechnica.com/business/2013/12/facebook-collects-c...

Facebook tracks and builds user profiles for people without accounts: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/31/facebook-...

Facebook's privacy settings have been designed with black patterns, making it easy to publish by mistake: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/29/facebook-...

Facebook makes it easy to tell when you're asleep: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/02/2...

I used a fake name on FB since the first day I signed up along with a photo of my favorite rock star. About a year ago, someone outed me and FB locked my account and said unless I emailed them a copy of my drivers license or some form of identification that proved who I was, they would keep my account locked.

I thought, "Whatever, I'll just fire up a new one."

This past month I signed up a new account under a very generic name like "John Johnson". No problems. I never uploaded a photo, just connected with the handful of people (less than 5) and felt like, "ok, we're cool now".

Yesterday, I got the same message and now the links you provided make a lot of sense as to why. FB really is after all of your data and essentially force you to give it to them, otherwise they hold your account hostage. Both times, I really felt like my privacy was being stampeded and this was a big intrusion to get at my personal information. No way am I going to give you an identifiable information about me. I already gave up an account I had used more or less for a decade instead of coughing up my personal information and photo.

So yeah, I'm done with FB - not that I was ever a huge fan, but this past week just confirmed what I always suspected.

Have algorithms that detect spam? Let users report on accounts being used to spam other users?

Sure, if I'm someone abusing the system, this should be easy to ferret out without having to surrender all your personal information and identifying markers just to make a SOCIAL MEDIA platform free of spam.

I think Google only better markets its intrusions than Facebook... Something to do with the public sentence "don't be evil". Indeed "evil" is like "common sense": everybody has its own and understands what comforts him/herself. Seems like pure marketing.

Maybe someone has any argument about the reality of this different Google/Facebook privacy intrusion/protection feeling?

Of course there are some other less intrusive search engines (DuckDuckGo, maybe Qwant), but unfortunately they still are less efficient than Google for fine or rare searches.

But for the average user, until a better Google comes along, I think it's OK to trust Google with their searches. And compartmentalization is paramount to information security, my point being that trusting some other company besides Google with that data is not acceptable, which is why I find that intercepting HTTPS connections is simply wrong and evil, regardless of reasons. This besides the fact that intercepting HTTPS traffic increases the attack surface, making users less secure.

We know Google does what it does. DDG's reason for existence is predicated on not doing so.

If DDG were found to be lying, I'd guess >80% of its customer base would evaporate overnight. It would mean destroying many years of branding, trust and relatively difficult cultivation of user browser defaults.

But that's worth gaming out - what would make it worth it to light all that on fire? About the only thing I can think of is a Lavabit-style conundrum, wherein our intelligence-overlords threaten someone's freedom. So, absolutely could happen, absolutely would come out.

So that's why I trust DDG to be less forthcoming with their logs.

And the "not even anonymous" is not an option: to be able to have a fully functioning phone, I hardly can escape declaring my full details to Google.

And this is clearly an "evil" choice of Google: I never created a Linux, Debian, Ubuntu or Mint account to keep my desktop computer up-to-date and featured by additional apps.

Any tracking that isn't announced to the user is not a cost, but is espionage.

It connects on-line and off-line searches, so it shows you the result in on-line locations. The underlying assumption was that users increasingly see on-line and off-line content as all part of the same world ("their content").

The commercial aspect was that it connected to places like Amazon. It made money for Canonical by using affiliate links if the user chose to make a purchase.

That is not the same as collecting all the history of the user and (anonymising) then selling that to a third-party or presenting adverts based on that data.

The default is off as users felt searches by default connecting to external services was an invasion of privacy - that's different to "selling searches".

Frankly, this closed-off the last viable manner for desktop Linux to secure a wider revenue stream of sufficient size to drive employing enough full time developers to keep up with the other platforms, in my personal opinion. FOSS doesn't change the dynamic that full-time developers cost real money.

Source: I worked at Canonical from the early days of the desktop, for ~10 years.

"Unless you have opted out, we will also send your keystrokes as a search term to productsearch.ubuntu.com and selected third parties so that we may complement your search results with online search results from such third parties including: Facebook, Twitter, BBC and Amazon. Canonical and these selected third parties will collect your search terms and use them to provide you with search results while using Ubuntu."

Source: Ubuntu's third party privacy policy.

* The default was not off in 12.10.

I'm fine if you want to make money this way! That's why you're a company, people need to make money. My argument was that some OSS software sells your search results, one way or another. I didn't take a position in this argument (but you can hopefully guess my position).

Now, you mention that your users complained, which was true. It caused a huge amount of backlash from your established user-base, many of which contributed to OSS themselves and have seen their contributions being monetized by Canonical (which is fine too, no worries). But besides the users, it was the pressure from EFF which caused Canonical to buckle to the pressure [1].

So, I don't care what Canonical underlying assumptions were, I don't care whether it is disabled now, I don't care whether Unity showed affiliate links or not. It's all just distracting from the main point: search terms entered in Unity were send, by default, to third-party servers!

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...

Which was four years ago. It's off now, and has been since 16.04 (the most recent LTS release, which shipped last year).

I agree the Amazon integration in the Dash was a mistake, but it's a mistake that has been fixed. It's simply not true anymore that "Ubuntu unity sells your searches in the desktop environment by default," and continuing to tell people so is deeply misleading.

The rest of your points are personal opinions on users and data privacy, I shouldn't have commented on that area, I apologise. I see no value in getting drawn into discussing the strong emotions associated with this area as it never ends well :-)

http://linuxbsdos.com/2015/10/28/first-things-to-do-after-in...

It's a personal frustration and professional regret that desktop Linux is under-funded to compete on an equal footing - the business model challenge feels intractable. RedHat/SUSE, Mandriva and Canonical have tried different options. But, there's been no sustained success that can get desktop Linux over 5% of market. Perhaps Google will have more success with ChromeOS.

Observe by contrast the efforts Google goes to with the Android APIs.

You're clearly angry, but I don't deserve the implication of being called stubborn, arrogant or aloof.

I've already apologised to you for pushing your comment side-ways in the other thread - I'm not sure what else you'd like from me at this point.

Canonical have tried to do some very good things to, and deserve some credit for successfully making Linux more end-user-friendly. They're not terrible people, just folks with a different set of perspectives & incentives from me.

https://fixubuntu.com/

There are probably lots of smaller examples; especially in Android.

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....

Also note that while Homebrew may be open-source, it is not "free software".

I confirm that he is probably right about _____collecting____ data. Yes, this most definitely includes FOSS software. If your qualifier for FOSS is not using GA or anything like that than your are right, however, most of probably still count brew as FOSS. Hope that helps.

There's Microsoft, Google, and/or Apple have that. The profit models of these big companies create some disincentives on onselling this data.

AV providers are often on much smaller margins and the return from selling this data or building their own products on it is much higher.

I wouldn't be surprised if ISPs and VPNs also sold on data.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2492599,00.asp

https://www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/a...

*https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf

Edit: I don't mean to imply that it's the right or the wrong thing to do (it probably depends on the situation). Just stating what I have seen in industry.

This is quite different than the AV vendor who does not own your communication from your own device.

I know I'm a relative minority in the corporate IT world, but as a software developer downloading/uploading dependent libraries or the outputs of my development issues, corporate MITM interception certificates absolutely scare me for my personal threat model and the threat model of the projects that I work on.

It is. I do work in a Fortune 500 occasionally, and have to use their MITM gateway (websense SSL intercept).

They haven't yet fixed the internal cert to not use SHA-1.

If you're using something other than a corporate windows desktop + browser, you have to install the root certificates manually.

They have to make manual exceptions for sites that do certificate pinning. When they miss a site, it creates issues. Github is broken for me...I have to use crazy workarounds.

If there were a movement to enable certificate pinning everywhere, it would be very disruptive for the Corporate MITM vendors.

Edit: They also have irritating "content filters". So, if I'm tasked to research options for a project, like say a VPN, I can't search from their network. It blocks pages talking about VPNS because there's a policy to block "websense proxy avoidance".

If the MITM function of bitdefender isn't advertised, how can anyone consent to it, or knowlegably ensure it's still enforcing connection resets on bad SSL certs?

By default this is ON and users don't have the competence to recognize that this is in fact increasing the surface area for attacks and to disable it. The mere existence of a setting that is ON by default doesn't absolve such AV companies.

But speaking of Bitdefender in particular, I installed it on my wife's computer, disabled that option, confirmed that it survived a restart, then one month later I discovered that it is ON again, probably due to an automatic update. It's also an "admin" setting and my wife's user account does not have admin privileges to turn it on or off.

So even with a setting in place, it's untrustworthy.

>Emergency Windows update revokes dozens of bogus Google, Yahoo SSL certificates

https://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/emergency-windows-u...

They revoked certs like this silently in the past which makes it even worse.

I'm not a Windows user, haven't been a Windows user since 2001, my AV experience has been with the PCs of my family, whom I'm trying to keep safe.

But even if I were a Windows user, if you can't trust Microsoft, you can't trust their OS, at which point it would be better to use something else because security really depends on how trustworthy that OS and its vendor are. I do trust Microsoft more than I trust an AV vendor though.

>As far as I've seen, there was nothing sinister in default Windows root CA list.

Are you in any way related to MS or is your memory just very short?

>Emergency Windows update revokes dozens of bogus Google, Yahoo SSL certificates

https://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/emergency-windows-u...

I'd argue that's a problem in CA trust model, not MS. If you trust a certain CA, of course you trust their issued certificates by design. Currently, if some high tier CA f*cks up, there's no other way to invalidate their issued certificates than propagating CRLs and removing its certificate from the root CA stores manually (or by updates, as in MS case).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9789819

Either way, Bitdefender installs their own root certificate and generates their own for google.com. I've got proof if you want.

From Wikipedia: "TLS and SSL are cryptographic protocols that provide communications security over a computer network". Your host is not "the network" and it's expected to be your trusted asset.

If the AV software can't be trusted, that's another issue not addressed by TLS.

AVs generally run with complete permissions, and can do everything up to and including injecting their own code inside your browser's running process. Providing them with an API doesn't weaken the security, it just reduces the chances they'll screw the browser up.

Well, it had a plugin that got disabled by following Firefox updates.

Depending on the AV vendor, the MITM implementation will "give AV access to your SSL traffic" or "allow everyone to intercept it" (Symantec).

That being said, users would probably be much safer if they skipped the antivirus and just installed a decent ad blocker.

[1]https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/webRequest#event-onB...

I only recently noticed this when Google chrome started marking even gmail.com as insecure on my dad's laptop.

Turned out that the Bitdefender license had expired and somehow this made certificate validation to fail?

>The Chromium browser disables pinning for certificate chains with private root certificates to enable various corporate content inspection scanners and web debugging tools (such as mitmproxy or Fiddler). The RFC 7469 standard recommends disabling pinning violation reports for "user-defined" root certificates, where it is "acceptable" for the browser to disable pin validation.

It doesn't have to be insecure. If the software that does the MITM checks the certificates correctly, I don't see how it would be worse than letting the browser handle it.

Not that I'd ever use an antivirus, of course.

So for example a self-signed cert. does it

a) create a "valid" cert itself, hiding the error from the user? This is obviously dangerous

b) create an "invalid" self-signed cert. This is messy as a user will then see a self-signed cert from the A-V vendor, which they may be more or less inclined to trust

c) Pass the traffic through without inspection, missing any potential threats

And that's just one case. SSL/TLS interception is very hard to get right and easy to make the user's security worse as a result.

I don't think this practice is a big issue because the local machine would have to be compromised for it to be an issue, in which case it's irrelevant because the game is over already. Also the alternative is not scanning ssl traffic for malware which has it's own very real risks.

But remember like I said that's just one example of why it's a bad idea, there's others, e.g. what do you do about EV-SSL certificates? You can't fake the browser element for them (remember this is the case where the A-V product hasn't hooked the browser), so where you want to MITM a EV-SSL connection you have to downgrade it to Non-EV.

Also what do you do with certificate pinning (either browser in-built or HPKP headers?)

Consider the goals that are trying to be achieved. You're attempting to stop the user either downloading malicious content or perhaps getting hit with a browser exploit or possibly you're trying to stop users going to a "bad" site.

The first one can be covered off with traditional on-access scanning of files.

The second one is much better addressed by improvements in browser sandboxing or general app. security.

The third one can be handled at a DNS level with reputation based block lists.

And, rolling back around to the main topic, preventing internal machines from being compromised by viruses, since a lot of people end up having to hit at least one website of some sort that has at least one tracking or advertising widget that could by three layers of indirection get compromised to serve viruses, which is, alas, not some sort of far out scenario nowadays, but just another day of the week on the web. (That is, even perfectly safe browsing habits can still get you owned on the modern web. And saying that a modern network can't count on "firewalls" and must have defense in depth still doesn't mean it's just peachy keen if an internal machine gets compromised.)

If you're going to insist those corporations can't penetrate HTTPS for compliance and security reasons, you're going to have to be willing to lift those restrictions and deal with it when their security fails. There's no two ways about this; either you grant them the necessary tools for compliance and security, or you stop complaining when they can't comply and aren't secure. (And at scale, let's be honest; the latter isn't on the table.)

The advantage is that they should have informed professional security people who can understand the trade-offs and make intelligent decisions about them.

Even then this strategy fails against certificate pinning which is becoming ever more common in mobile and also web space, so corps need other solutions to those problems (likely endpoint based)

However what we're talking about here is end-user A-V products and their use of HTTPS interception at a desktop level and the trade-offs that this forces on individual end users who are less equipped to handle this.

Realistically the A-V product will likely choose to cause "less noise" to the user so won't present them detailed technical information about the errors their masking, potentially making the user's security worse.

also you have installed an application that has a root acces to the pc, if it was mallicius it could do allot more damage. it is ultimately a question of trust.

i created and installed my own root certificate because i dont want clicking on the exception if i open a new incognito window, its especialy anoying for websocket connections.

If you MITM the connection locally it triples the computational cost for both encryption and handshake operations. Then more websites don't use TLS because it's three times as slow for the user.

It also prevents you from using a good cipher suite when the MITM doesn't support it even though the browser and the server both do, again reducing security or performance or both. And it's very easy to screw this up the other way and have the browser show a good secure connection with strong primitives and forward secrecy while the MITM is actually communicating with the server using export ciphers or RC4.

The existence of a trusted root private key on your machine exposes you to KCI of all servers. And key compromise is not even necessary if they use the same root private key for everyone, which has actually happened.

This is not a comprehensive list of the reasons why that is a bad idea.

AV scanners do not have a 100% detection rate. Letting malware be where a trusted program is expected is how you get infected.

> so they can scan the urls, and block some attacks

The purpose of HTTPS is to provide a guarantee that your connection to Google is direct, with no intermediaries, such that (1) only Google knows your search query and (2) you get a guarantee that the received content is from Google.

And you get this guarantee from certificate authorities that have a good reputation and that are in business because they've proven they can keep their shit secure. And when one of them violates that trust, the OS / browser vendors can start to invalidate their certificates. AV companies are bypassing it all.

The blocking of attacks reasoning is kind of bullshit, because Google's Safe Browsing service and browser extensions maintained by a community like uBlock Origin are doing a better job of warning against potentially malicious websites. There are always vulnerabilities to exploit of course, though it's getting harder for those to pop up due to the modern sandboxing of browsers.

However I have yet to see evidence that AV software is doing a better job of catching those, because it's a whack-a-mole game and it's more likely that browser vendors find and fix those vulnerabilities faster than AV companies, because bugs get reported to browser vendors first. And sure, if you have Adobe Reader or Oracle Java installed as plugins in your browser, that's a huge risk, but it's actually easier to uninstall those and browsers have started disallowing plugins. Safari for example is disabling everything by default.

The problem with installing their own root certificate is precisely one of trust. Yes, you allow a piece of software to run with root permissions, for as long as you don't see it do stupid shit, like installing a root certificate, at which point all of that trust should be gone.

And that is because a custom root certificate that doesn't belong to a competent certificate authority cannot be trusted and will increase the attack surface. This is security 101.

This is a popular misconception, but false. SSL creates an encrypted tunnel so that nothing "in the middle" can penetrate the tunnel (in theory), but there is no contradiction in the two sides of the tunnel delegating out their trust. There better not be, because in practice, there are almost always intermediates now on the real web. It is very common for a WAF or a load balancer to be the thing responsible for the SSL rather than the server generating the response, or you have CDNs or DOS prevention like Cloudflare doing the real work, etc. etc. There is no particular problem with the user doing the same thing. Sure, they can be irresponsible with it... well, so can the HTTPS server side, so, well, yeah? If you're going to declare a particular encryption technique unusably flawed because it could be used incorrectly and insecurely, you're not going to be encrypting very many things.

In fact, the very web connection you are reading this on, if I understand it correctly, was not actually encrypted by YCombinator. It uses a cert they own, but they're not the ones terminating the SSL connection; that's been delegated to a trusted third-party.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8383466

And they don't MITM the TLS connection, they terminate it. The difference being that the performance is better rather than worse (so more people use TLS instead of fewer), the server is aware of this happening so it isn't fooled into thinking the connection is using more secure ciphers than it actually is, there is no third party forcing lowest common denominator security between the three, etc.

I dont know where do you live but there is a TON of different javascript injections in the wild with ad networks that are not caught by browser vendors or are caught to late. Google does not do deep scan of the page or files it just has a blocklist of urls. If i host my code on another url or change a file slightly only AV is good in this situation.

And remember they have to get it right only one time.

>I have yet to see evidence that AV software is doing a better job of catching those

I wouldn't be so one-sided. Imagine a fresh new variety of ransomware starts spreading. No one can catch it at 0-day, but good AV can catch it at 1-st day (OK, 1-st week) and neither Google nor uBlock or the likes can't.

Google can of course react equally fast. But "signal delay" may be much higher, as users report only URLs they can immediately link to their troubles, e.g. malware that crash browser.

And second, what Google can do now is to block only one attack vector, namely web page.

Thinking rationally, chances are high that Google is seriously considering to enter the AV business. They are in highly advantageous position to do it successfully, with their user base, resources and AI tech.