News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection. Parent comment

Re:China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection by unethical_ban on Monday November 05, 2018 @09:55PM (#18387958)
This should absolutely be exposed in browser UIs, esp Firefox which uses its own store. Why can I not easily select/deselect all, sort by country of origin, issuer, plain text search filters, and so on? The ability to click-through, or even to simply display the "insecure" badge, would still be there.

Or, as you said, being able to subscribe to other recommendations would be cool.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection by dsl on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @03:05AM (#18389207)
Because it is never the "China Government" CA that is the problem, it is a medium to large Western-based CA getting hacked.

China, Iran, etc. don't want direct attribution.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection by killjoywashere on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @03:21AM (#18389261)
And by "Western", keep in mind Italy and many other "2nd world" countries (to use some dated terminology).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection by Lio on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @06:26AM (#18390032)
2nd World? Doesn't that usually refer to former members of the old Eastern Block?[1]

To my knowledge, Italy has never been part of the Eastern Block.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection by arm85 on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @07:48AM (#18390478)
Huh, I never thought about Switzerland being a third world country.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection by RugnirViking on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @04:24PM (#18395038)
Or indeed somalia being a 2nd world country
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection by brobdingnagians on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @06:00AM (#18389927)
Could this be done as a browser extension? I'm not too familiar with the browser extension API from mozilla, but can you check certificates of sites?

EDIT: Looks like you can - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2402121/within-a-web-bro...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection by brobdingnagians on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @06:07AM (#18389956)
You could create an extension which checked certificates of visited sites, which includes information like country of origin, CA, etc. then have an interface for warning about certain parameters and configuring what to trust, warning about anything that doesn't meet your criteria.

The other part would be creating a way/file-format for experts to provide information about which CAs they trust and which are suspicious, then let the extension consume those.

It's not as good as built-in browser support, but it's a heck of a lot faster and more do-able.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection by mtgx on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @05:42AM (#18389835)
Meanwhile, Google's Chrome is going in the opposite direction, trying to show the user less and less such info to "improve UX".
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection by gcb0 on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @09:47AM (#18391410)
they would want their captive users to get smart and disable tracking features that are essential to their business, such as globally enabled referrer, etc.

just like microsft didn't want windows users to be able set a different default browser...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:China Telecom's Internet Traffic Misdirection by resters on Monday November 05, 2018 @10:23PM (#18388069)
Exactly. And if you subscribe to the recommendations of more than one expert, a useful option would be to decline to trust any CAs that are mistrusted by any of the chosen experts.
[ Parent | on HN ]