Kazakhstan's low-tech approach is just that, low-tech and low-effort. They could have used tons of vectors besides simply saying "install this cert."
A tiny shred of effort would have been to package an "updater" that did the install without explicitly saying that's what it was for. Or better yet: Kazakhstan is committed to a greener more ecologically friendly future! All tax documentation will go paperless! Just use the provided USB Key to access your documents in electronic format!
A small morsel of effort would be to force it on OS vendors through regulation/licensing/threats/money for localized copies. A good deal of effort would hijack CRLs, pinnings, et al while demanding/sneaking the private keys of the CAs.
Public Key Infrastructure is fucking pointless when the infrastructure is precisely what you can't trust.
Being imperfect is different than being pointless. Even if you developed the perfect algorithm for global security infrastructure, the Kazakhstan government could still just break down your door and implant the backdoor into your hardware if they wanted. So by your logic should we just forget about this encryption stuff and just do everything in plain text again?
In particular, we'd see a lot more places than Kazakhstan do this if good countermeasures weren't in place...
They could, of course, avoid spying on uncompromised machines to avoid detection, but then anyone practicing good security hygiene would be automatically left unaffected by the government spy program. Plus there'd still be the possibility of detecting malware through other means (malware on client machines is far easier to detect than MITM of unencrypted communications). Not to mention how much more difficult all this would be than simply MITMing unencrypted traffic.
The situation with HTTPS is significantly improved.
This seems a cynical and lazy evaluation of the situation. No solution is perfect, trade offs must be made everywhere. With the right precautions the average person can have his/her communications encrypted. This is a much better situation than the one we were on before.
Chrome, etc., require that certificates which descend from publicly trusted roots have their certificates published in certificate transparency logs. Someone would quickly notice bogus certs being issued and the associated root would get blacklisted.
Especially in the post-finally-ending Symantec world the CAs understand that issuing any such cert is likely to very quickly end their business in most other countries.
I feel the real problem kz is going to have is that they have now demonstrated that they will abuse having a root cert, so there is no way any root stores will let them in in future. I imagine they’d even have difficulty getting any of the other roots to issue certs for them (managed sub-ca I think? I forget terminology)
But all a government has to do is embed within the endpoint, post-decryption. "Or else."
That’s a pretty high bar to clear though.
They did it to everyone whose traffic transited ATT's backbone
But let my re-phrase my question like this: Do we have any evidence that NSA can perform MITM on TLS 1.3? Using a federal US CA would be one way, tricking a CA to issue fraudulent leaf certificates would be another, but as established elsewhere in this thread, both those ways are quite noisy. Attacking the endpoint is another way, but once Mallory does that, all bets are off.
The real issue is how abstract the consequences of loss of privacy are. It requires people to actually think beyond "I've got nothing to hide".
No worries though. Greedy corporations and governments are greedy and they'll keep pushing the limits of societie's tolerance until it blows up in their face.
It's both, everyone can contribute to the solution or the problem.