MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan

Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan by LoSboccacc on Thursday July 18, 2019 @02:36PM (#20472726)

to be fair some of us told from the beginning that making all user used to trust the green check would have caused this sort of trust fatigue to the point the majority would have stopped bothering with the actual certificate content and trust chain, and you can search my history highlighting this very issue in relation to let's encrypt, it was a social issue from the very beginning and I got downvoted heavily and repeatedly because apparently "techies" can't be bothered with exceptions and failure modes once a catch all solution is found

but the warning signs were all there i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17298747#17304077

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Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan by minitech on Thursday July 18, 2019 @02:51PM (#20472862)

We don’t want users to trust the green check, because it never meant you could trust a site. We do want users to distrust plaintext, because it means the café you’re visiting can steal your password. I don’t see how this is a good criticism of the push for HTTPS everywhere (which appears to be the context here).

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Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan by LoSboccacc on Thursday July 18, 2019 @03:02PM (#20472944)

because cafe can just ask people 'install this extension to navigate' and non-tech users being users will fall for it most of the time, because state actor can do even worse, and once we trained the users that non green check is dangerous they won't have the knowledge to distinguish between "insecure with no check" and "maybe secure with check but I've to control every time the details", people will shortcut that part, until some researcher finds our for them and even then it's not guaranteed that the message will reach everyone

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Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan by XMPPwocky on Thursday July 18, 2019 @03:07PM (#20472983)

Exactly - this is why we don't want to train people that non-TLS traffic is insecure, but rather keep them from encountering it, ever, ideally. TLS must be the default- a baseline- and deviating from that baseline must be at least as hard as getting a user to install a malicious extension.

Ever SSHed into a server and been told by your SSH client that, oh, by the way, the server is using the NULL cipher with no authentication, and network attackers can mess with your session arbitrarily? Probably not. That's what using plaintext HTTP should feel like.

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Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan by bscphil on Thursday July 18, 2019 @07:55PM (#20475116)

I think you're missing one important detail: the idea behind the green padlock is that the average end user isn't technically capable of (or shouldn't have to) monitor all the details of their internet connections to make sure they're secure.

If that basic intuition about users is correct, the solution is not to give up on this and force users to deal with the true complexity of the situation. The solution is for the browser to show a red blinking INSECURE instead of the green padlock when the cert it receives for a site doesn't have a valid chain to a root in the default key store shipped with the browser.

To be honest, I can't figure out why this isn't already the default behavior. It would solve a bunch of other problems as a side effect, including insecure crappy antivirus programs that MITM your internet connection.

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Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan by LoSboccacc on Friday July 19, 2019 @01:16AM (#20476348)

if they can force a cert into your os trust store they can force a cert into your browser trust store, this solves some very specific issue but not this one.

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Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan by bscphil on Friday July 19, 2019 @08:09AM (#20477920)

That's why I said "store shipped with the browser". I don't think Kazakhstan has the ability to get Firefox to ship their root cert.

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Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan by LoSboccacc on Friday July 19, 2019 @08:16AM (#20477943)

this is kinda rich under an article where they forced a cert into the is trust store. it takes the same amount of effort to get the cert into browser specific stores because these need to be editable and an installer get control of the system anyway

"it rather involves being already at the other end of this airtight d doorway"

the current page ask the user to run an installer, elevating privilege. there's nothing a browser can really do against that. DLL can be replaced and signatures can be tempered etc.

just because you said "ship them with the browse" doesn't make you magically right nor safe under the linked threat

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Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan by bscphil on Friday July 19, 2019 @09:17AM (#20478358)

Alerting the user when a MITM certificate is active in the trust store is relying on a completely different threat model than "protect the entire operating system against state-mandated malware". I'm saying browsers should at least do the former. You seem to think that's pointless unless they also do the latter, but of course they can't do that. Some security of the trust store is better than no security.

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