Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
by giancarlostoro on Thursday July 18, 2019 @03:08PM
(#20472986)
It is a valid point, it becomes much more obvious that you're snooping if you're trying to MITM. If you weren't snooping, you wouldn't bother trying.
”all a government has to do is embed within the endpoint”
That’s a pretty high bar to clear though.
Not really. NSA requests are backed by LE either directly or... extortion style. https://www.wired.com/2007/10/nsa-asked-for-p/
Allright. But they didn’t do it for all ~300M citizens though, did they?
Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
by williamscales on Friday July 19, 2019 @12:54PM
(#20480343)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
They did it to everyone whose traffic transited ATT's backbone
I haven’t immersed myself into the details of the Room 641A scandal, but it does indeed sound awful. I do not approve of the operations of NSA/Five Eyes.
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.
Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
by williamscales on Thursday July 18, 2019 @05:37PM
(#20474160)
Given it's already happened in the US, I don't think it's high enough.
This is exactly what Carnivore and PRISM were
And how would Carnivore/PRISM strip off the TLS encryption?
Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
by StreamBright on Thursday July 18, 2019 @03:24PM
(#20473117)
Not only that but they can happily MITM HTTPS as well. Not all the HTTPS sites use certificate pinning or HSTS.
It's a tough problem because certificate pinning kills a lot of legitimate use patterns; it's not something I'd like to see being the default everywhere.
Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
by StreamBright on Friday July 19, 2019 @02:49AM
(#20476652)
Yes but this is how many companies protect their HTTPS traffic (including one financial institution I work for).
What root cert would they us for that?
The government of my country has at least one certificate that's trusted by Mozilla (and I guess Chrome and Windows too) by default.
It won't stay trusted if it is actively used for MITM attacks. At least that's the idea.
Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
by StreamBright on Friday July 19, 2019 @02:55AM
(#20476684)
Re:MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
by StreamBright on Friday July 19, 2019 @02:53AM
(#20476672)
You mean CA? There are many options depending on which agency and which target you are talking about. They have few options from stealing a CA from a legitimate CA user if the want anonymity or use one that is built in to your browsers or systems somebody else already pointed out in the thread.
But all a government has to do is embed within the endpoint, post-decryption. "Or else."