Re:The UK Is Trying to Stop Facebook's End-to-End Encryption
by LinuxBender on Monday April 05, 2021 @09:52AM
(#26698956)
I think they meant unrestricted signing certificate. A few CA's have been caught providing this to external entities and have been pulled from trust stores. The cynical side of me assumes the behavior just moves to another shell company. For those curious how to mitigate or at least identify when this is occurring, you could trust transparency reports, or if you don't trust those, then log certificate fingerprints of the sites you visit.
It's probably also worth logging the creation/expiration dates too, given that certs expire so much quicker these days. If you wanted to make this information even more useful, have people all around the world run this and feed it into a distributed database and log the ISP the test was run from so that you can see if a particular ISP has been compromised. That is how some folks I know in Africa found out their ISP was using BlueCoat proxies and that the certs were being installed as part of their ISP's required package downloads.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:The UK Is Trying to Stop Facebook's End-to-End Encryption
by tialaramex on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @08:48AM
(#26711116)
This seems like an over-complicated non-solution. If your browser is trusting some other root, you can see that information in the browser. For example if I click the padlock for this site, and pick More Information / View Certificate, sure enough this is a certificate issued from DigiCert.
But also, it's basically game over if you agree to run arbitrary software other people pick, so that's where the real problem is for the African case you describe.