The anti AI scraping on this site doesn't work that well. I'm being served non-sense text about buttplugs. I'm human, I swear.

That was proof of soul check and you passed

that's actually the exploit, it was very physical

We're living in a South Park episode.

That's what comes after the verification can.

anti-AI scraping is often anti-privacy in practice, as any effective implementation requires invasive browser inspection to detect scrapers.

The web is for bots now. Humans are the minority and will get pushed out, or leave in the face of various pending identity verification schemes to get past the bot filters.

The web was always intended for both humans and machines.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

Identity verification will gate the web due to various political and legal pressures. Anonymity will only be found outside it.

"Web 3.0" and "always" doesn't seem to align by any stretch.

The idea wasn't really named/documented until ~1997 (I think), but the seed of it was in Tim's original WWW proposal from 1989.

"The second part of the dream was that, [...] The computer renters the scene visibly as a software agent, doing anything it can to help us deal with the bulk of data..." - https://repository.cern/records/6kxvc-v6203/preview/dd-89-00... - https://www.w3.org/1998/02/Potential.html

Never thought I'd miss the days when block(chain)heads thought they had the rights to the term Web 3.0.

I got the same, on a residential internet service. No idea what the trigger is, worked on my phone though.

So basically anyone who used this CA is screwed if someone knows your email?

Only if they're lazy and went with the "download key and certificate (and we'll generate the keys for you)" option. Otherwise at least how it's supposed to work is that you give a CA a certificate signing request (CSR) containing your public key, they sign it and hand back your certificate. The certificate itself doesn't contain anything sensitive, because it's the same thing that your server presents to clients. But people are lazy and might not know how to generate a csr locally, hence the aforementioned option. And of course if they're too lazy to generate a csr locally, they're probably also too lazy to keep backups, so you can be sure that eMudhra keeps a copy in case they deleted it from their downloads folder.

With this exploit, what's stopping me from sending my own CSR for your domain?

The number the tool found was 1861. The e-mailed OTP code was 1858. What am I missing?

I noticed that as well. Figured it was a concurrency issue, and they have a follow-up message that you can see if you click on the OP of the Mastodon thread that confirmed my guess: https://mastodon.catgirl.cloud/@49016/117476097901925573

>(yes the code is off by a few. its bc the poc is shit and to speed it up it uses 8 connections at the same time. it just stops the counter once it has a hit so its off by ~4 lmfao. you could easily fix this but cba today)

Don't piss off the internet, there will be consequences. I guess.

Could someone explain this? Does this mean that it enables logging in as any account in emudhras infra?

Yes, it’s a complete auth bypass. All you need is the email address of a user and they’ll likely sign CSRs for any domains under that account.

It’s the end for them, I imagine.

Security represents less than 1% of their business.

Aye, but it'll now represent much, much more than 1% of their corporate reputation.

Purported security, you mean.

Actual security, add some zeros ;)

Hahahahha what a roast. Too funny, especially the "4 Bars" in the background of the demo.

This site serves me garbage. Iocaine, I think? I use Brave.

"If you are not [a bot], and you feel you have been served garbage by mistake, please contact the owner of the site you're visiting."

If anyone knows another way to access the content, I'd be interested. No contact details are offered and visiting mastodon.catgirl.cloud resets my connection.

You can use https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon to read Mastodon posts in your terminal:

  $ zygolophodon --with-ancestors https://mastodon.catgirl.cloud/@49016/117475976434068995

Doesn't that also fetch the content directly? So depending on the logic of the filter it likely won't make any difference.

It uses the API, which hopefully is protected from bots less fiercely.

Ah yes, adopting the standard cloudflare approach. "Contact the site administrator to resolve this" but no contact details are provided.

Please can this not be true..

Coward.

You should be able to open the url in any other mastodon instance where you are signed in

did not know it was a mastodon thing

weak aura

so use your phone?

There was an post about something like this a while back on lobste.rs, where some people were upset about the image that Anubis shows while it is validating your machine.

People are so uptight, it's embarassing

I mean, they do accept money to give you a version without that.

"S" in "eMudhra stands for "Secure".

Oh man, good that they are leaving the CA business.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50195110

That has no effect, since the'd get no such business from now.

What's sad it they won't be taking their certs with them. Let's hope the powers up the chain conduct some deep self-refection on their part in thus fiasco.

> Let's hope the powers up the chain conduct some deep self-refection on their part in thus fiasco.

that almost never happens.

stop hoping corporations grow a soul and a conscience.

Who said anything about soul or conscience? Getting hacked doesn't deliver value for shareholders

> stop hoping corporations grow a soul and a conscience.

stop anthropomorphizing social constructs (corporations). corporations are run by humans. it is the humans running them that lack conscience and a soul.

In America, Corporations are people, too (for serious, see Citizens United SCOTUS ruling).

But corporately-suited Homo sapiens* should definitely be held criminally liable for much of their intentional shenanigans...

I always found it so interesting that corporations are essentially the outcome of we pay some people some money for them to work for the best interests of this entity that is not theirs. A lot arises from that.

I understand it in the following way:

They put the public key into js and encrypt the body of the request. This is common practice to protect users' important data from being accessed by a proxy (in this case, Cloudflare) and is ok.

But the real bug is that they don't rate-limit, invalidate, or protect the endpoint related to OTP checks, so it can be brute-forced, as the search space is limited.

so not sure why the author shows us the public key

Damn, these Mastodon accounts are a rabbit hole to get lost in

Cut the undersea cables already

I gave up cell phone service a few years ago (mid-sized USA city).

This seems less-and-less extreme, daily. Free yourselves from your leashes!

----

Next time you're standing in line, strike up conversation (about anything) with your ugliest linemate (it doesn't even matter about what, just offline communication)...

Maybe ya'll both like ZFS or "heard about that PHP thing!?" (I used both conversation starters, today – it worked – I can be the ugliest, too).

Please don't, not everyone appreciates small talk.

Please express this succinctly when talkers like me "get going" – I appreciate that not everybody wants these brief connections (you won't hurt my feelings with a simple "hey I'm not really much for talking").

If you prefer wordless silence, pulling out a phone (or book/magazine) works well when talkers "don't take the hint;" or face away (for particularly invasive conversation starters).

My hope is that small talk leads to shared connections, perhaps even (a brief intertwining of) humanity.

So everyone else should suffer because you don't want to politely decline?

Suffer? Where's that rugged individualism when you need it.

"Rugged individualism" is why America has slowly destroyed itself – divided, conquered.

As with all things, the past few decades were slowly, while the past few years have went quick.

What do you like talking about? What brings you into the HN comments?

I guess certs isn't the only thing they'll be exiting.

eMudhra may be exiting the global SSL/TLS certificate business, but that won't fix its security culture. It's not even 2FA, it's 1FA.

If anyone can guess or brute force the factor, it's approaching 0FA.

It's like fractals, not all dimensions are integers. If your one factor is extremely weak, then it's really only 0.x of a factor.

Does anyone understand what's going on here? They expect some kind of request to be signed with a certain key, but what is that request and what does it get you?

I guess they just bruteforce OTP by sending all combinations of four digits to the server and eventually one works.

Is this site blocking users coming from HN or something ? I'm getting a garbage page starting with "Face, those cold eyes, and the pale people; I like them if we have."

I'm getting blocked or rather served nonsense because the site thinks I'm an AI scraper :/

I guess this is normal now

It worked for me just now, and I'm on mobile internet which gets blocked more often than landline connections.

Blocked link, thanks AI!

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50194176 that didn't go anywhere for some reason