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Comment by jimdeterman | Hacker News Reader

The appliance itself doesn't seem that important. The big thing I take from the article is law enforcement needs to: "persuade one of the Certificate Authorities — using money, blackmail or legal process — to issue a fake certificate for the targeted website." If you can get a forged certificate from a trusted cert provider, then there is a bunch of ways to do this. The box is just a convenience.

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Yes - I thought this was a cryptographic breakthrough, but it's just people breaking promises.

That, and it demonstrates how bad the default SSL trust model is. If the gmail.com certificate came from Thawte yesterday and comes from the Department of Defense or CNNIC today, your browser will happily accept it without warning.

If a CA is compelled to issue a false certificate by court order, this destroys their credibility completely. If I ran a CA, I'd rather face the consequences, and let the court ask another listed CA, rather than destroy my entire business model.

Watch what happens when we find out which CA's did this. My money is on "they do not go out of business". Give it a few months.

Especially with Americans new found willingness to accept overreaching law enforcement measures. So long as one of the right trigger words (terrorism, children) is used, the average purchaser of certificates won't blink at the idea that law enforcement completely subverted the chain of trust that enables their customers to believe they are dealing with who it says on the certificate.

Court order?

Your argument might make sense if it was law enforcement making the request. But do you really think companies should ignore court orders?

Can a court order you to commit a fraud?

Yes. Courts can also order you to destroy property, breach (most types of) confidences, alienate people from money in their accounts, etc etc, and lie about doing all of the above.

Source?

There's a difference between fighting court orders and ignoring court orders.

CAs must be audited and have a certification to be accepted in the major browsers (something like WebTrust). If anyone did this, they would lose that certification immediately and then they'd be out of business because their root CA would be revoked from Windows/Firefox/Mac OS.

The question is how WebTrust would treat this type of theoretical issue.

Looks like all it does is replace a SSL MITM proxy.

The real bad guys can just use symmetric encryption, with keys distributed by mail or by hashing parts of certain books. It's the typical end-user going to their banking site or reading their email that's most vulnerable to such devices. China might be a top customer.

Public-key encryption (such as PGP) would work as well.

Or rather Off-the-record messaging: You do not want deniability, and not leave provable traces.

If the real bad guys are smart, they're just going to use SSL, with a single static private CA.

What will end up happening to the 'real bad guys' http://xkcd.com/538/

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