Kazakhstan's National HTTPS Certificate Is Cancelled
tsarka.org
tsarka.org
Have you heard of Tsarka before? They don't have any press releases from when it started? As others have echoed - could this just be a state sponsored actor?
"I can't help but think if the government were wanting to spread positive propoganda about these tests, your post is exactly what they would write: "everyone wins and everyone is happy with our results of MTIMing the entire country".
Who knows how much information the state hoovered up during this "pilot".
My view of what happened is some clowns at the top wanted a proper, full interception of traffic. Besides the attention in international media it received, people had real issues accessing the internet properly (those who installed). So they simply could not execute their MITM properly. Putting aside privacy, etc. I expected simple operational ineptitude, which is what happened (gladly) and they dropped saying "it was a mere test".
PS, in 2011 the government tried something similar with Google's traffic and after Google started redirecting the KZ traffic they backed, saying some similar B.S. like "it was a test".
So, it was a pilot and it succeeded. Now what?
There's probably many more who don't get caught because their attacks are more targeted.
The whole Public Key Infrastructure is fully insecure because of this property that any root CA can emit a internet-wide valid certificate for any domain.
That's why people work on DANE for DNS and Tor onion services (among others) to reduce the attack surface to the name resolution level, which in the case of onion services equals breaking an ed25519 keypair because the onion domain name is tied to the key.
We need to ditch PKI as soon as possible!
Things like Let’s Encrypt allow anyone that can intercept 100% of the traffic to your site to get a signed cert for your domain with no further validation. Unless your site is directly peered to multiple backbones, you are trusting at least one service provider not to man in the middle your traffic.
Cert pinning sort of protects against this, but it is widely considered impractical.
The certificate transparency efforts also sort of protect against this, though I think there are still CA’s that don’t participate. As long as browsers accept certs from those CA’s, certificate transparency doesn’t solve the problem either. (Also, what percentage of sites actually monitor to see if there are malicious certificates for their domains?)
Any CA will do that. Paying a hundred bucks for a certificate will has never stopped a malicious actor, therefore Let's Encrypt does not introduce any new concern.
> Cert pinning sort of protects against this
DANE was designed for this. Since DNS is always a SPOF on the web, registering TLS public keys in DNS reduces the attack surface (instead of introducing a new channel for transport security).
> The certificate transparency efforts also sort of protect against this
That's bullshit. Nothing prevents a CA to emit certificates without declaring them. We should not rely on those big corporations for our security: our interests are FAR from aligned.