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Comment by vips7L | Hacker News Reader

You can MITM https.

Only if you have a cert that the browser trusts for that domain. If a CA was found to be illicitly minting certs, browsers and operating systems would untrust them. All their certs would stop working. Their business would be ruined.

That's interesting. Can someone elaborate on this? My understanding is once the session is established, that's it. just encrypted traffic. How to inject something into ecrypted traffic?

DPI units can unwrap and re-wrap SSL

Comcast's RFC (6108) states that it designed the system described therein specifically to not need to use DPI.

Not saying Comcast definitely doesn't use it; rather, that it'd be hilarious to see Comcast lie to everyone's faces yet again.

Of course, to distinguish HTTP traffic from non-HTTP traffic and to intelligently insert the code snippet only where it won't disrupt e.g. API call response or a file download, some basic level of DPI is required.

You don't re-wrap. You just downgrade to HTTP.

This is why TLS1.3 and HSTS exists.

Do you have a link to anything on this? I'm still not clear on how to MITM a TLS transmission sans CA cert.

The attacker needs to generate a new cert that the client trusts. This is easy on a corporate network where you can force users to trust a private CA. Unlikely to happen with a US ISP, but possible if someone hacks the CA (eg DigiNotar) or the CA hands out unconstrained certificates to someone who acts badly (eg CNNIC).

Speaking of which, is there a published list of Root CA fingerprints a specific version of OS or browser is supposed to have that I can compare to? In other words, how can one tell if their browser/OS is not compromised with undesirable Root CAs.

Mozilla and Microsoft publish their lists. Chrome uses the OS's root store. I've seen other open source software use Mozilla's list, but I've never seen a list of what software does that.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Included_Certificates https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security/trusted-root/parti...

What you are describing doesn't seem to be a MITM attack on https traffic, but something else, which is why I stated "sans CA cert".

They're describing what would be required to MITM HTTPS traffic. You're correct that they essentially need to get the cert.

Without a root CA? And without showing up in certificate transparency logs?

Good luck :)

No.

Technically, yes, but the only way I know possible is having direct access to the target device to force it to trust fake certs, and is usually used to unwrap encrypted traffic being sent from applications on your own devices. I don't know of a way for the ISP to do this, unless they conspire with a certificate authority. I'd like think this isn't happening.

Have your customers install internet "accelerator" software.

Fortunately, iOS devices won’t allow this.

Only if the victim trusts the attacker's certs, right?

That said, Comcast is big enough that it might be in cahoots with at least one less-than-scrupulous CA (or might even be a CA; I don't follow these sorts of things closely enough).

Mozilla would kick Comcast out of the root CA list pretty fast.

Finally, there is certificate transparency logs, you can set CT headers on your site to require the certificate to be in CT logs. Then you can monitor if anyone's creates certificates for your domain. And updated clients can validate that certificates is in the CT logs.

HTTPS is pretty robust these days. There's still a few corner cases around SNI, but that only leaks what host your visiting, wouldn't allow injection -- and specs are slowly closing those holes too.

Is there a published list of Root CA fingerprints a specific version of OS or browser is supposed to have that I can compare to? In other words, how can one tell if their browser/OS is not compromised with undesirable Root CAs.

Mozilla maintains a list of root CAs that are distributed with Firefox, and used by most other vendors too.

But really, if you don't trust what installed on your machine it's game over.

> That said, Comcast is big enough that it might be in cahoots with at least one less-than-scrupulous CA (or might even be a CA; I don't follow these sorts of things closely enough).

The moment that was discovered, the CA would stop being a trusted CA.

Only if it was a barely used CA. If killing it would break lots of sites, it would take years to kill if ever.

There's a lot more appetite these days for enforcing requirements on CAs, ever since CT started going down the road towards mandatory, and ever since misbehaving CAs started getting forced to implement it immediately. Intentionally MITMing TLS on the broader Internet the way this thread is talking about would be a fairly quick death sentence.

Also, given the existence of Let's Encrypt, there's much less reason to be using a paid CA, and planned migration to a new CA provider isn't too much to ask. There'd likely be some work within browsers to provide clear error messages, and sites would need some amount of time to migrate, but I think we're talking days-to-weeks before there's a warning banner on the sites and months at most before the CA is dead.

How? Excluding cases where the attacker already has some sort of secret

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