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Comment by phonethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

MITM is not mitigated at all by HTTPS. What makes you think that? Do you understand how certificate signing works?

How does certificate signing not mitigate man-in-the-middle? Say you have control of DNS and you can fully impersonate and replace any server. You present a valid certificate for the server. It has the public key, which the client uses to try to encrypt traffic. The man-in-the-middle doesn't have the private certificate. You convince the client its talking to the right machine, but then you can't understand anything the client has to say, because it uses the legitimate public key.

Say you have control of the infrastructure and you forge a certificate. You'll have a hard time getting the client to trust the certificate unless you have compromised the signing key of a certificate authority and generated an apparently valid cert.

So, can it entirely prevent it? Can I get verisign to issue me a certificate for G00GLE INC.? If you can alter the client's list of trusted authorities, you can make yourself an authority, but you've already compromised the client. If you can get the server's private certificate, you've compromised the server. You can get creative, sure...probably, you stand a better chance of beating the people in the chain than the technology...but the difficulty of doing so seems to amount to 'mitigation' at the least.

Parent isn't wrong... technically.

Certificate Transparency exists, solely because any CA can issue an SSL cert for any domain, and use it to MITM via a proxy.

You are trusting every CA out there, not just Verisign. That is the ultimate weakness. Any CA can issue a cert for any domain.

Expect-CT header is the only thing protecting you from a MITM, and it's not even a protection, really, and it's trivial to strip that header as the MITM before proxying to the client.

How do you think mitmproxy[0] works?

[0] https://mitmproxy.org/

...do you? Unless the attacker has access to the private key associated with the SSL certificate, they can't read any HTTPS traffic encrypted via that certificate - mitigating the ability of that bad actor to perform a MITM attack.

The above poster is still technically correct though, getting the cert is just 1 more obstacle in the way of the attack, which isn't as much of an obstacle as one would think for some actors(see China).

Certificate transparency would make it blatantly obvious if Chinese CAs were issuing bogus certificates. (And if they issued certs without submitting them to CT logs they wouldn't be accepted by Chrome or Safari, so it wouldn't be very useful.)

Sure, they could do it, but it wouldn't be long until there were no Chinese CAs trusted by any browser.

An attack like this could still be done for CLI clients/library clients such as curl (ie. server-to-server connections), none of which I'm aware of incorporate CT log verification.

But the server can’t do header checks for CLI tools prior to certificate negotiations, so it would be difficult to get away with. Not impossible, but it’d limit your Targets to IPs who are exclusively non CR clients. Any slip up and you’d be busted.

You can add CT checks to such software with e.g. ctutlz (a Python library towards this end) but you need to be on the sort of treadmill that browsers are on, with regular updates and disabling security features like CT checking in browsers that don't get updated in a timely fashion.

All the non-Google modern CT logs moved to rolling annual logs. Cloudflare's Nimbus for example, is actually logs named Nimbus2019, Nimbus2020, Nimbus2021 and so on. Nimbus2019 is for certificates that expire in 2019. Most of them are already expired 'cos it's November already, it doesn't see a lot of updates, in January Cloudflare can freeze that and eventually they can decomission it, browsers will stop trusting it, but it won't matter because those certs already expired. If you go get yourself a new Let's Encrypt cert now, it'll probably be logged with Nimbus2020, come January 2021 you won't care if Cloudflare freezes it and starts shutting it down.

As a result you need frequent (say, monthly seems fine) updates to stay on top of new logs being spun up and old ones shutting down, or else you'll get false positives.

For CLI or server software that has a regular update cadence anyway I can see this as a realistic choice, for a lot of other software it'll be tough to do this without more infrastructure support.

And even if they get a key, they will show up in the CT Logs eventually and the attack becomes public.

The effectiveness of CT logs isn't a thing unless the website uses CT monitoring or is a huge company. A [delegated or non-delegated] DNS takeover, or IP address release (eg. cloud providers re-assigning an IP to another customer) could allow you to generate a certificate for some-forgotten-subdomain.medium-sized.company.com using the ACME http challenge. Of course this is mitigated by properly managing your DNS, and CT monitoring is encouraged everywhere.

In other words, the effectiveness of the CT logs is a thing. There are multiple services which will do this for you for free (Cloudflare and Facebook at least make it trivial to get notifications for your domains) and it’s a level of visibility which almost nobody had just a few years ago.

Cert pinning mitigates this too right?

IF you pin services to a key you control this mitigates the problem with bad guys obtaining bogus certs, BUT now you need to manage the pinning application to ensure it knows about any new keys before they roll into use. This may force you to compromise on your rotation schedule, maybe you'd prefer to use new keys for the new cert you're buying this week but alas the new app version is still waiting for Apple sign-off, so it'll have to be next year instead.

IF you pin to an intermediate key, which is under the control of a CA, then bad guys who obtain certs from that intermediate will not be inconvenienced by your pin, but these keys are intentionally long-lived (they are protected in an HSM) so the rotation issue isn't as fraught.

crt.sh offers a RSS Feed, I use that to track all certificates issued for my domain. Doesn't really need anything expensive or complicated.

CT Logs don't mitigate any of the attacks but they make them very very very visible if they happen. Especially if a CA goes rogue, this will be immediately visible and provable.

Only if there's an Expect-CT header, which is trivial to strip.

Well, no, the CT Log will include any valid certificate presented so any widespread attack will have to outright block access to the CT Logs or you're gong to have a bad time.

Expect-CT only controls if the browser will warn the user if the cert is not in the logs, it does nothing about certs being entered into the CT Logs themselves.

Yeah, I think they do, actually.

Two things...

Proxies are a thing, and stripping the Expect-CT header is trivial.

Any CA can generate a valid SSL cert for any domain.

Literally the only reason TLS uses certificates is to mitigate Man-in-the-Middle attacks.

Establishing a shared secret with another party over a public channel is not that hard (Diffie-helman, RSA). The hard part is to ensure the other party is who they say they are. Certificates tackle this by having a trusted party (CA) cryptographically bind the shared secret to an identity.

There are issues here, but if you can read and modify the traffic between my PC and the HN servers, you still won't be able to read and modify the traffic.

Technical corrections:

The binding is over a _public key_ not a _shared secret_.

Also that last sentence is confusing and I'm not sure how best to fix it. Maybe the last word should be 'meaning' not 'traffic' or maybe the word HTTP should be inserted?

If https doe not mitigate MITM attacks, what is the purpose of it?

The purpose is that, and that at which it fails. Why do you think CT logs exists? Exactly for this reason...

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