Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I believe them. If you're going to use a malicious certificate to spoof traffic, you'd be pretty dumb to start by targeting Google, since all their properties are pinned in Chrome. You'll just get caught.

Also, using X.509 CA=YES certificates to mint new certificates on the fly is a standard and legitimate feature of corporate network hardware. In virtually every large enterprise network, employees don't have direct access to the Internet; they bounce through proxy servers. The middleboxes that make this work all have "upload a root CA cert here" features to make this work.

That they accidentally issued a malicious certificate, I think, makes things a little worse from my vantage point. There are a million ways to get hacked, but not as many excuses for just being sloppy.

View on HN

I'm fairly confused by your stance here. I was expecting you to tell us that a) security with backdoors is worthless (intermediate CAs, for use in packet inspection devices, not merely proxies) and b) security without control (and repercussions) for those that guarantee the security.

It's not exactly a "standard and legitimate feature" either; there were lengthy discussions this very year [1].

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=724929

The distinction is presumably about whether clients have to be modified to accept a particular (organizational) root or whether someone gets access to a root CA that will work with unmodified mainstream browsers.

The "standard" way of doing enterprise network surveillance and censorship is by getting end-users to use client software with a modified configuration that (unlike the general public's browsers) accepts the surveillance and censorship without generating a browser warning. In the Trustwave case, it was done with unmodified software and hence could have been done against the general public, or unsuspecting corporate users.

There have been interesting policy discussions about the fact that HTTPS site operators may not "consent" to this surveillance, even if some end users are considered to have done so. For example, PayPal might not want corporate network operators to have access to employees' PayPal credentials or financial transaction data. Hence PayPal's preferences might be something like

employee doesn't use PayPal at work > employee uses PayPal at work without interception by employer > employee uses PayPal at work with interception by employer

while the employee's preferences might be

employee uses PayPal at work without interception by employer > employee uses PayPal at work with interception by employer > employee doesn't use PayPal at work

and the employer's preferences might be

employee doesn't use PayPal at work > employee uses PayPal at work with interception by employer > employee uses PayPal at work without interception by employer

You're confusing two issues. Enterprises can MITM traffic without being issued an intermediate CA=YES certificate; they just add their own root certificate to all their desktops.

So, presumably they put their badly-issued "real" public cert on the checkpoint (instead of making their own captive CA and root key/cert for that), and it would have just complained/not worked, normally, but since it was mistakenly issued as CA=YES, it worked, and no one cared. Then Google discovered it because of some Chrome users behind the checkpoint.

I guess incompetence is a decent explanation here, and probably the most likely, but also provides a very convenient explanation if you wanted to hide something more sinister.

"Then Google discovered it because of some Chrome users behind the checkpoint."

And cue the banning of Chrome on government networks in 3. 2. 1...

I hope they wouldn't. It's like a canary in the coal mines. It's an easy way to be alerted to serious problems in your organisation....

Enterprises MITMing traffic is wrong, regardless of any of this; It's pretty much the reason why Google has introduced Cert Pinning, as the 'security' aspect of those boxes is utter and complete bullshit.

I can think of legitimate reasons for enterprises to MITM traffic. For example, protecting users against malware as a result of drive-by downloads or spear phishing campaigns. Data loss prevention is another good reason -- I would want an enterprise that I'm trusting with my credit card data to alert on payment instruments leaving their network to gmail accounts, for instance.

Data loss prevention is another good reason

In some regions, companies are legally required to ensure personal data is protected. It's against the law for them to not protect it.

Employers often have legal responsibilites to their employees to ensure that those employees aren't exposed to ahem unprofessional content from other employees. The only real way to do this is to intercept and filter HTTPS traffic. Otherwise you're one HTTPS porn site away from a sexual harassment case.

That's pretty silly. Enterprises are also obligated to ensure that random employees don't spirit out millions of customer account files over the Internet. If you want an unimpeded Internet connection, provide your own.

Chrome will ignore the pin if there's manually installed CA on the client, exactly to allow corporate MITMing.

The goal might be to target google and specifically gmail. They might have wanted to wiretap gmail conversations.

The Islamic fundamentalist fethullah gulen gang is a secret organization that has taken over most important positions in Turkish police and courts. They are wiretapping anybody they want using police resources. They blackmail, imprison and silence secular opposition. For example, they currently keep over 70 journalists in prison because of what they said or wrote.

My point about Gmail is that it is uniquely difficult and risky to spoof, because Chrome has Google's real certificates pinned.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com