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netresecon Text entered into Windows' Run dialogue gets sent to Microsoft's telemetry

We deleted this tweet earlier today. Thanks to everyone who fact checked our statement and reached out to notify us about the mistake! A correction has been posted here: https://twitter.com/netresec/status/1440298935868743686

netresecon Text entered into Windows' Run dialogue gets sent to Microsoft's telemetry

Yes. Sorry for the confusion. The original tweet has now been removed and a correction has been posted instead.

netresecon Text entered into Windows' Run dialogue gets sent to Microsoft's telemetry

We first tried to post replies with corrected information, but it didn't seem to help. The tweet has now been deleted and a correction tweet has been posted instead.

netresecon Text entered into Windows' Run dialogue gets sent to Microsoft's telemetry

The PCAP in the referenced tweet was created using PolarProxy, which decrypts and re-encrypts TLS traffic while saving the decrypted traffic to a PCAP file.

netresecon Text entered into Windows' Run dialogue gets sent to Microsoft's telemetry

MitM'ing the traffic using a trusted root CA allows TLS traffic to be decrypted, even if perfect forward secrecy is used. That's what we did to produce the decrypted PCAP shown in the Wireshark screenshot.

netresecon Text entered into Windows' Run dialogue gets sent to Microsoft's telemetry

You are completely right. The traffic was sent as TLS encrypted HTTP/2 traffic to Microsoft. We decrypted it using PolarProxy in order to see what was transmitted. The screenshot in the tweet shows the decrypted PCAP generated by PolarProxy.

netresecon Text entered into Windows' Run dialogue gets sent to Microsoft's telemetry

You are correct. This traffic was not generated by typing text into the "run box", it was generated by typing text into the "start menu box". We are very sorry for the confusion this has caused. The wireshark screenshot shown in our tweet was showing TLS traffic that has been decrypted by PolarProxy. That’s why it shows up as HTTP/2 traffic over TCP port 80.

netresecon Analysis of Chinese MITM on Google

The purpose of the "Great FIrewall of China" is to censor the Internet, i.e. the intention of this MITM doesn't seem to be to covertly spy on the University user's searches.

A self signed X.509 cert is enough in order to see what they are searching for and to block/RST queries for topics like "Tiananmen Square protests". The CH authorities don't care if users notice the MITM in this case.

netresecon China, GitHub and the man-in-the-middle

New findings regarding the Chinese MITM of GitHub.com can be found here: http://netresec.com/?b=1328C6B

Turns out the guy who uploaded the packet capture file was @chenshaoju