MITM on HTTPS traffic in Kazakhstan
bugzilla.mozilla.org
bugzilla.mozilla.org
https://rus.azattyq.org/a/30064788.html
They have been talking about this stuff for some years, though. It will get implemented at some point. I have a feeling it was one of their "test trials": can we boil the frog yet, or do we have to heat the water up a bit more?
Or failing that, some kind of digital dead drop with the files. If this could be updated a few times a week, that's better than not having access to material that you don't want the government to know about. It has to be possible.
example:
openssl s_client -servername www.paypal.com -connect www.paypal.com:443 < /dev/null 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -fingerprint -noout -in /dev/stdin
SHA1 Fingerprint=E8:20:7A:27:8C:BE:D4:D9:7F:44:32:89:E7:6B:13:DD:CE:58:50:F6
Banning this certificate or at least warning the users against using it WILL help a lot.
Each authoritarian regime is authoritarian in its own way. Kazakhstan doesn't have a very strong regime, especially since the first president resigned earlier this year. When people protest strongly against something, the government usually backs down. For example, a couple of years ago the government withdrew their plans of lending lands to foreign governments after backlash from ordinary people. If Kazakhs knew about the implications of installing this certificate, they would have been on the streets already.
If Firefox, Chrome and/or Safari block this certificate, the people will show their dissatisfaction and the law will be revoked.
Sometimes the people in authoritarian countries need a little bit of support from organizations to fight for their rights. I really hope the browser organizations would help us here.
Anyone can control a (root) certificate - the problem is getting others to trust it. Legitimate use cases might be: You want to intercept (and decrypt) traffic going from your local computer to SSL/TLS endpoints (affects only you) for example. Less clear cut / nice example: Company wants to read your traffic and therefor deploys a cert like this on your computer, now can snoop on anything you do, https or not.
You can make one on your own computer, give the result to your friends, tell them to connect through you as a proxy, and intercept everything. The tricky part is that browsers are hard coded with a list of a few trusted root certificates to trust. In order for the home baked certificate you just made to do any good, people have to explicitly install it and mark it as trusted. That means you have to distribute your newly minted root certificate and get every end point device to accept it manually.
That's what's so sinister about Kazakhstan's approach: by issuing a governmental mandate for citizens install the certificate they generated, and restricting their internet if they don't, they are effectively bypassing the Internet's current trust system entirely and granting themselves cart-blanche access to all their traffic.
The challenge is not to make it but to get it trusted by OS and software. The Kazakhstan government solved it by having the ISPs just tell people to install the thing themselves into each and every device you own.
Why does the government want this? To snoop on people. Usually framed as "We need to be able to fight terrorists, criminals and/or foreign enemies who 'abuse' encryption to hide their malicious activities". Tho, a lot of times the government will say all people are potential terrorists, and you just don't know if they are until you start snooping on them.
It's not only a thing with just authoritarian regimes, either. Australia passed a law which basically forces Australian companies and citizens to add backdoors in any products using end-to-end encryption (thereby effectively disabling end-to-end encryption) so the government can read communication if they want to.
The UK has a law ("snooper charter") that requires companies to "remove or disable" encryption when the government shows up with a warrant.
The US similarly are looking into end-to-end encryption busting legislation. And they already compelled companies to effective disable encryption systems, e.g. when a judge ordered lavabit (then the email provider Edward Snowden used) to hand over their encryption keys and install a government provided device capable of logging all traffic. And let's not forget that for a long time US law classified strong encryption as a "weapon" which meant you could not export encryption easily. Or the NSA e.g. pushing their backdoor encryption-busting PRNG (Dual_EC_DRBG) and weak encryption schemes (Speck, Simon).
German politicians recently started demanding end-to-end encryption busting legislation too, except they said "we do not want to make encryption weaker or insecure, we just want that the companies give us the plaintext data", which once more shows that they didn't thought it was necessary to do the most basic research into how this stuff works before talking.
It is not uncommon to see this in companies that (for security, regulatory, or other reasons) need to monitor traffic in and out of their network. They have all the company provided computing devices include their self-generated CA certificate and force all HTTPS traffic through a MitMing proxy in order to do the scanning.
On its own the root does not magically intercept the traffic, so Kazakh ISPs will need to do a bunch of (potentially quite expensive) work to actually MITM traffic for the Kazakh government, but with the root once that work is done it doesn't get flagged as a problem.
Because this exact same strategy (root that is not trustworthy is installed) is used in corporate setups to do anti-exfiltration, porn filtering and dozens of other things of dubious value, browsers are designed to let you, or the computer's administrator, choose to trust root CAs and indeed lots of counter-measures that protect ordinary users from bad guys are deliberately _disabled_ in the scenario where you've told it to trust some third party. You know best.
If you imagine a hypothetical system which just doesn't trust this root, say somebody has a Raspberry Pi they smuggled across the border, or more prosaically, they just said "No" and refused to install the root certificate -- such a system just will treat the MITM as an error, your secure web browsing won't work because it can't make a secure connection.
Or contrariwise, suppose you install the root in an otherwise ordinary PC in New York connected to AT&T, it will have no effect because the Kazakh government obviously isn't in New York MITMing your connections to other stuff.
That said, I don't see how government would step back. People are uninformed and generally passive, they wouldn't care enough. So, sadly, it might be the only way to push back that decision. But I still don't like it.
I'm not a Kazakh, I'm Russian, but our politics has a lot in common. And I would say, third forces interfering with politics is not as bad (if at all), as local governments interfering with people's privacy.
However, who makes these changes is interesting. It happened to be mostly developers in Five Eyes' countries acting against Five Eyes.
Do we need to have elected representatives in browser vendors and encryption standards bodies? Or given that the elected representatives are for mass surveillance, would that be any good?
Because of the complex, un-intuitive nature of encryption, it mixed particularly badly with politics, and we're still suffering from the fallout of that now. (crypto wars 1)
Firefox and other application vendors who use those standards do end up being unavoidably slightly closer to politics (as demonstrated in this particular issue now), but I think Mozilla would do well to keep their goal simple - Protect user privacy where they can and explain to users when they can't.
A notice to the user like "You are using a key known to allow access to third parties" is just a fact and no more political than "the site you are visiting uses weak crypto standards" or similar.
Does the grain of sand on a beach in Japan know whether or not I've just sat down in America? No.
Does the merging black hole/neutron star somewhere in the universe know that it will have consequences for small bags of carbon and water somewhere in the universe? No it does not.
Do you know what your child is actually thinking when you harangue them for the umpteenth time? No, you don't.
Lack of privacy/privileged access to information has always been the byproduct of active human effort. The natural state of things, is for information to only effect it's immediate locality. I.e. privacy.
Lack of privacy; therefore is the political subject. Subtle difference, granted, but that subtlety belies the consequences of letting things get out of hand.
Excessive "awareness" is a problem. There are those that relish the thought for the power such systems confer; they chant
"I can make you safer!" "You lose nothing!" "There is no danger in this!" "It is just the sacrifice a Good Citizen should be expected to make for the Greater Good!"
However, once the check is written, does the government ever relinquish it's right to privacy?
Nay. National Security. Just trust us.
Never mind that the assertion that led to the sacrifice of the initial liberty was that there were those amongst us who couldn't be trusted.
Nay, sir, I agree with GP. The breach of fundamental rights (or imposition of obligation) is the matter of politics, and very infrequently do I see any credible case made where something as fundamental as breaking the confidentiality of the most efficient means of communication anything but a power grab, and eventual tool of tyrannical oppression.
We could be there one day. But now the fight is purely technical. I'm, personally, going to set up dedicated server on online.net and setup proper and fast VPN for all my relatives and friends. I hope that other people would do the same.
For users who are already subject to the MITM, when they try to download a new version of their browser, couldn't the ISP simply serve them a slightly modified version of the new/updated Chrome/Firefox binary which does not blacklist their certificate? It would require a high level of technical expertise, but what could prevent this sort of thing?
If it's on Windows, probably the digital signature[0] of the installer bundle will flag for invalid/unknown signature. For nix you could verify checksums but for Apple, if it's not in the store, I think it's nigh* impossible to do.
[0] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/packaging/sign-...
As a reference - relays https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?... - bridges https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-combined.htm... - ticket https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/20348
Noteworthy "I messaged the user my unpublished obfs4 bridge whose OR port is firewalled and the bridge is working so far". Also, the boxes don't seem to perform a good job in inspecting for protocols tunnelled over HTTPS (https://gitweb.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/httpsprox...).
But there is a minor remark I have to make here. I'm sure you were talking about citizens of Kazakhstan, when you used the word "Kazakhs". The word "Kazakh" actually denotes an ethnicity, not a citizenship. And although Kazakhs are predominant ethnicity in Kazakhstan (~65% of the population), there are many others, and it's incorrect to call them Kazakhs.
Wikipedia suggests "Kazakhstani" as a English term for Kazakhstan citizens. I also saw other people using the word "Kazakhstanians". Maybe one of these two would be a better choice than "Kazakhs".
But I'm still skeptical about it. I think in my own speech I'll stick to "Kazakhstanian" (despite the word "Kazakh" is so much easier to type). Because I'm just used to make distinction between words "Kazakh" and "Kazakhstanian" when I speak Kazakh and Russian languages (most popular ones in Kazakhstan).
I noticed this behaviour last February with Kazakhtelecom (telecom.kz) internet provider. When I opened an http website in my browser and started clicking randomly on the parts of the page which are usually not clickable, sometimes such click would open a pop-up window with ads. Those pop-ups did also open sometimes, when I clicked on links of the page. It was unusual, because I used the same websites just a few days before that from Russia and nothing like that happened.
To figure out what's going on I opened the same webpage through proxy and compared it with localy opened one. Shell command for that was something like:
diff <(curl http://website) <(proxychains curl http://website)
I'll be back in Kazakhstan in 3-5 days, I'll try to reproduce this once again.
Legality is secondary when you are punching up in a 3rd world country. (I am from India)
2. Plese stop using the label "Third-world". You are your own "first-world". There's better labels to describe yourself, namely "developing".
> how this is legal even.
The government writes and enforces the laws. They'll never self incriminate.
And their defense claims US has SSN which is equivalent of Aadhaar why anyone can see ludicrous
And still Aadhar requirement is not removed for filing income tax return (which results in massive penalities)
I do wonder if Chrome will go to requiring CAs for this purpose be deployed via something more “enterprise” (e.g. custom extensions on Windows need to deployed via group policy now).
Regardless of where the cert store is, it came with some CA certs "in the box". Pinning applies to these CAs. Any CA's added by the end user (aka person at the keyboard, or enterprise admins, etc) bypass pinning.
For better or worse, bypassing of pinning is required in some enterprise scenarios to inspect traffic leaving the network. e.g. Is someone attaching all our customer data to a email in gmail? To know that, I need to MITM mail.google.com.
Sadly, this mechanism does get abused :(
But how would Chrome know if a root cert from Windows’ cert store was added by the user or not? They would all be located in the ”Trusted Root Certification Authorities” container.
"The" Trusted Root Certification Authorities store isn't a real thing, it's just a view onto a bunch of different stores that are actually separate, including a local machine store and per-user stores plus of course stores added by your membership of a domain or other grouping.
So Chrome gets to distinguish between certificates that Microsoft added and the ones added by Group Policy or whatever else to your system.
Several ISPs (including some big national players, not smaller local/struggling/other ISPs) trialled that sort of thing in the UK in the mid/late 00s but there was a big enough ruckus about it that they stopped.
The really egregious thing about what some of them were doing is that they replaced existing ads so were basically trying to take money of the sites (they were at the same time also trying to get sites to pay or be considered "low priority" traffic so were trying to tripple-dip: get paid by their primary consumer, get paid by the sites, and take the sites' ad money).
It doesn't surprise me that it is actively happening in places there is less choice (so "voting with your feet" is not an option for telling ISPs what you think) or public outcry is less effective (or drowned out by more pressing issues the area might have).
I had a similar experience with my ISP in Canada. Infact, I did a talk on how I worked out what was going on from a technology perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YeaYIPM-QI
If you want to conduct some testing, I'd be more than happy to help.
If I visit https://gmail.com, I expect all traffic to be encrypted because my browser checks that gmail is indeed using encrypted connection. How is this getting intruded upon?
More importantly, suppose I checkin to a hotel in USA as I usually do and use the hotel's wifi. Would they be able to intrude into my connection to https://gmail.com?
Could someone please give me some clarity on this.
The connection is still encrypted the whole purpose of certificates is to verify with WHO you are connected with. In the Kazakhstan case the government by installing a root certificate has the ability to impersonate gmail.
> More importantly, suppose I checkin to a hotel in USA as I usually do and use the hotel's wifi. Would they be able to intrude into my connection to https://gmail.com?
If the site you visit is over https you can be relatively certain that you are indeed establishing an encrypted connection with the domain owner. If it's plain http anyone sniffing in the same wifi can see and mess with your traffic
And now the government found a very simple non-technical workaround. Send a message to everyone requiring a government root CA with an easy install, or their internet won't work.
Now "us techies" have to find a new technical solution to a very social problem.
It never ends. :(
But all a government has to do is embed within the endpoint, post-decryption. "Or else."
That’s a pretty high bar to clear though.
They did it to everyone whose traffic transited ATT's backbone
But let my re-phrase my question like this: Do we have any evidence that NSA can perform MITM on TLS 1.3? Using a federal US CA would be one way, tricking a CA to issue fraudulent leaf certificates would be another, but as established elsewhere in this thread, both those ways are quite noisy. Attacking the endpoint is another way, but once Mallory does that, all bets are off.
The real issue is how abstract the consequences of loss of privacy are. It requires people to actually think beyond "I've got nothing to hide".
No worries though. Greedy corporations and governments are greedy and they'll keep pushing the limits of societie's tolerance until it blows up in their face.
It's both, everyone can contribute to the solution or the problem.
Kazakhstan's low-tech approach is just that, low-tech and low-effort. They could have used tons of vectors besides simply saying "install this cert."
A tiny shred of effort would have been to package an "updater" that did the install without explicitly saying that's what it was for. Or better yet: Kazakhstan is committed to a greener more ecologically friendly future! All tax documentation will go paperless! Just use the provided USB Key to access your documents in electronic format!
A small morsel of effort would be to force it on OS vendors through regulation/licensing/threats/money for localized copies. A good deal of effort would hijack CRLs, pinnings, et al while demanding/sneaking the private keys of the CAs.
Public Key Infrastructure is fucking pointless when the infrastructure is precisely what you can't trust.
Chrome, etc., require that certificates which descend from publicly trusted roots have their certificates published in certificate transparency logs. Someone would quickly notice bogus certs being issued and the associated root would get blacklisted.
Especially in the post-finally-ending Symantec world the CAs understand that issuing any such cert is likely to very quickly end their business in most other countries.
I feel the real problem kz is going to have is that they have now demonstrated that they will abuse having a root cert, so there is no way any root stores will let them in in future. I imagine they’d even have difficulty getting any of the other roots to issue certs for them (managed sub-ca I think? I forget terminology)
They could, of course, avoid spying on uncompromised machines to avoid detection, but then anyone practicing good security hygiene would be automatically left unaffected by the government spy program. Plus there'd still be the possibility of detecting malware through other means (malware on client machines is far easier to detect than MITM of unencrypted communications). Not to mention how much more difficult all this would be than simply MITMing unencrypted traffic.
The situation with HTTPS is significantly improved.
Being imperfect is different than being pointless. Even if you developed the perfect algorithm for global security infrastructure, the Kazakhstan government could still just break down your door and implant the backdoor into your hardware if they wanted. So by your logic should we just forget about this encryption stuff and just do everything in plain text again?
In particular, we'd see a lot more places than Kazakhstan do this if good countermeasures weren't in place...
This seems a cynical and lazy evaluation of the situation. No solution is perfect, trade offs must be made everywhere. With the right precautions the average person can have his/her communications encrypted. This is a much better situation than the one we were on before.
Seems a very solvable problem.
Too much security is willing to give up on the 95% because they can't get the 100%.
Trivial technological solutions will not stop the state actor from retaliating against those not following their policy either.
https://www.removemalware.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/the...
Wait until you're doing forensics on a cryptolocker outbreak and you find not only did a user do that, but multiple users helped her through it and the management then praised her for overcoming technical barriers even after it was found to be the cause of the incident.
Unfortunately nothing about warnings makes anything a solved problem.
This is also terrible for foreign investment and attracting business. It also makes foreign intelligence’s job easier.
Now if you’re a politician in a democracy, you know it may be all over in about 8 years, so it’s more your interest to cosy up to the companies
but the warning signs were all there i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17298747#17304077
Ever SSHed into a server and been told by your SSH client that, oh, by the way, the server is using the NULL cipher with no authentication, and network attackers can mess with your session arbitrarily? Probably not. That's what using plaintext HTTP should feel like.
If that basic intuition about users is correct, the solution is not to give up on this and force users to deal with the true complexity of the situation. The solution is for the browser to show a red blinking INSECURE instead of the green padlock when the cert it receives for a site doesn't have a valid chain to a root in the default key store shipped with the browser.
To be honest, I can't figure out why this isn't already the default behavior. It would solve a bunch of other problems as a side effect, including insecure crappy antivirus programs that MITM your internet connection.
"it rather involves being already at the other end of this airtight d doorway"
the current page ask the user to run an installer, elevating privilege. there's nothing a browser can really do against that. DLL can be replaced and signatures can be tempered etc.
just because you said "ship them with the browse" doesn't make you magically right nor safe under the linked threat
Actually, if it's mitm it's "all bets are off" isn't it, because the KZ government can filter that it out the proxied response?
Still, if oscp can assist at all, it's probably worth it that the browsers check for mismatch (if they don't already)
Edit: typos
If I was setting up an organizational CA for internal websites (not MITM), I would consider using Name Constraints to limit the certificate's scope and potential for abuse or compromise.
Always seemed like a misfeature to me, but all the browsers do it.
[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/net/...
It would be meaningless.
I can prove ownership and then receive a wildcard certificate for *.internal.company.com, usually by a TXT record or similar (lets ignore EV certs for now), however that certificate isn't an intermediate certificate which is limited to signing new end certificates for blah1.internal.company.com, but wouldn't be able to sign for blah1.not.company.com.
I'm no SSL/TLS expert by any means, so please let me know if I'm wrong and it is fairly easy to get intermediate certificates that are domain name limited - x509 constraints are apparently flakey.
... unless you want any private keys to be personally signed and or generated by bob & alice over in security after checking some boxes in an internal audit form, or any other number of company-internal schemes involving signing and encryption of business-specific data
The only use-case that's not possible with Letsencrypt is to issue certificate for IP address.
Cert pinning does mitigate it for apps, doesn't it? The end-user doesn't need to really worry abt rouge root CAs, if my understanding is right.
Traditional VPNs, P2P VPNs, Tor as a Proxy (decentralised net? dat/i2p/freenet/ipfs) could solve it generally across various use-cases, of which, VPNs are already mainstream.
And er, no, the overlap between operators of public Certificate Authorities and national ISPs is very small. There are only 57 root CAs trusted by Mozilla.
Applications where the developer has pinned to their own certificate will stop this attack.
Chrome and Firefox will ignore pinning for locally installed CAs. This is a very common use case in the enterprise where, for example, a bank has audit requirements to decrypt and store all workstation traffic.
You can't have security if you have a MITM that says "compromise your endpoint or we block you" and you concede to that. The only real solutions are either political or making the encrypted traffic look like some permitted traffic. (Or using a different network.)
You don't need to use a publicly available CA to verify client-side certificates. The server could use its own internal CA to sign CSRs from clients and send the reslting certificate back to the client via email or some other means.
In this case, only connections where a password was already agreed on would be protected vs. general unauthenticated browsing.
There was a draft proposal to add PAKE support to TLS 1.3, but it appears to have unfortunately expired [1].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password-authenticated_key_agr... 1: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barnes-tls-pake-04
https://youtu.be/mx40DSeoxnw?t=1230
TLS 1.3 was in some part an exercise in removing crap people thought might be a good idea in earlier versions, but then either never used or turned out to be a terrible idea but was notionally "optional" so you could say to keep using TLS but just disable that feature. So there is skepticism pre-existing in that room against the idea of just adding more stuff than might be cool unless it's clearly _needed_.
A feature that keeps six people in Kazakhstan (who happen to have manually pre-configured a PAKE) safe but everybody else is still screwed isn't the sort of impact TLS 1.3 was looking for.
Yeah. Fangs vs shells. Microbes vs white cells.
It's just the way this universe works. The struggle is eternal. Probably built into the root parameters of the Big Bang, if you could somehow trace it that far back in time and causality (which you probably can't, I dunno).
An agency is tasked with doing random sample captures of randomly selected target internet connections.
Inventory all the types of traffic being exchanged.
Flag anything that isn't obvious plaintext or already being MiTM'ed for analysis follow up.
Implement new blocking rules or interception implementation for each flow that isn't already being intercepted.
The failure being that the long tail of uncategorized data would be large.
Do you have a good reference for what game state updates look like for every game on the internet? What about custom IoT device protocols? Every type of DRM used for media streaming? Document attachments of spreadsheets or database images containing arbitrary numeric data?
How do you distinguish data like that, which outside of some headers may be indistinguishable from random numbers, from someone using the same format or protocol for encoding arbitrary encrypted data?
In an authoritarian state, you just start blocking and breaking things.
Everything you don't understand, you block. And then you make the user explain it to you and then if it's a use case you care about, you do the work to either decide it doesn't have any danger of carrying traffic you care about or build an intercept scheme for it.
There are also a whole bunch of IP transport protocols other than TCP and UDP, but firewalls have a tendency to block them, so today people just encapsulate everything in TCP or UDP.
There are a lot of TCP and UDP ports too, with their own protocols, but those darn firewalls again, so now everything is increasingly using HTTP[S].
The things that get blocked never go away, they're just made to look like whatever is still allowed. Yes sir, Mr. Firewall, this is Hypertext Transfer Protocol over SSL on TCP port 443 using IPv4, which is approved for intercept.
Except that it's really email and games and file downloads and whatever else, with things added daily by everyone on the internet, and no reference for what all of that plaintext is even expected to look like.
So you say you're going to get a DPI classifier and try to distinguish all these different types of HTTP. Except that whatever you exclude will soon be right back encoded as formats and protocols you allowed, because information theory says you can encode anything into anything.
And it gets harder to distinguish them with every iteration, because what you're really using to distinguish them is their encoding inefficiency -- it's the things that are always the same for a given class of data, even though the relevant part of the message is the things that are different. The end state of all of this is that the real entropy is all that's left and there is nothing there to distinguish with anymore.
I'm well aware of all that you've said.
My point was, they get TLS interception down, and they capture what they want from a target of interest.
When they look closely at your traffic and decide all these cat gifs have too much or too little entropy in the data that forms their pixels, they simply (if they're courteous) say, "Persuade me that you did not know that this app was helping you hide messages back and forth. Persuade me or we shoot you now." And then they shoot.
Fortunately the more typical case isn't kidnapping and execution but only having your connection blocked, which creates a helpful feedback loop that enables continuous improvement in the ability of secure communications to avoid detection. Which benefits everybody, but especially those in violent authoritarian countries that need it all the more.
Rather than death, if we look at the history of oppressive societies, the more likely outcome is a job offer, the kind they won't let you refuse but they'll make it so you don't want to refuse anyway. They find the clever people who are working around the filters and interception and hire them to be the watchers. They get perks like time to spend on a real private connection, etc. Meanwhile they are required to contribute to making the noose ever tighter.
no, he's being hyperbolic to make the point that in an extreme situation, a default-deny approach could facilitate mass suppression of 'undesirable' traffic without creating an insurmountable backlog of traffic for the 'bad actor state' to review in determining what to process further.
Only it doesn't, because as soon as they allow anything, everything else starts to look enough like whatever is still allowed to make it through, because that's the only way to make it through.
Slashing away more things only increases the resources people will put behind making arbitrary traffic look like allowed traffic. It trades not having to review everything for having to fight everyone instead of only the people they want to block.
Then some people win, everyone copies the winners' methods to get through, and you're back to square one only now everything looks even more like everything else than it did before.
But, being "sufficiently clever" isn't all that easy. China has done a good job, but they're a very big country with a lot of resources and a lot of very smart people, and let's be honest, even as good as they are, anyone with a will to get that censored information will get it.
It costs a lot to censor people on the Internet. The goal of people like me is not to stop the most determined, intelligent censorship approaches, but rather to make them as expensive as possible to build and maintain.
My ideal is force governments to either accept the Internet without censorship, or almost completely disconnect from the Internet (and simultaneously deny their nations the competitive advantages that come with it). North Korea is a good model. They basically don't have Internet in North Korea. It's sad, but I can live with that; it's better than allowing an oppressive regime to benefit from the Internet while oppressing their citizens.
For example, in order to scale less expensively, the Great Firewall is architected such that it need not actively be in the middle of the entire flow of traffic and need not actively proxy. Historically, they didn't need it to do so in order to achieve their goals.
Now, however, the advancement of a combination of new technologies is finally closing that gap.
In order to maintain historic blocking capability it becomes necessary in the long run to actively MiTM all the connections.
But that can be made to scale and there are nations who can afford it.
How do we know? Because the job is not significantly harder than serving up all that content. (At worst it's a little more than 2x the work.)
And today most content is served up from a handful of privately owned infrastructures. If a corporation can build it, so too can a lot of nation-states.
The incentives to build this have changed.
You say "authoritarian state", sounds to me like the network at many employers and institutions in the US!
not really, we know exactly what the government response is and it's turning citizen one another, that applied with the gestapo back then and it's happening today with the "social credit system"
why do all the random sampling work if all you need is one "regime believer" among a hundred person or so to maintain full awareness of dissident activities.
I wonder if Google changed its mind about this once Sundar Pichai took over and then gave Project Dragonfly the greenlight.
What the fuck.
Stop thinking about the country with literally less than 1% of world internet users and start thinking of the reputational damage a less than charitable presentation of your collaboration with a totalitarian state against your users would do to the other 99%+ of your market.
Malware forks of open source projects (and closed-source software!) are not a new problem.
In reality, being one BGP trick away from a mere dedicated individual or corporate owning certs for your domain is an actual risk today.
The downside of pushing them to that is that that browser will be unlikely to get regular security updates and will likely hide the interception.
In fact, you're making it worse because you're giving legitimacy to a government that is conducting actions which we shouldn't consider acceptable. If the US government started doing the same thing, I would really hope that browsers would block those certificates too.
But I disagree with the response that says we should do nothing. In fact, corporate root certs should be blocked / ignored by the browser in the exact same way and for the exact same reason. The only exception should be certs issued for a limited number of domains that are only active in a specific developer mode that can be enabled by knowledgeable users.
Sure, technological solutions can't solve this issue 100%. (My employer can also fork a browser.) But acting as if everything is OK when the connection is being MITMed is wrong and browsers shouldn't do it.
Technological solutions can't solve this at all if the entire stack is controlled by the interested party.
In the case of government snooping, you (theoretically) own the end device being used for access. In the case of corporate snooping, you're using corporate owned and managed devices. There is absolutely no technological solution that exists that will prevent another person from building software for (or selling to) corporations who need to snoop on their employees. Considering the selling price of appliances that perform these services (e.g. Bluecoat's range), the cost of a browser is negligible in comparison.
I don't think it's fair to conflate a lack of privacy on corporate owned devices with a lack of privacy on your own personal devices.
In places like Kazakhstan and China it's a harder problem, and HTTPS is necessary but not sufficient to solve it.
HTTPS is that tool. It is a social problem now, it was a technical problem problem just recently.
but atleast we know
And compromising HTTPS in places with a functional judicial system (and human rights) would probably be blocked by an end-less series of law suites.
That's extremely worrying as well and it appears politics so far are unwilling to make it illegal. There needs to be more protest and more competition so consumers can vote with their wallets.
They’re training their entire population to install things that they get in unsolicited emails that purport to be from a legitimate source.
What could go wrong?
Another technical solution would have been to allow security without privacy. If the purpose of the government actions is just to monitor content, you can enable that without disabling security. The HTTP protocol could be modified to transmit checksums signed by a cert, so that a client can verify that content has not been modified, but that content can be (optionally) not encrypted, but still no content-injecting attacks can take place.
But privacy advocates don't like it, so the result is either you have total security + privacy (such as it is), or none at all.
If it does not, could you file a bug report with a complete packet capture (and exact browser version - multiple browsers are preferred)? https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues
(Edit: Reportedly, "not all Internet providers have started MITM attacks yet" so if you do the test, make sure you are on an intercepted network... if safe to do so.)
I tested it both off a VPN and on a VPN from my iPhone yet still had the same result both times.
I currently see "0, 23, 65281, 10, 11, 16, 5, 13, 18, 51, 45, 43, 21".
(Also all of the installed extensions are also enabled in private mode. I know that changed recently so I checked. Also the certs the browers claim I'm getting in all three scenarios seem to be the same...)
[1]: https://twitter.com/grittygrease/status/1151921809417048064
The code is here: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/blob/master/caddyhttp/h...
The paper: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf
> Kcell JSC informs its customers of the need to install Security Certificate on personal devices capable of connecting to the Internet
> Due to the increase of identity and personal data theft, including stealing money from bank accounts, introduced a security certificate as an effective tool to protect the country’s information space from hackers, online fraudsters and other types of cyber threats.
And some FAQs are hilarious (as in hilariously devious):
> What happens if I do not install the Security Certificate? You may have problems accessing the Internet.
> Will installation of the Security Certificate affect the protection of my personal data? The security certificate has no access to your personal data.
Yeah, true that, literally, but you forgot to mention something there...
[1] https://www.kcell.kz/en/product/3585/658, might have to switch to EN in top right corner
I don't think Firefox or Chrome can do that can it?
Any way to avoid or bypass name or path constraints would be considered a huge and monumental vulnerability today.
You would be unduly optimistic — for example, Apple did not support them at least as recently as 2015 (see e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=407093...) and 10 years ago OpenSSL hadn't even shipped support upstream, plus however long it took your distribution to ship a major version upgrade to 1.0.
I was hoping someone might have a pointer to current information on that topic since I believe Apple did finally fix Secure Transport but not when.
I have not gotten as far as testing it in production but based on testing Safari and Chrome in https://nameconstraints.bettertls.com/ and creating our own name constrained cert and testing it with both OS X Curl and Linux Curl (OpenSSL) I am still of the impression it works.
Most other people seem to be sure that it does not though (for example in this discussion and here https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/95600/are-x-509...) so I am not sure if I missed something or if people are just not up to date.
But the other systems did at least appear to honor the constraints.
I've asked Apple security folks about this a few times, but they just look uncomfortable and change the topic.
Modern browsers do respect name constraints of intermediate issuing certificates.
You only need a root if you're issuing other keys.
Firefox does, though I don't know how much they check beyond just the dNSName constraints. Here's the unit test making sure it stays working: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/b8157dfaafc42deb3b...
To the best of my knowledge, no browser can do this today, and I don't know of any other software that can do that either. (I'd want to have it in the system certificate store with the same constraint, as well.)
Name Constraints, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, wouldn't solve the problem, for two reasons: most software doesn't support them (and silently ignores them rather than correctly failing closed), and they require the CA certificate to contain the constraints rather than system configuration adding the constraints.
We need a mechanism to place certificates in a certificate store (browser or system) with specific domain constraints configured by the administrator. To avoid the failure mode of Name Constraints, those certificates shouldn't be accessible to software that doesn't know to enforce domain constraints.
That would also require updates to various SSL libraries (and to browsers) to handle this new certificate store and enforce the constraints.
Could you elaborate on this? Specific examples? CVEs? My experience has been that most software will either honor them, or honor the "critical" flag, which is correct (if disappointing) behavior. If you want it to fail closed, use the critical flag. If you want it to fail open, clear the critical flag.
Doing some additional research, it looks like the situation has improved significantly now, and name constraints might actually work as designed if you don't care about older systems.
That still doesn't address the ability for a browser/administrator to apply such name constraints to a CA that didn't ship as part of its certificate, though.
It seems like the principle of least privilege could easily be applied to the CA system rather than trusting all CAs for all domains, as there seem to be obvious/natural constraints in certain cases (like CAs that only operate under a particular country TLD).
1. The actual browser software has its own rules for what's trusted on top of the root trust store often copy-pasted into other software (e.g. in the Python package Certifi). These rules include name constraints of the sort you're interested in, functionally they're used to constrain roots that might be fine but whose government operators promise they're only for some TLDs under authority of that government, so in a sense for those names the government decides who "really" owns them anyway.
Rather than link a horde of HN readers into Mozilla's poor mercurial server I'll point you more indirectly at a summary from their wiki:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Additional_Trust_Changes
You can fork Firefox and add your own rules to NSS, or if you're feeling really fancy, your own extension mechanism to add rules at runtime.
2. You can spin up a root, and trust it, and use that to sign a suitable constrained intermediate. Then, destroy the private key for the root and continue using the intermediate.
In this scenario Firefox gives total trust to your root, but it can't possibly proxy mybank.com because you destroyed the private keys, it can't do anything further at all. The intermediate, which can still issue, is constrained.
Google (I think? Some big tech firm with know-how) has used this trick for products that do loop-back HTTPS. It mints a root cert during instal, issues one certificate and then destroys the private key, then it can trust the root cert but without any danger you later get MITM'd by the root, because that root's private key no longer exists anywhere.
https://blog.qualys.com/ssllabs/2017/03/13/caa-mandated-by-c...
CAA is a mechanism for trustworthy CAs to agree not to issue certificates to people who don't want them.
So if you set CAA to insist you only want Comodo certificates in darkhorn.example, Let's Encrypt will refuse to issue certificates for names under darkhorn.example
But no matter how you set CAA for darkhorn.example, my private CA can issue certificates for it no problem. Let's Encrypt aren't _prevented_ from issuing, they are _declining_ to issue by policy, and that policy is part of why the world trusts them. But the world doesn't trust my private CA, so I don't have to follow that policy.
There will always be a fight over privacy. Giving up to a foreign government is a terrible idea. It would absolutely just let the problem spread and get worse.
I don't think Kazakhstan has the resources to replace outside online services. A move like this should simply result in them shooting themselves in the foot. This needs to be a firm line such that it's simply not practical for them to implement.
I understand that bugs/discussions should weigh both sides. And ultimately, we may need more than HTTPS. That's fine. The point is we don't just roll over and give up.
Point in case: In 2018, Kazakhstan ranked #144 in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. Countries such as China, Cuba and Belarus had a better ranking. [See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Inde...]
IMO what’s needed is first and foremost more democracy in Kazakhstan. That’s not something that Firefox can solve.
With that said, perhaps anti-surveillance technology can assist the affected users. Maybe Tor. I’ve heard about some other, similar project but I can’t recall its name right now.
[Edit: These where the anti-censorship applications I was thinking of: https://www.psiphon3.com/ and https://getlantern.org/. Can’t vouch for their security though.]
From the point of view of the Firefox, this should be an extremely simple technical problem. There is CA that is known to be "compromised" in an entirely technical sense, i.e. it is known to allow MITM. So blacklist it, end of discussion. Allow the user to remove it from the blacklist somewhere in browser's settings: it's not for you (Firefox) to decide what the greater good is.
I assume, it would indeed be a problem for Kazakhstan to fixing the service if people are not using the internet, because their browser doesn't work (because it's both an economical and a social disaster, obviously). Or maybe it wouldn't, because Kazakhstan will send troops to every home to replace every browser by Kazakh-fox or whatever. And it may play out to the better in the end, as much as it can lead to massacre.
But (as a 3rd party technological company) don't play mighty and powerful, responsible for the lives of people in Kazakhstan, it's not your fucking business how they live. You see a technological problem (known CA allowing MITM) — you solve it (block the CA!). That's what you promised your users to provide, to fix technological problems, not to fix the political climate in Kazakhstan, USA, China, whatever.
Their government isn't merley "snooping" on it's citizens due to a week chain of trust architecture and a lack of ethical clarity... it's requiring by law that it's citizens be snooped on and censored. In such a regime, a technological arms race is not going to change the legality of subverting their measures, and cannot help the masses without simultaneously jeopardising their safety.
To continue using internet, you need to install our government-provided fork of Firefox that doesn't blacklist our government-provided root cert.
regards, your Tele2
No doubt the NSA intercepts all kinds of things, but they're not doing it with TLS MITM technology (at least not without further additional hacks).
> At the moment, providers started to use the certificate in the capital of Kazakhstan - Nur-Sultan (ex. Astana).
So it may not be nationwide yet.
I'm from capital (Nur-Sultan, former Astana).
I just checked my wife's phone and apparently she got SMS. Funnily enough, her cellular internet now does not work at all. Probably rollout is not going easy.
If HN didn't have the lock in the url bar (no https), it would have zero impact on my behavior. I had to look just now to even know if there was one.
If HN still wasn't using https, we'd still be here. Virtually nobody really cares day to day.
Also, it would be great if there were a "red dot" style warning when you manually click "Proceed anyway" while viewing a https page with an invalid certificate (currently, the browser remembers the "Proceed anyway" decision and accepts the invalid cert after the initial acceptance of the warning)
Here is the crux of the issue, many TLS middleware providers install their own root certificate for network monitoring, data loss prevention, security scanning and so on. I personally would like them to stop doing that or at least make it obvious to end users it's happening. However, in order to modify the root store, they must have been authorized to do so by the Administrator, and it's their network or hardware.
If we try to make it obvious to users that this inspection is happening, these providers will switch to using alternative methods, such as using Microsoft Detours - which would be even worse, now you have random vendors patching security critical code in such a way that is not discoverable for end-users. This cannot be prevented, because they must already have Administrator access or they wouldn't have been able to modify the root certificate store in the first place.
In this Kazakhstan scenario, imagine if adding the government certificate put a red dot that said "You are being monitored". If the government didn't like that, they could instead require you to install monitor.exe that had the exact same effect, but didn't show the dot by patching and hooking all the crypto APIs. I find this argument against adding an obvious indicator quite compelling.
I think companies in the US are legally required to provide similar disclosure when monitoring their employees, so I don't see why they'd have a problem with a persistent indicator like that.
It's going to be a lot fewer than the people who'd be able to understand they'd need to do X to keep the internet working.
Not at all. They spin it as providing security:
"Due to frequent cases of theft of personal and credential data, as well as money from bank accounts of Kazakhstan, a security certificate was introduced that will become an effective tool for protecting the country’s information space from hackers, Internet fraudsters and other types of cyber threats.
...
What is a security certificate?
A security certificate is an electronic certificate that allows to protect Internet users from content that is prohibited by the laws of the Republic of Kazakhstan, as well as from malicious and potentially dangerous content. The security certificate is intended to provide subscribers of cellular communication in Kazakhstan with Internet access in the most secure manner."
(source: https://www.kcell.kz/ru/product/3585/658 -- but this text seems to be coming from government, since it's quoted by all providers).
Maybe clicking on the red dot could show a page with company policy.
So what if they could, in theory, work around the indicator by asking users to install some dubious live-patching executable? Firstly, the users wouldn't have to do so - the enforcement mechanism here is ultimately the MITM itself, so as long as the users just installed the certificate they could continue to access sites (they would have to make the certificate available separately, for installation on iOS / Android / ChromeOS etc). Secondly, the security implications of live-patching the executable are mostly irrelevant, because the only people installing this have already lost the security game. Thirdly, there is a benefit in making the bastards work for it - keeping that live-patcher up-to-date and working against a range of target executable versions is going to be bitter work.
The problem Kazakhstan had was that there was no existing CA they could already force to issue certs. So they had to make a new one. It would be foolish to assume that none of the many trust anchors your browser already trusts haven't already been compelled by your local government to do exactly this.
Also, DANE and DNSSEC solves this problem.
DANE is, unfortunately, not viable to implement in browsers right now for a variety of reasons: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/01/17/notdane.html
CT makes such an attack obvious, but the harm can't be undone.
A case study: root certificates for the GPKI, the South Korean governmental CA primarily used for public institutions, are not included in most browsers except for maybe IE [1] but frequently trusted due to (still) prevalent uses of ActiveX controls. It is of course subject to CA/B Forum baseline requirements [2] and publishes CT records, so you may guess their "accidentally" invalid wildcard certificates [3] are quickly spotted... Heck no! It was only noticed 3 years later [4]. No one knows what happened in this period.
[1] For example, Firefox doesn't include it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1377389
[2] https://cabforum.org/baseline-requirements-documents/
[3] For example, https://crt.sh/?id=6990343 contains a public suffix `.co.kr` (comparable to `.com`). Note that the BR contains very strong requirements for such public suffixes, which the GPKI didn't follow.
[4] https://www.mois.go.kr/frt/bbs/type001/commonSelectBoardArti...
The increasing politicisation of Mozilla is also a concern --- it seems unwise for it to fight a government, or turn their core product into a platform for doing so. It's sad to see "privacy" brought up as an argument, and that seems to be Mozilla's main one these days; I think it's perfectly fine for people to desire privacy (and my MITM proxy will help with that, by stripping out trackers and such), and for Mozilla to offer services that do (they could work on their own VPNs and "firewall busters", for example), but the attitude of knowing better than the users or forcing them to trust or not trust certain entities is wrong.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2019/07/01/fixing-antiviru...
Or replace it with a compromised version.
> This will save privacy of all Internet users in Kazakhstan.
No. This will mean that users would simply switch to chrome, edge, brave, ... , n + 1.
In case all of them block this CA, the government will force people to install an older version or will patch any open source browser so that it works with their certificates.
IMO, this is also wrong from a philosophical point of view. Your browser should just be your browser and not take part in political disputes. It doesn't sit well with me that Firefox has anything to say in the politics of its users.
And finally, encryption doesn't solve violence.
In the United States, for example, it's legal (even expected?) that corporations can install custom CAs into their user's browsers and prevent internet access to any browser without it installed. Is it Mozilla's job to prevent these CAs from being installed on user's workstations? Should Mozilla reject any certificate from Blue Snort, etc.?
Kazakhstan has likewise declared it legal (under their own sovereign legal authority) to prevent web access to its citizens without the required CA installed. Just like it's legal in the US for corporations to "spy" on their employees, it's legal in Kazakhstan for it to spy on its citizens.
Laws of Western countries do not extend into other sovereign nations, regardless of what one thinks of those laws. It's not Mozilla's job to get involved in this case.
> And finally, encryption doesn't solve violence.
Nor abuse of freedom by nation states, unfortunately.
Just because a nation state decides on something doesn't mean that foreign entities can't protest that decision. Firefox and Chrome can add very scary warnings to users about government sabotage if they want to; they can even start including ads for Tor and comparable services if they want to. Blocking the cert would at most be very consumer-unfriendly to people wanting the certificate to be in place. If they disagree with a particular browser vendor, those people can switch browsers or fork an open source one.
Mozilla's job is to provide a safe and open web. The Kazakh government is opposing that. In this case, it's perfectly in line with Mozilla's mission to warn users as best they can against the scary precedent their government is setting.
Of course this only works well if Google, Microsoft and Apple join the effort to warn users. Google is already showing a constant warning on Android when a device is being MitM'd and many of their apps do certificate pinning. Facebook and Twitter do certificate pinning in their apps as well.
I don't see why browsers couldn't take action as well. Just don't show any green locks during a MitM and show periodic notifications about the users' security being compromised. Block the certificate if you have to; as a party people rely on for choosing what certificate authorities to trust, they can't allow themselves to be compromised by governments enforcing laws endangering the safety of the web.
Wouldn't be the first scandalous thing in the former Soviet Union that a Swedish phone network was involved in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecom_corruption_scandal
If enough high level sites do this (Google, Cloudflare, Wikipedia etc) it might force the hand of the government since they are the ones effectively breaking the internet.
ZaTelecom Telegram channel (https://t.me/zatelecom) claims that that not all ISPs have rolled out the MITM attack. For now, a good solution would be to switch to a different ISP (it's not like in the US, each home has access to 2-5 different ISPs).
Also, users ask everyone to use a VPN. So, I think that they have access to VPNs.
I never had any problems with SSH and I operate my own OpenVPN on VPS using standard port and I never had any problems with it as well.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/189647/what-hap...
Guess it wasn't canceled after all.
--
somehow i missed that HPKP is dead and will be removed from chromium and all the derivative browsers. now google is focusing on Expect-CT
The browser checks for validity by ensuring the website certificate is signed by a certificate that is shipped with the browser. These "root certificates" are usually owned by Certificate Authorities, such as Verisign or any other number of CAs. CAs ought to verify that the entity creating a new certificate is who they claim to be (the website owner) before signing a certificate. This way, you trust Verisign to tell you that you can trust the target website.
What Kazakhstan has done is create their own root certificate and asked people who live there to install it in their browsers. They are also intercepting any connection to facebook.com and giving your browser a Kazakhstan-created certificate, which is then verified against the Kazakhstan-owned root certificate. Since it will pass this check, the browser shows a happy green banner, even though the certificate is owned by Kazakhstan and not facebook.com. In other words, the data people in Kazakhstan send to facebook.com is now being intercepted and decrypted by Kazakhstan before being forwarded to facebook.com. Facebook is the example used in the linked bug, they can perform this with any other website, too.
Is this voluntary? If I bring a device into the country without this certificate (or if the local removes it from their machine) do things go back to normal?
Can we leverage signed DNS records to add another layer of control needed? Do we also need encrypted DNS where we can choose who to trust? Are we stuck with the CA trust model?
Certificate Transparency. Current browsers are moving to not trust any certificate whose issuance wasn't publicly logged. That doesn't prevent an attacker from issuing an MITM certificate, but doing so would permanently burn a CA. (At least, once the policies are in place and enforced.)
Site owners can monitor these logs for rogue certs issued for their own domains.
If Verisign deliver a certificate with the wrong domain, you'll be able to know that Verisign signed that certificate.
They could certainly say it was a mistake somewhere in the process, but that argument won't work for ever.
At one point sadly you need to trust someone. This model at least give you a way to prove that trust has been broken.
How about comparing the IP address of the request with the IP address reported in requests to the FB server with the IP reported if you make an XHR call to a different domain endpoint that returns your IP? That would compare the physical browser's IP with the MITM 'requestors' IP?
If enough of the centralised sites and CDNs look out for this it would render it a lot less effective. This also turns a undetected user security/privacy problem into an in your face "firewall" from the user's point of view. Now the user asks their tech friend "why can't I see FB" and their tech friends sets them up on a VPN.
Apologies if this is hand wavey I'm not a network or security expert but I am curious about this.
The Verisign brand lives on, but it was acquired by Symantec back in 2010, Symantec then sold their CA business to DigiCert back in 2017. So although you may find certificates with "Verisign" branding on them, that has nothing to do with the company named Verisign.
This will immediately block their services in the country and will raise awareness at scale.
I understand that by making people install the government cert, any website with a cert signed by that government cert will happily speak TLS.
But, how can they read data transmitted between websites they don't control? When the client asks for Facebook's cert, wouldn't the government have to sneak in and show a fake cert signed by them instead? How does that work?
The regime has just painted a huge "X" on their backs.
If you hack the governments servers and steal the certificate private key you can pretty much rob the entire country - all bank transactions, pins, passwords etc. will be in the clear for you, ripe for the picking.
This is yet another reason why backdoors are so dangerous, not just for the privacy of all citizens.
If someone manages to redirect traffic by e.g DNS spoof to some server which presents a self-signed certificate for e.g Facebook.com, the government-MITM would just sign that as being Facebook.com.
$ wrk -t 50 -c 500 -d 5m --latency --timeout 3s http://qca.kz/It would probably be illegal and if the regime finds out they'll put you into jail etc.
It's not even this blatant in most cases. About 6 countries have issued certificates for Google, India being one of them. And they all made use of the fact that they were part of the trusted root certificates on our systems.
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-HTTPS-requests-not-cacheable-b...
I like the idea of a permanent, non-removable banner saying "Kazakhstan is spying on you, learn more here <link to more info>.".
Edit: RFC 6844 very unambigously states that it can be used for additional verification:
CAA records MAY be used by Certificate Evaluators as a possible indicator of a security policy violation. Such use SHOULD take account of the possibility that published CAA records changed between the time a certificate was issued and the time at which the certificate was observed by the Certificate Evaluator.
To the extent that Kazakhstan succeeds with this, it will only make other governments jealous of the capability and want it for themselves.
"I knew the techies could do it! They told me they couldn't but I knew they were lies. See! even Kazakhstan can do it, so why can't I also break HTTPS encryption?"
As for whether designating that browser vendors can't distribute software to Kazakhstan, their government would just fork an open-source one, mod it to pre-include their MiTM cert, and force their citizens to use that.
I think ultimately the solution is going to be p2p content-centric approaches.
Do you think the government will care?
The 1% will either put up with it, stop using the internet, or leave.
One thing will happen though - the economy will not be ruined.
Generally speaking, since the Cold War ended, these sorts of countries don't mind troublemakers leaving. It's better international PR for them to have 'problem people' leave voluntarily, than to repress them.
Instability is the key.
This is a HTTPS only issue and fundamentally it's the same problem as control over domains (ease of manipulation through centralisation).
As far as I know, both the apps you mentioned use HTTPS. However, apps have the option of doing what's called Certificate Pinning.
That's when the application ignore OS/User trust settings about certificates, and just allows a list of hardcoded certificates / certificates signed by a hardcoded CA. Akin to how SSH works (kind of...).
If I remember correctly both Telegram and Instagram have pinned their certificates, which would probably block all network communication but not allow for a MITM attack, even if the user installed the KZ root certificate.
Russians? Chinese?
Previously, a government could monitor what site a user is visiting just by looking at the TLS session startup. Even if it is hosted on a cloud provider and 100 different sites are hosted from the same IP, they could look at the TLS-SNI data in the plain text to choose to interrupt and block the connection.
A fallback would be to manipulate DNS queries and force all DNS queries to be directed to official DNS resolvers. But DoH makes that far harder to control.
This is a bluff being called. Tech said "If we make it so that they have to spend all this money and build a massive scale intercept that actively participates in each TLS session, they won't buy into the cost."
Costs keep going down for this sort of thing. Now there are large organizations and governments willing to work on this stuff.
DoH is easy to block. They can look at SNI and cut DoH connections.
Being able to access all the content is far more valuable than hostnames.
And then massive CDNs will start to support it.
Some of them might even enable it, with encrypted SNI, on _every single listener on all of their IPs_.
DoH was designed to evolve into something nearly unblock able. Unless you active intercept 100%.
Which some people believed no one would pay up for or that it would be unscalable. This stuff only gets cheaper and easier.
Who's to say that this isn't happening in the US as well? The US has invested billions of dollars in dragnet surveillance that is allegedly useless for anything other than metadata in the context of HTTPS.
Is it out of the question to ask whether our secret courts could issue gag orders and claim that national security mandates CA root keys? Such a gag order would only be served to a small group of engineers at large companies, and those engineers would have no right to report on it. We're talking about only a few hundred FISA gag orders, and thousands are served annually. It would make their multibillion dollar infrastructure useful again, wouldn't surprise me if some (unnamed, anonymous) judge bought the argument.
To employees at vulnerable companies, what's your PKI like? Is anyone aware of a company that implements strong multi-party checks on accesses to important private keys? If the NSA wanted your keys, how many employees would need to be served gag orders? Is it on the order of dozens or hundreds?
No one can say it because you just claimed it's all secret and can't be proven.
edit: not to say they are specifically MITM'ing HTTPS widescale.
Assume NSA et. al had access to trusted CA private keys, then they could generate certificates for arbitrary domains which would be trusted by clients. But if they MITM'ed _all_ connections (or even a large portion) surely someone would have noticed, like in the DigiNotar case [0].
But it's even harder (or better) now, with the advent of Certificate Transparency. Since browsers check certificates, periodically, against the CT logs which would fail for forged certificates [1].
However, stealing private keys from companies themselves is a practice that I can imagine happening on a small scale, like the Realtek signing keys for Stuxnet [2]. But doing that on a large scale is not really sustainable.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar#Issuance_of_fraudule... [1]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/190096/how-will... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Windows_infection
A "few hundred" gag orders placed on engineers about something deeply outrageous sounds completely implausible as lasting secrecy. Secrets simply can't be kept at that scale.
Even NSA employees themselves would eventually refuse to keep such a program secret, as we saw with Snowden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
I could of sworn there are instances where root authorities had brush ins with the law, maybe I'm just remembering a theoretical rant I heard somewhere.