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Comment by nurbo | Hacker News Reader

A fellow from Kazakhstan here.

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.

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Please do post this feedback in the bugzilla bug and the linked discussion thread; this is the kind of thing that helps developers make a more informed decision rather than just speculating on what would help people more.

I wished that all individuals in all countries would have such an attitude towards their governments.

I totally agree with your point. Blocking this certificate in major browsers or warning users would be of great use.

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".

While technically this is true, it is rare (and sounds nerdy) for English speakers who are familiar with Kazakhstan to actually use the word "Kazakhstani" or especially "Kazakhstanian." The word "Kazakh" is used informally to refer to natives or citizens of Kazakhstan when the meaning is clear from the context. Similar to how "Americans" (which could arguably refer to any North or South American) is used instead of "U.S. citizens." Or "Saudis." At least that was my experience from living in K'stan for 4 years in the '90's.

I didn't know that. I'm not a native English speaker. If this is actually an established way to informally address Kazakhstan citizens in English, then it's OK, I do not object.

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).

But he actually could have been talking primarily about Kazakhs in Kazakhstan, so nothing wrong there.

> If Firefox, Chrome and/or Safari block this certificate

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?

>...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-...

What is the extent of the MITM attack that you can do with this certificate? Can you intercept all https traffic?

If a user trusts this root CA (~ "installs the certificate") then someone who controls the root can now make their MITM look like the real deal, because it's trusted. After all you've said you trust them. Whether you _should_ trust the authoritarian government of Kazakhstan is a policy issue.

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.

How do I know that NSA does not have one root certificate pre-installed in my browser?

Review and compile the browser yourself, or just trust that someone would have found it by now and trust that your browser vendor knows that and would never do it in the first place unless they wanted to kill their browser instantly

The NSA doesn't need a root certificate installed on your computer if they already have the private keys to the root and/or intermediate CA providers.

Yes, having a root CA certificate like this installed in a client allows the certificate issuer (so in this case KZ government and anything they authorize ISPs to do) to impersonate any and every other domain. So yes, ALL https traffic to and from that client to be subject to intercept.

Why does such a certificate exist in the first place?

It exists to intercept https and potentially other TLS traffic. It exists because everybody can make such a certificate. I made such a CA certificate for my personal use, not to MITM myself, but to issue certificates for some internal services that are out of scope of letsencrypt. Every major desktop OS comes with tools that let you make a CA certificate, Windows does, macos does, linux distro usually ship openssl/gnutls/nss tools (as installable packages).

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 seems like this is material movement toward actual authoritarianism to me.

Anybody can make one.

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.

Because it takes nothing but an openssl installation (or similar) to generate one?

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.

Anyone can make one. You can make one if you want to. Getting others to trust and install it is the key - and in this case it is government mandated.

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.

Yes

In the meanwhile consider using Tor https://www.torproject.org . It has different transports transport plugins available if that will make the traffic look like regular traffic and not Tor traffic.

Tor has been blocked here for the last 10 (or so) years. You have to find and add a couple of bridge servers to get it working, until they get blocked as well, of course.

This is correct, but there are a couple of caveats.

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...).

I really don't like the idea that some third forces would interfere with internal politics of my country. Browser should work according to technical standards, not according to what US citizens decided to be good or bad. If Firefox wants to forbid locally installed roots, I'm all for it, but implement it for everyone.

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.

Privacy is not 'what US citizens decided to be good', it's fundamental human right.

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.

Encryption is political. The technical standards around HTTPS are politically motivated. The push for HTTPS everywhere, de-facto required TLS in HTTP/2, eSNI & DoH, were largely a response to the US government's mass surveillance.

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?

I disagree that encryption is political. Fundamentally, it's a privacy and security mechanism and on its own it's no more political than locks, safes, paper shredders or curtains.

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.

Privacy is political.

Privacy is apolitical. In fact, it is built into the very fabric of how the world works.

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.

Consistently applied standards are good. But if a developer change can interfere with a country's politics, it's because political actors have coopted the developers' work for leverage in their own system. Dev teams like Mozilla's are under no obligation to give a stable platform to anybody's political goals.

I also think there is a risk that Mozilla if blocks the government certs then that would turn all Firefox users in the country into criminals. I'm all for security and privacy, but it is a rough choice between protecting users from surveillance by their authoritarian government or trying to make sure users can follow local laws.

I don't think that we are there. There are no laws to circumvent the bans and in fact a lot of users are using VPNs. The only measures our government is doing is technical ones: ban websites, install DPI, now they apparently plan to MITM on some (or all) connections. But I've never heard about anyone convinced of circumventing those measures. In fact I'm not aware that any similar law exists.

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.

Couldn't agree more.

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