In other words "MitM everything".
It gets so tiresome. I used to think the people who called out tyranny everywhere were just nuts, but it never ceases to amaze that everything nowadays keeps going "centralize and control".
It gets so tiresome. I used to think the people who called out tyranny everywhere were just nuts, but it never ceases to amaze that everything nowadays keeps going "centralize and control".
Yes, it already happens with corporate proxies, and yes, I'm sour about that too...
To be clear, I'm not blaming any NetOps here. It's just... Why is it so tempting? The things you can do with that type of data, it almost seems like you have to be superhuman in terms of keeping people away from it. Maybe I"m just too damn enchanted by just delivering packets to enable people... But when you get pushes from agencies suggesting "Hey, add a by definition awesome logging and tapping point" it really ruins my day.
And yes, I run a network too. No. I don't give a darn what my users do with it as long as the servers are up and fine, and the global riffraff stay out. I don't know. Just overly grumpy I guess.
Here it is:
* Companies have internal (intranet) network services
* Companies operate their own DNS (DoH) resolvers
* They also have global (internet) employees
* The devices those employees use have hard-coded DNS (DoH) resolvers (Google, CloudFlare)
* Don't let them use the hard-coded DNS (DoH) resolvers
* Make sure their machine uses the company DNS (DoH) resolver.
I know people think that DNS-over-HTTP makes everything private and secure, but it doesn't. Google and CloudFlare still see every single DNS query from everyone.
You don't care if your users get hacked? Would you mind telling me what company you work for?
That's if your users are well-behaved and follow the rules. To stop the users from being badly behaved, NSA recommends blocking connectivity to well-known IP addresses of the public DoH resolvers (e.g. Cloudflare) and TLS inspection to stop connections that try to go to less well known ones, including via ODoH, which means your TLS inspection device must understand the protocol.
To do TLS inspection at that level you need to MitM all HTTPS traffic going everywhere, as you need to read all HTTPS traffic to any possible host, as any of them may be a DoH resolver or relay. Q.E.D.
Please point out where I made that claim.
All I am saying is that the way "knowing what kind of web requests" - and DNS request in this case - is achieved is by becoming a third party in supposedly two party encrypted communication. The company certainly has the authority to do so (check your local laws, though, as there are some exceptions) - but it is MitM in function and practice, if not in name. "TLS inspection" and "data loss prevention" are simply common euphemisms for the technique.
It's also not new, MitM proxies and for that matter endpoint introspection (e.g. keyloggers at the user machine) have been in use for decades in the enterprise, and have been making their way into BYOD private machines as well via various MDM tooling.
Using your company DNS server as the grandparent has mentioned is not MitM. Inspecting all traffic by all devices in your company to try to enforce the use of said DNS server requires MitM, though.
TLS inspection and DLP are not euphemisms, they're valid names for a security practice. They're not even the same thing--you couldn't replace both mentions with "MITM" and expect another to know what you're talking about.
Yep. And corporate/enterprise environments should (not nearly enough do) do exactly that with devices owned and managed by the enterprise.
Any personal devices or those owned by contractors, clients and other external actors should not be allowed access to internal corporate networks. This is neither a particularly new or controversial idea either. Most large (or even medium-sized) organizations have separate "guest" networks for external resources which aren't secured or monitored.
However, internal networks are (and should be) a very different story.
Sure! But the fact that they should (and many have been) already be doing just that does not change the fact that the technique imposes a third party listening into supposedly two party encrypted exchange. It's allowed, but it is still MitM.
> Any personal devices or those owned by contractors, clients and other external actors should not be allowed access to internal corporate networks. This is neither a particularly new or controversial idea either.
Whilst I agree, recent trend to push for more BYOD where the device is owned by the contrators, employee or an external actor, but still allowed access and controlled by the enterprise does tend to blur the lines quite a bit, especially as most tooling has been lacking decent isolation between "enterprise" and "private" on the same device. MDM tooling tends to want to administer the whole device and apply the stricter "enterprise" policies, with a pinky promise that private life is going to be respected.
Which is why employees should either be given employer-owned devices or use device subsidies (as many companies provide) to pay for a device that's only used for work purposes.
That companies attempt to hijack (and I mean that in both metaphorical and literal senses) personal devices for corporate purposes, aside from the obvious issues, it's also terrible security policy.
That businesses do this is exploitative, unethical and insecure. I suspect such businesses don't really care about the first two, but should care about the third.
As an infosec/infrastructure guy, I'd raise hell over such a policy -- because leaving aside the scumbaggery (I think I just coined a new word. Good for me!), having personal devices connected to internal corporate resources (even with corporate MDM configurations) is literally begging to be compromised, for (hopefully) obvious reasons.
Replying again, as I should have addressed this as well.
I disagree. When using corporate resources, the organization is not only well within their rights to monitor (or at least log) all communications, given the potential for malware, data exfiltration and (to a much lesser extent) employee misconduct, an organization would be remiss for not doing so.
Which is why it's extra important not to allow or (as I addressed in my other comment), require those working onsite to use personal resources on internal networks.
Use of MitM by the corporation as part of Data Loss Prevention interferes with any hardening you or your vendors might be making against a MitM attack attempted by anyone else - it breaks if, for instance, the application vendor your enterprise has decided to use (let us call them "Example plc") has pinned their own CA certificate within the applicaton as the only one that is supposed to sign certificates on the Example domains - say, for "content.example.com" - following example that e.g. Google set. Or, worse yet for this example, as specific certificate to be used instead of the specific trust anchor. I've seen both examples in the wild, so it is not an idle discussion.
Not only you need to override that pinning with your own CA in the application for the content to be inspected, to retain the same level of hardening you'd need to implement the same checks the application did in your DLP system, so that it verifies that the system is legit - and that costs money and time and remains fragile over time, so many enterprises simply do not bother doing so, falling back to the well-known list of public CAs instead (that includes my $CurrentCorpo, much to my annoyance). It weakens the whole system, which is already fragile enough thanks to actors like Symantec, WoSign and StartCom - and possibly others.
>It gets so tiresome. I used to think the people who called out tyranny everywhere were just nuts, but it never ceases to amaze that everything nowadays keeps going "centralize and control".
The recommendations are for enterprise networks, although they're also reasonable (although not really accessible to the non-technical) for individuals who care about their privacy as well.
An enterprise network isn't (or shouldn't be) some sort of individual free-for-all. In fact, good security practice recommends (although this isn't universally implemented) that all perimeter network traffic, regardless of type, be proxied (or MitM'd, as you put it) to protect from both intrusions and exfiltration of data.
Are you claiming that Enterprise networks should allow external resolvers to be used on internal resources willy-nilly?
In fact, good security practice demands that devices that aren't authenticated (e.g., with 802.1x) shouldn't be granted access to internal resources at all. On the flip side, internal devices shouldn't rely on external infrastructure resources either.
This isn't censorship or some sort of fascistic control mechanism. Rather, it's an appropriate organization response to extant and potential threats to their IT infrastructure and data.