Bug 1758773: MITM in Russia | Hacker News Reader

Bug 1758773: MITM in Russia

bugzilla.mozilla.org

51 pointslalaland112517 comments

In the comment's zip attachment you can have a look at the certificate.

    Subject Name
    C (Country): RU
    O (Organisation): The Ministry of Digital Development and Communications
    CN (Common Name): Russian Trusted Root CA

    Issuer Name
    C (Country): RU
    O (Organisation): The Ministry of Digital Development and Communications
    CN (Common Name): Russian Trusted Root CA

    Issued Certificate
    Version: 3
    Serial Number: 10 00
    Not Valid Before: 2022-03-01
    Not Valid After: 2032-02-27
    Certificate Fingerprints
    SHA1: 8F F9 15 CC AB 7B C1 6F 8C 5C 80 99 D5 3E 0E 11 5B 3A EC 2F
    MD5: 7F BB 1F BB D1 29 47 E7 28 DC BF A4 56 8C 64 CD

Also available on crt.sh: https://crt.sh/?id=6316640888 (from comment #7)

Seemingly they did not prepare early enough like the French [1] at the time. IMHO the whole cert trust chain is broken. Is there actually a services that serves cert fingerprints seen from another place in the world that can help detect a MITM?

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2013-1...

https://notary.icsi.berkeley.edu/

>Last updated: Thursday, 26. July 2018 03:21 PDT

Shucks, all the good tooling dies young.

I hate to say it, but here it is: that's a feature not a bug.

Don't tell them. They still believe that if they use TLS and some {google, microsoft, cloudfare, etc} cert they are safe.

How is this a bug in Mozilla? This seems to be about some email the Russian government has sent, and CA certificates.

If the certificate is being misused, I think it should be revoked by the authority who approved it.

> If the certificate is being misused, I think it should be revoked by the authority who approved it.

That's the problem. There is no "authority who approved it", beyond the Russian government agency that created the certificate. The certificate is self-signed, and users are being asked to install it manually.

This is a root ca that can issue as many unauthorized certs as they wish. It is critical that this thing is added to every other explicitly untrusted list in all OSes and Browsers, to protect millions of innocent internet users.

what's the bug? that Mozilla should ban this certificate so the West can successfully disrupt Russia's internet?

No, so the Russian government cannot intercept every https (TLS) connection out of the country. With this they could attack every user on ruNET and capture every password, every email, every message… it is critical that it be blocked for the safety of the internet.

Centralized trust is the mechanism used by the current version of the web. It is a broken system by design. Who says I can trust verisign or any other CA. Russia creating their own CA and asking it to be installed just emphasize how broken the current mechanisms are. Its not new, its always been broken.

It’s a lot more complex than you may realize. We have a transparency solution known as Certificate Transparency. For a “verisign” issued cert to be trusted in the browser, there must be an append only record of the cert stored in a blockchain. If Russia overrides a local trusted root, all bets are off an CTlog is not used. You can trust the CA because malicious issuance is a death sentence. And we have logs for all eternity.

Hmm I had never heard of Certificate Transparency, looks like its a relatively newish tech added onto how SSL/TLS certs work. It seems only Google Chrome & Safari require SCT chains (not used by Firefox). Maybe I've never heard of it because I'm a Firefox user? You mentioned blockchain, does that mean there is a public blockchain for these Certs? I didn't see that mentioned anywhere but it does seem like blockchain features overlap with the desired features of "Certificate Transparency".

There is a blockchain ran by a bunch of interested third parties for CT, yes.

The block chain is different for each CT operator, it just allows you to validate the issued certs.

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