Though HTTPS is better than nothing, and this attack relies on HTTP to inject the initial payload, state sponsored attackers in some countries can likely just subvert CA or CDN infrastructure instead.
If you use the MITM judiciously, it's very likely that nobody will notice, or that those that notice can be compelled not to say anything.
Sounds from other comments like my knowledge is out of date though, and browsers have real protections against the obvious ways that used to be possible, which is great news.
Of course then the question is how quickly browsers can roll out an update/config to distrust all future certs from said CA.
Besides, if you have enough access to the CA, you can just get whatever cert is in the transparency log, though that's almost certainly harder for most nations and CAs.
Chrome, Safari, Firefox.
> And do all CAs support it?
Yes, the browsers made them.
> Besides, if you have enough access to the CA, you can just get whatever cert is in the transparency log
No, the CA doesn't have the private key of certs.
> No, the CA doesn't have the private key of certs.
Woops, yeah good point.
That would require compromising the certificate requester.
But it requires a lot more steps.
My impression was the CA's made the likes of Standard and Poor look rigorous, but I'm happy to learn more from actual experience of them rejecting such an application.
My point wasn't to discredit LetsEncrypt, but to point out that Google's claim to mitigate the MITM attack vector with https-first wasn't a very strong argument. I mean, yes, sure: if you can't intercept or downgrade to HTTP the MITM doesn't work. But all the HTTP seems to do was redirect to a malicious payload. But you can also do a redirect in HTTPS.
So if you can spoof someone to go to https://g00gle.com/ it should be just as easy to launch the attack chain from there.
Source: Have to be that human from time to time
If you get the normal DV cert they don't provide any more verification than Letsencrypt.
And since browsers have moved away from indicating OV/EV certs to end users, not many organizations are paying for those anymore.
OTOH, Certificate Transparency Logs will give the game away, so there's that.
Are you saying that CAs should be refusing to issue certs for potentially spoofed domains?
I just mentioned LetsEncrypt because it's free and exceptionally easy to use. I'm not implying in any way they aren't providing a great service, it's just that that service also gets misused because it's cheap and easy.