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Comment by 0l | Hacker News Reader

Certificate transparency is intended to solve this issue.

Why would an agency wanting to MITM you publish data about the MITM certificates?

Because browsers can require certificates to be in the certificate transparency logs to be valid. Chrome already does this. If a government convinces a CA to create a malicious certificate and publishes this cert to the CT logs to perform MITM, it will get found out and that CA can close its doors.

Also, if someones DOES have this ability and gets found out, e.g. someone finds the certificate, it makes it clear someone had that ability. You'll know that root CA is compromised one way or another and it potentially gets burnt.

Thus, they'll only use it under the strictest smallest of circumstances where the reward outweighs the risk, in a high profile scenario, rather than rolling it out willy nilly.

Similar to when threat actors use a 0day.. if they use it all the time it eventually gets discovered and fixed. If they save it for a special case they may manage to use it a couple of times before it gets patched.

How does the MITM victim get a non-MITM connection to the CT logs so they can be sure to get the correct ones?

Browsers enforce that certificates are signed by two independent CT logs. The public keys of which is shipped by the browser. So a MITM would need to compromise a trusted CA and two CT logs to be able to pull off an attack undetected. Maybe not impossible but much more difficult than just a single CA compromise.

By using pinned certificates which are hardcoded into all the major browsers.

Yeah for some reason I don't feel confident about Mogadishu Internet Trust Corp and many others.

Why wouldn't the TLA override that as well? Perhaps by leaning on the company that supposedly owns the domain.

The browser is verifying that the certificate appears in public certificate logs. So if a TLA forges a certificate (whether with the cooperation of a certificate provider, DNS provider or domain owner) that is now part of the public record. And if they do it with any domain that has enough eyeballs, someone would presumably notice. Not to mention that it's an easy way for agencies from rival countries to tip a reporter or security researcher off that it happened.

Of course in reality most browsers don't actually check the certificate logs but only require timestamps signed by certificate logs that prove that at least two certificate logs know of the certificate. A TLA that can pressure at least two logs to provide those timestamps without actually publishing the certificates isn't really stopped. But at least that widens the circle of people who have to be in on the conspiracy.

In a perfect world browsers would do spot checks against the actual certificate logs, and require that the signed timestamps are from logs that are unlikely to be influenced by the same actor (e.g. a Western, a Russian-sphere and a Chinese-sphere certificate log). Your guess why we don't do either is as good as mine

That would be compromising the domain owner, rather than the threat model of Certificate Transparency which is compromised Certificate Authorities, especially given the number of government owned, publicly trusted (sub-)CAs.

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