nationwide interception of Facebook & webmail login credentials in Tunisia

[Mark Lomas]

Some years ago (probably in 2000) I persuaded a major bank to remove the
majority of CA certificates from the key store of the browser they had
deployed.

The IT department regarded the change as a nuisance, but the Legal
department understood the problem as soon as I showed them the list of CAs.

May I conduct an informal survey? Who on this mailing list has not removed
any of the CA certificates that were pre-installed by whoever supplied your
browser?

        Mark


On 25 January 2011 20:24, Ian Batten <igb at batten.eu.org> wrote:

>
> On 25 Jan 2011, at 16:18, Passive PROFITS wrote:
>
> > That would not deal with the falsifying of certificates.  Assuming the
> code-base of this is not intentional corrupt, the addition of an extension
> such as certpatrol is also required (a firefox extension), to notify one
> when the SSL cert swap by the government/ISP (using the browser accepted as
> 'true' passported C.A.(s) under their control) has taken place (a MiTM is in
> progress notification function).  The other known way would be manual/local
> (each time) inspection of the cert fingerprint(s).  e.g. you note Facebook's
> fingerprint then check each time it's got the same 'print.  Then (once under
> notice the hack is under progress) you could retreat, or start playing your
> own pre-planned counter-measures ... depending on the peril of the
> situation, tactics, etc, call the government, depending on the nature of
> your business, etc.
>
> There's been some recent, if un-startling, discussion of this:
> http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/sroosa/flawed-legal-architecture-certificate-authority-trust-model
>
> I suspect that once you have more than a handful of CAs, it's for practical
> purposes impossible to get any meaningful assurance that they are all
> legitimate.   If CAs delegate their authority, it's difficult to even know
> that certificates whose chain of trust goes back to a CA you trust was
> actually issued by that CA.  And for as long as any CA can issue a
> certificate in any name, any domain can be subverted by any one of the CAs.
>
> Which means that certificates are as weak as the weakest CA you trust,
> unless that CA in turn trusts a yet weaker CA.
>
> I've not looked at this in detail (perhaps I should) but I think it's
> possible in most browsers to trust _no_ CAs and yet trust individual
> certificates, which might have the required semantics: when a certificate is
> encountered, you check it (by whatever out of band mechanism you deem
> appropriate) and then add it to your certificate store, but you do not add
> its certifying keys.
>
> ian
>
>
>
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