That was what I was thinking of (but worded it badly in the middle of my rant!)
If I wanted to intercept all your traffic to any external endpoint without detection I would have to compromise the exact CA that signed your certificates each time, because it would be a clear sign of concern if e.g. Comodo started issuing certificates for Google. Although of course as long as a CA is in my trust bundle then the traffic could be intercepted, it's just that the CT logs would make it very clear that something bad had happened.
The whole point of the logs is that they're tamper-evident. If you think the certificate you've seen wasn't logged you can show proof. If you think the logs tell you something different from everybody else you can prove that too.
It is striking that we don't see that. We reliably see people saying "obviously" the Mossad or the NSA are snooping but they haven't shown any evidence that there's tampering
> We reliably see people saying "obviously" the Mossad or the NSA are snooping but they haven't shown any evidence that there's tampering
Why would they use the one approach that leaves a verifiable trace? That'd be foolish.
- They can intercept everything in the comfort of Cloudflare's datacenters
- They can "politely" ask Cloudflare, AWS, Google cloud, etc. to send them a copy of the private keys for certificates that have already been issued
- They either have a backdoor, or have the capability to add a backdoor in the hardware that generates those keys in the first place, should more convenient forms of access fail.
mark_round|2 months ago
If I wanted to intercept all your traffic to any external endpoint without detection I would have to compromise the exact CA that signed your certificates each time, because it would be a clear sign of concern if e.g. Comodo started issuing certificates for Google. Although of course as long as a CA is in my trust bundle then the traffic could be intercepted, it's just that the CT logs would make it very clear that something bad had happened.
tialaramex|2 months ago
It is striking that we don't see that. We reliably see people saying "obviously" the Mossad or the NSA are snooping but they haven't shown any evidence that there's tampering
dns_snek|2 months ago
Why would they use the one approach that leaves a verifiable trace? That'd be foolish.
- They can intercept everything in the comfort of Cloudflare's datacenters
- They can "politely" ask Cloudflare, AWS, Google cloud, etc. to send them a copy of the private keys for certificates that have already been issued
- They either have a backdoor, or have the capability to add a backdoor in the hardware that generates those keys in the first place, should more convenient forms of access fail.
rnhmjoj|2 months ago
It probably just means they are asking the providers to hand over the data, no need to perform active attacks.