<story><title>New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services</title><url>https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/new_nsa_leak_sh.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josteink</author><text>If this is true, and that NSA has been MITMing providers like Google, they are undermining the already shabby trust the US cloud-industry has attempted to build. I doubt Google and friends are very happy about that, since that&amp;#x27;s their one big basket where all the money comes in.&lt;p&gt;NSA in their eagerness to do rampant spying on everyone have had quite some collateral. They have decided to compromise the &lt;i&gt;one&lt;/i&gt; thing which allows us to communicate securely on the internet: trust.&lt;p&gt;Right now we need to find out which (root?) CAs are compromised by the NSA. Long term it would probably be a very wise decision to revoke &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; US-based CA from the default trusted-list of browsers and OSes.&lt;p&gt;We cannot have untrustworthy CAs in a system based on trust. That&amp;#x27;s simply not an option.&lt;p&gt;Edit: As I&amp;#x27;ve been pondering for a while (and which was also pointed out on reddit) we now have a situation where self-signed certs are more secure than CA-issued ones. They are the only ones you know can&amp;#x27;t be faked. How backwards is that?&lt;p&gt;The NSA is ruining the internet one piece at a time. The NSA needs to be dismantled.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>semenko</author><text>The HSTS commits &amp;#x2F;maybe&amp;#x2F; suggest that Google thinks a &lt;i&gt;Verisign&lt;/i&gt; intermediate was signing MITMs for Google properties. They just blacklisted &amp;quot;VeriSignClass3SSPIntermediateCA&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com/23523051&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;chromiumcodereview.appspot.com&amp;#x2F;23523051&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that the associated bug is private (&lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=173460&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;code.google.com&amp;#x2F;p&amp;#x2F;chromium&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;detail?id=173460&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a good explanation of the &amp;quot;bad_static_spki_hashes&amp;quot; parameter here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://ritter.vg/blog-cas_and_pinning.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ritter.vg&amp;#x2F;blog-cas_and_pinning.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services</title><url>https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/new_nsa_leak_sh.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josteink</author><text>If this is true, and that NSA has been MITMing providers like Google, they are undermining the already shabby trust the US cloud-industry has attempted to build. I doubt Google and friends are very happy about that, since that&amp;#x27;s their one big basket where all the money comes in.&lt;p&gt;NSA in their eagerness to do rampant spying on everyone have had quite some collateral. They have decided to compromise the &lt;i&gt;one&lt;/i&gt; thing which allows us to communicate securely on the internet: trust.&lt;p&gt;Right now we need to find out which (root?) CAs are compromised by the NSA. Long term it would probably be a very wise decision to revoke &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; US-based CA from the default trusted-list of browsers and OSes.&lt;p&gt;We cannot have untrustworthy CAs in a system based on trust. That&amp;#x27;s simply not an option.&lt;p&gt;Edit: As I&amp;#x27;ve been pondering for a while (and which was also pointed out on reddit) we now have a situation where self-signed certs are more secure than CA-issued ones. They are the only ones you know can&amp;#x27;t be faked. How backwards is that?&lt;p&gt;The NSA is ruining the internet one piece at a time. The NSA needs to be dismantled.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lambda</author><text>Didn&amp;#x27;t the slides show that it was the Diginotar compromise?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We cannot have untrustworthy CAs in a system based on trust. That&amp;#x27;s simply not an option.&lt;p&gt;The entire CA trust model is broken. In the trust model, any CA can issue certs for any domain; so a Chinese CA could issue Google certs, or a US CA could issue certs for the Dutch government.&lt;p&gt;Self-signed certs with certificate pinning are indeed more likely to be secure than CA certs. Of course, you can do both; CA signed certs (which does add a small amount of trustworthiness, as the CA is at least supposed to do a little work to verify a real-world identity), and use certificate pinning to avoid this kind of attack.</text></comment>