The argument regarding no certificate pinning seems to miss that just because I might be on a network that MITM's TLS traffic doesn't mean my device trusts the random CA used by the proxy. I'd just get a TLS error, right?
The argument regarding no certificate pinning seems to miss that just because I might be on a network that MITM's TLS traffic doesn't mean my device trusts the random CA used by the proxy. I'd just get a TLS error, right?
Not if someone can issue the certificate signed by the CA your phone trust.
Imagine being in a cafe nearby, say, embassy of the certain north African country known for pervasive and wide espionage actions, which decides to hijack traffic in this cafe.
Or imagine living in the country where almost all of the cabinet is literally (officially) being paid by the propaganda/lobbying body of such country.
Or living int he country where lawful surveillance can happen without the jury signoff, but at a while of any police officer.
Maybe its not common but frequent enough.
This is stopped by certificate transparency logs. Your software should refuse to accept a certificate which hasn’t been logged in the transparency logs, and if a rogue CA issues a fraudulent certificate, it will be detected.
> Imagine being in a cafe nearby, say, embassy of the certain north African country known for pervasive and wide espionage actions, which decides to hijack traffic in this cafe.
How would they get your phone to trust their CA? Connecting to a Wi-Fi network doesn’t change which CAs a device trusts.
Because there is a quadrillion trusted CAs in every device you might use. A good chunk of these CAs have been compromised at one point or another, and rogue certificates are sold in the dark market. Also any goverment can coerce a domiciled CA to issue certs for their needs.
If you go down this path you argue desktop browsing https is broken, which i dont think is a serious argument.
That is a wild claim. I can't imagine that being correct given how that's been abused in the past
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/iranian-man-middle-att...
It's a pretty huge list.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/126047
The chances of zero of these CAs having been compromised by state-level actors seems… slim.
Do you trust "Hongkong Post Root CA 3" not to fuck with things?
Your link's from 2011; the US government was still in the trusted list until 2018. https://www.idmanagement.gov/implement/announcements/04_appl...
> That is a wild claim
China telecom regularly has BGP announcements that conflict with level3's ASNs.
Just as a hint in case you want to dig more into the topic, RIR data is publicly available, so you can verify yourself who the offenders are.
Also check out the Geedge leaked source code, which also implements TLS overrides and inspection on a country scale. A lot of countries are customers of Geedge's tech stack, especially in the Middle East.
Just sayin' it's more common than you're willing to acknowledge.
Israel is not in Africa.
Not if you are part of an org that uses MDM and pushes their own CA to devices.
Ok, fair point. However, I would consider any MDM-enabled device fully "compromised" in the sense that the org can see and modify everything I do on it.
An MDM orga cannot install a trusted CA on non-supervised (company owned) devices. By default on BYOD these are untrusted and require manual trust. It also cannot see everything on your device - certainly not your email, notes or files, or app data.
If it is untrusted, you also won’t have a TLS connection be established based on that CA.
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