3 comments

  • tptacek58 minutes ago
    All serious attackers are man-in-the-middle attackers (usually by tricking victims into diverting their own traffic, not literally by inserting themselves into the network path). Passive-only attackers went extinct along with the backbone-connected Sun servers that were used to launch those attacks.<p>I don&#x27;t so much care about the rest of this analysis, but you can&#x27;t call an unauthenticated TLS session &quot;secure&quot;.
    • stingraycharles33 minutes ago
      &gt; usually by tricking victims into diverting their own traffic<p>What does this mean practically? Getting a VPN profile installed ?
      • tptacek31 minutes ago
        No, the simplest (but far from the only) example is DNS injection.
      • embedding-shape28 minutes ago
        Make the web unusable unless you&#x27;re protected by your &quot;DDOS&quot; protection, offer a free service to solve the problem. Or provide a free service with as little friction to start replacing private&#x2F;internal networking with, ideally with wide platform support. Or provide some sort of alternative &quot;private&quot; altnet, promising anonymity and access to clearnet via some sort of gateways, specifically for murky stuff.
        • alwa1 minute ago
          Or, of course, go high-touch: sell hyper-e2e-encrypted, hardware+software mobile devices directly to crime syndicates, explicitly to keep their traffic safe from prying governmental men-in-the-middle…<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;EncroChat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;EncroChat</a>
  • arcfour21 minutes ago
    &gt;Nobody checks your private keys<p>You&#x27;re implying that they should???
    • taspeotis17 minutes ago
      I suspect private keys should receive a nominal check, that they can&#x27;t be guessed by smashing the number 4 on a numpad.
      • arcfour7 minutes ago
        So we either expose the key material for inspection (very obviously bad) or we try and brute force how many possible &quot;weak&quot; private keys from the public key to see if they check out?<p>Note that this is on the order of trillions of useless computations at least per year since almost everyone just uses a CSPRNG or HWRNG available in all modern computers to generate their keys sanely.<p>Now, for CAs, sure because that is a very small number of certificates. But that&#x27;s a completely different discussion and also however eMudhra managed to lop off all of the entropy except for the final byte was wildly incompetent and not something a layman would even consider doing.<p>It&#x27;s also not the job of the CA to detect you being an idiot. You can go post your private key online after getting your certificate if you so wish, the CA may revoke it if they find out but they&#x27;re just in the business of helping <i>you</i> secure <i>your communications</i> with others. If you wish for them to actually be insecure... You are silly, but that was always allowed.
  • mplewis29 minutes ago
    &gt;the whole system doesn&#x27;t even work<p>Yeah, I saw a fire hydrant leaking the other day. Time to tear out all the plumbing, the whole system doesn&#x27;t even work!