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From: privacy@vortex.com Date: March 24, 2010 3:53:44 PM AST To: privacy-list@vortex.com Subject: [ PRIVACY Forum ] Surveillance via bogus SSL certificates
----- Forwarded message from Dave Farber <dave@farber.net> -----
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:34:27 -0400 From: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net> Subject: [IP] Surveillance via bogus SSL certificates Reply-To: dave@farber.net To: ip <ip@v2.listbox.com>
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From: Matt Blaze <mab@crypto.com> Date: March 24, 2010 3:09:19 PM EDT To: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net> Subject: Surveillance via bogus SSL certificates
Dave,
For IP if you'd like.
Over a decade ago, I observed that commercial certificate authorities protect you from anyone from whom they are unwilling to take money. That turns out to be wrong; they don't even do that.
Chris Soghoian and Sid Stamm published a paper today that describes a simple "appliance"-type box, marketed to law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the US and elsewhere, that uses bogus certificates issued by *any* cooperative certificate authority to act as a "man-in-the-middle" for encrypted web traffic.
Their paper is available at http://files.cloudprivacy.net/ssl-mitm.pdf
What I found most interesting (and surprising) is that this sort of surveillance is widespread enough to support fairly mature, turnkey commercial products. It carries some significant disadvantages for law enforcement -- most particularly it can be potentially can be detected.
I briefly discuss the implications of this kind of surveillance at http://www.crypto.com/blog/spycerts/
Also, Wired has a story here: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/packet-forensics/
-matt
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