>Independently of the request for inclusion, this group could discuss if the
>Kazakhstan's CAs should be blacklisted, by adding them to the Mozilla CA list
>using negative distrust flags
That would have some pretty bad consequences. With the MITM CA cert enabled,
Borat [0] can read every Kazakh user's email, but no-one else can. With the
MITM CA blacklisted, Borat can still read every Kazakh user's email, but so
can everyone else on the planet. So the choice is between privacy against
everyone but one party, and privacy against no-one.
Peter.
[0] The personification of the Kazakh CA-enabled MITM, following the pattern
of Alice, Bob, Mallet, etc.
>On Sat, 2016-01-09 at 14:11 +0000, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>> That would have some pretty bad consequences. With the MITM CA cert enabled,
>> Borat [0] can read every Kazakh user's email, but no-one else can. With the
>> MITM CA blacklisted, Borat can still read every Kazakh user's email, but so
>> can everyone else on the planet. So the choice is between privacy against
>> everyone but one party, and privacy against no-one.
>
>I don't understand why blacklisting a MITM CA would enable everyone to read
>the data that passes through the MITM. Could you please explain? (It sounds
>like there is either a misunderstanding on your or on my side.)
For the MITM to work, Borat will be proxying all traffic out of (and into) the
country.
If you allow the MITM cert, only Borat/the proxy can read everyone's traffic.
If you disallow the cert and turn off encryption, Borat can still read
everyone's traffic, but so can everyone else on the planet.
The "can't connect to the site without TLS" issue isn't really there either,
Borat will connect using TLS so TLS-only sites will continue to work, it's
only the downstream users who don't get any protection.
Peter.
>> If you disallow the cert and turn off encryption, Borat can still read
>> everyone's traffic, but so can everyone else on the planet.
>
>Who said "turn off encryption"?
If you don't allow the MITM cert, which is needed to enable encryption in the
browser, you don't get any encryption. Disallowing the MITM cert has the
effect of turning off encryption.
Peter.
>Or we ensure that firefox and chrome refuses to see those sites at all,
>because they refuse a downgrade attack.
So users will switch to whatever browser doesn't block it, because given the
choice between connecting to Facebook insecurely or not connecting at all,
about, oh, 100% of users will choose to connect anyway.
>Let the nation state basically block all of the sites they want to MITM and
>see how that works out.
It'll work out just fine for them, because what you're giving users is a
choice between using the Internet and not using it, and close to 100% will
choose to use it no matter what. We've already got real-world stats on that
for several countries, for example 700M Chinese folks use the Internet despite
intrusive government monitoring.
Even if every single browser vendor decides to block (which will never happen,
who's going to consciously cut off their user base like that?), all Borat has
to do is distribute a patched version of whatever browser or browsers they
like and/or distribute a small installer that injects Borat's CA cert, and
everything's fine, with or without the browser vendors' cooperation.
Peter.