
Kazakhstan's National HTTPS Certificate Is Cancelled - wyldfire
https://tsarka.org/post/national-certificate-cancelled
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slenk
Was posted earlier today by a very new 'tsarka' account:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20632373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20632373)

Have you heard of Tsarka before? They don't have any press releases from when
it started? As others have echoed - could this just be a state sponsored
actor?

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steve19
As I wrote in a comment on that post:

"I can't help but think if the government were wanting to spread positive
propoganda about these tests, your post is exactly what they would write:
"everyone wins and everyone is happy with our results of MTIMing the entire
country".

Who knows how much information the state hoovered up during this "pilot".

~~~
slenk
I should have quoted you directly - I just didn't look deep enough.

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marksomnian
Discussion in mozilla.dev.security.policy (mailing list to discuss TLS
implementation in Firefox/NSS):
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/wnuKAhACo3E)

~~~
walrus01
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567114](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567114)

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southerntofu
Am i the only one reading this article as a harsh criticism veiled to pass
censorship? I'm not sure, though, but this sentence sounds absurdly false: «
Everyone got their own: we got the free Internet, the government got an
instrument for fighting digital weapons. »

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andrerm
> the tests were completed, all the tasks set during the pilot were
> successfully solved

So, it was a pilot and it succeeded. Now what?

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ilaksh
How do we know that other super CAs aren't being used for MITM by other
countries?

~~~
southerntofu
Some are. The French and Tunisian governments have been caught emitting fake
TLS certificates through their national CA in the past.

There's probably many more who don't get caught because their attacks are more
targeted.

The whole Public Key Infrastructure is fully insecure because of this property
that any root CA can emit a internet-wide valid certificate for any domain.

That's why people work on DANE for DNS and Tor onion services (among others)
to reduce the attack surface to the name resolution level, which in the case
of onion services equals breaking an ed25519 keypair because the onion domain
name is tied to the key.

We need to ditch PKI as soon as possible!

~~~
hedora
PKI weaknesses extend far beyond state sponsored attacks.

Things like Let’s Encrypt allow anyone that can intercept 100% of the traffic
to your site to get a signed cert for your domain with no further validation.
Unless your site is directly peered to multiple backbones, you are trusting at
least one service provider not to man in the middle your traffic.

Cert pinning sort of protects against this, but it is widely considered
impractical.

The certificate transparency efforts also sort of protect against this, though
I think there are still CA’s that don’t participate. As long as browsers
accept certs from those CA’s, certificate transparency doesn’t solve the
problem either. (Also, what percentage of sites actually monitor to see if
there are malicious certificates for their domains?)

~~~
southerntofu
> Things like Let’s Encrypt

Any CA will do that. Paying a hundred bucks for a certificate will has never
stopped a malicious actor, therefore Let's Encrypt does not introduce any new
concern.

> Cert pinning sort of protects against this

DANE was designed for this. Since DNS is always a SPOF on the web, registering
TLS public keys in DNS reduces the attack surface (instead of introducing a
new channel for transport security).

> The certificate transparency efforts also sort of protect against this

That's bullshit. Nothing prevents a CA to emit certificates without declaring
them. We should not rely on those big corporations for our security: our
interests are FAR from aligned.

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mikece
Don’t believe it — Uzbek propaganda!!!

