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Is pki the next part of the global internet censorship regime?
In a previous post, we discussed the takedown of a foreign website that violated texas laws. I argued that domain takedowns are unlikely to be used for global censorship. But these days https certificates are becoming nearly obligatory, and the system around them is much more haphazard.
As a sideshow on the iran situation, the pgsa dot ir website is trying to stay up in the face of the sanctions. The website originally had a letsencrypt certificate, but obviously the US was able to get that yanked. After a week, they managed to get their hands on a chinese certificate. But surprisingly, only a few days later, the certificate was revoked, making the https site unviewable on certain browsers. I'm not certain exactly why the chinese issuer revoked it, but it could likely be due to pressure from above.
Unlike the internet, Google, Apple, and Mozilla pretty much control almost every browser in the world. And for an issuer it seems that there are no rules when it comes to having your certificates accepted on those browsers, simply beg and kiss ass to each of them until they decide to let you in the club. This means that anywhere, having an https website happens at the whim of these 3 American companies, and each one pretty much has a veto over the process. It's no wonder that they all go to lengths to put up big warnings and gimp functionality on http websites.
Of course it remains to be seen whether or not this lever of censorship will be used in the future and for what purposes. Can an SF judge order Mozilla to start rejecting certain certificates? Not sure. Right now there's also the escape hatch of simply using http, but browser makers will continue to push more and more invasive warnings about it.
The PKI infrastructure for https was always half a scam, more a license to print money for whomever could convince the browsers to add their root key than anything. (Dear website owner who (had to) pay every year for your ssl certificate: check how long your browsers root certificates stay valid. Feel scammed yet?)
The fact that it is largely independent of DNS seems particularly silly. Certificates tied to hierarchical domain names would probably be an improvement. Everyone running a country code TLD could simply specify which certificates are valid for that particular TLD. Let DENIC (or German legislation) decide which CAs can validate .de certificates. Then it would seem reasonable to require devices with TLS-capable browsers sold in Germany to have these CAs and only these CAs enabled for .de. For bonus points, simply ship the TLS certificates over dnssec, so browsers only need to know the public keys of the root servers (while also adding non-Western root servers).
Similarly, Iran would have CAs for .ir. Yes, this means that they could MITM any .ir website, but I do not think that many dissident sites run under .ir in the first place. (The fix there would be a browser plugin which uploads any certificate chain it encounters. So any bad actor could be easily identified.)
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Also, it is becoming increasingly clear that the US can not be trusted as a steward of the internet any more than it can be trusted as a steward of free trade or the international rule-based order.
Trump's little war really does not seem to go well. In the beginning, his actions could be described as "grand but foolish", like assassinating the ayatollah or dropping a lot of bombs on the IRGC.
Now, he has escalated to ... (check notes) ... threatening a trade war with China if it does not follow US sanctions?
And the next plan to stop Iran from blocking Hormuz is to use the US influence on the internet to make the Iranian Persian Gulf Strait Authority unable to have a website which is loaded by default browsers? Surely that will be enough to get an unconditional surrender.
And if Iran does not bow to this, one could apply further pressure by evicting the Iranian delegation to the United Nations, I am sure that this would be devastating to them and well worth any transient reputational damage to the US as the host of the UN.
Certificates are free nowadays from any issuer worth your trust. I get the backlash against forcing HTTPS everywhere, but it is a genuine improvement over "walk into a coffee shop and pwn people's bank accounts/social media/email with them have no recourse or knowledge"
The benefit of the CA model is that it can assume that nation-states are, they themselves, a threat, and moreso than the browser developers. Sure you might not trust the preloaded list of certs, but you can always change that if you want (or ship your own browser with your own preloaded certs)
Obviously nation states are a threat, the problem is that CAs are not a very good way to mitigate that threat.
I am sure that the NSA can freely generate whatever certificates they want for at least half the CAs in my browser, but I am also assuming that they would prefer to just use the genuine private keys of the server instead. They can just hit google with a national security letter and make them cough up their keys. Much cleaner, because if you use a non-standard cert chain, there is always a chance your victim will publish it, which will embarrass your CAs.
The number of places where businesses will feel that defying the local government on matters of national security will best serve the interests of their shareholders is likely to be small.
For the record, I am not against SSL, I think it is pretty great actually. I just don't like the CA model where some 60 organizations have the authority to certify arbitrary domains.
Per Claude, about 5-8 CAs offer free certificates. That leaves some 50 certificates whom my browser trusts which you claim are not worth my trust. Trouble is, if I remove these, a good fraction of websites will not work any more.
If your point is that we should get rid of all the CAs other than Let's Encrypt, I think that this might actually be am improvement. Though I would also take crowdsourced validation. Let the website display its in-org certificate chain (with one of the root certs on top, if it must), but then let me query whatever third party I trust to see if that certificate is commonly used for that particular domain. (Though that would require judgement, which is not something one can expect of most internet users, sadly.)
At the nation-state things are on an entirely different level.
The frontier of things is resting on developments in adversarial machine learning. If you look at a lot of polymorphic variants of attacks from threat actors (the basic premise being that you want your code to change form without changing function), don’t imagine it as a rigid block of code but as a melody. If a system is trained on data to search for something like “Beethoven’s Fifth,” it’ll trigger an alarm whenever it hears those four notes. The “melody” itself is the logical flow of data; the way variables are manipulated and syscalls are invoked. The “instruments” are the specific CPU registers and the “tempo” is the sequence of junk instructions (e.g. NOP-sleds or opaque predicates).
The most sophisticated engines nation-states are working on involve heavily leveraging AST Rewriting. What it does is at the time of compilation, its first parsed into an abstract syntax tree (AST). The engine then intercepts the process and applies several layers of transformation:
It’ll swap registers. If a routine uses a register like
eax, ebxandecx, it’ll swap them foredi, esi, andedxthroughout the block, which changes the binary encoding of every instruction without altering its logic.Substituting instructions like replacing
add eax, 1withinc eaxor more complex substitutions like replacingxor eax, eaxwithsub eax, eax.Transpositioning code by reordering the blocks using
JMPinstructions maintain the original execution flow, which changes the physical layout.Inserting dead/junk instructions that don’t have any impact on the program state into the execution path.
So a basic register shuffling may look something like this:
B8 01 00 00 00 05 02 00 00 00 (mov eax, 1; add eax, 2). That’s a simple routine that moves a value into a register and then performs an addition. And so a security stack may go in and look for the standard signature of that hex pattern. So then what happens is the code will rewrite that sequence using opaque predicates, which is just a conditional branch where the same outcome is mathematically fixed but computationally difficult or expensive for a static analysis to determine. So for instance,if (x^2 + 1 > 0) (…)will always be true for real numbers; and by wrapping the payload in these logical constructs, you’re forcing the defender to execute the code in order to understand it and in doing so, you’re turning the defender’s own security stack against itself by getting it to run. Because by the time the EDR’s analyzed the payload of the current iteration, it’s already moved on, re-coded and now presented a new, unrecognized face to the next layer of defense. It doesn’t hide from the light, it changes what the light reveals. This is why a lot of vendors like CrowdStrike predicate the heart of their stack on behavioral-heuristic driven conflict and not signature analysis. The only constant is change itself.More options
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