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Parallel Reconstruction of Lawful TLS Wiretapping

135 points by jerrythegerbil

by 0xbadcafebee

5 subcomments

Yes this is to be expected. I've mentioned multiple times over the years that TLS CA issuance & validation's many security holes (>=14 at last count) could be solved by changing how certificates are issued. I've never had the kind of clout to get that message wide enough that anyone would take it serious.
One of Web PKI's security holes is the fact that any CA can issue valid certs for any domain. The only official "mitigation" for that is voluntary and can be defeated.
The solution to that is to rearchitect the Web PKI ecosystem to use domain registrars as the sole source of truth for which CA is allowed to issue valid certs, in addition to cryptographic fingerprints of the source of the originator and issuer. I won't rehash it here but it's not technically difficult and would make it so only the domain owner could issue certs, and valid certs could only come from the CA the domain owner authorizes.
Maybe if this keeps happening, people will realize it's worth working on? But I doubt it, as a lot of money is at stake, and nobody wants to risk that just to stop governments and cybercriminals from spying on the occasional connection. If it was blatant and obvious then they might have to act; as long as it's kept covert and hard to prove, things stay the same.

by aleksejs

2 subcomments

The jabber.ru post referenced here presents clear evidence (in the section titled "Network") that the malicious actor was able to reroute traffic going to the legitimate jabber.ru server. An attacker in this position does not need an RCE to get a cert, they can just get one issued the normal way, because they do effectively control the IP address that the domain is pointing to.

by arowthway

0 subcomment

We should have listened to Rachel!
>I've been aware of the ACME protocol for a while. I have tech notes going back as far as 2018, and every time I looked at it, I recoiled in horror. The whole thing amounts to "throw in every little bit of webshit tech that we can", and it makes for a real problem to try to implement this in a safe and thorough way. Many of the existing clients are also scary code, and I was not about to run any of them on my machines. They haven't earned the right to run with privileges for my private keys and/or ability to frob the web server (as root!) with their careless ways.
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/05/22/ssl/

by nl

2 subcomments

This isn't what parallel reconstruction means. This seems to be reverse engineering the attack.

by ls612

6 subcomments

I thought certificate transparency was the thing that was supposed to prevent exactly what this article is describing. What if anything is incorrect about my model of the world in this respect?

by edelbitter

1 subcomments

>the various ACME clients like acme.sh are run with elevated privileges
Its really not that difficult to not grant excessive privileges - at the very least for recurring ("cron") runs, once filesystem structure, cache invalidation triggers and web server configuration are in place. Its a shame this is still taught in the "just run as admin" style.

by perching_aix

1 subcomments

> TLS wiretapping with root-CA-signed certificates is a thing that both happens and verifiably has happened. (...) This being a fact rather than a conspiracy theory tends to upset people.
Maybe what people get upset about is catchy misleading [0] summaries like this, which suggest [0] a CA - nation state collusion, despite the actual story going in a completely different [0] direction? The thing that would be actually big news [0]?
[0] in the eye of the beholder of course, as always

by codedokode

2 subcomments

by TZubiri

1 subcomments

by Peacefulz

0 subcomment

by janmo

0 subcomment

So it looks like Hetzner is doing the same thing OVHCloud did with EncroChat and SkyECC. But hey, we have GDPR, keep your data hosted in the EU it is very "safe" there (ironic).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_Sky_Global#Communi...
EDIT: Based on German law this certainly is not a lawful interception but one made by an intelligence agency.

by ghostlyInc

0 subcomment