If whatever cert is presented by a remote website doesn’t have a certificate signed by one of those 52 organizations, your browser is going to throw up a warning page instead of showing content. KT Corporation, the ISP in question, isn’t one of those organizations.
They can go create a CA if they want, but it doesn’t do them any good unless it’s trusted by Firefox (or whatever browser people use, but I’m using Firefox, and I expect that basically the same CAs will be trusted by any browser, so…)
Thanks for the explainer, but that’s not what I meant.
For example: If I, an ISP in Beijing went to BEIJING CERTIFICATE AUTHORITY Co., Ltd. which is on the list, and had my cert issued by them for foobar.com that listed them as the root trust, wouldn’t that work? Because the service operating there currently is illegal and I need to take it down, i don’t see how or why they could refuse. If they can’t do this for ISPs, then certainly law enforcement should be able to force them to comply, I would assume.
If I then went to abuse that cert and spread malware on my fake cloned site, then what are the affected users going to do, call the cops and tell them the illegal seedbox is down?
This is the only way I can see governments being able to display blocked website notices, takedown notices and other MITM insertions demonstrably happening in all sorts of countries without triggering a “back to safety” warning in most browsers.
This has to be possible, because otherwise the observable results don’t make any sense.
I’m not necessarily saying they did the attack this way instead of just simply spreading malicious torrents which is far easier, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t be able to do this.
There are only 52 organizations that Firefox trusts to act as CAs. An ISP isn’t normally going to be on there.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Included_Certificates
https://ccadb.my.salesforce-sites.com/mozilla/CACertificatesInFirefoxReport
If whatever cert is presented by a remote website doesn’t have a certificate signed by one of those 52 organizations, your browser is going to throw up a warning page instead of showing content. KT Corporation, the ISP in question, isn’t one of those organizations.
They can go create a CA if they want, but it doesn’t do them any good unless it’s trusted by Firefox (or whatever browser people use, but I’m using Firefox, and I expect that basically the same CAs will be trusted by any browser, so…)
Thanks for the explainer, but that’s not what I meant.
For example: If I, an ISP in Beijing went to BEIJING CERTIFICATE AUTHORITY Co., Ltd. which is on the list, and had my cert issued by them for foobar.com that listed them as the root trust, wouldn’t that work? Because the service operating there currently is illegal and I need to take it down, i don’t see how or why they could refuse. If they can’t do this for ISPs, then certainly law enforcement should be able to force them to comply, I would assume.
If I then went to abuse that cert and spread malware on my fake cloned site, then what are the affected users going to do, call the cops and tell them the illegal seedbox is down?
This is the only way I can see governments being able to display blocked website notices, takedown notices and other MITM insertions demonstrably happening in all sorts of countries without triggering a “back to safety” warning in most browsers.
This has to be possible, because otherwise the observable results don’t make any sense.
I’m not necessarily saying they did the attack this way instead of just simply spreading malicious torrents which is far easier, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t be able to do this.