British Intelligence Responds To Slashdot About Man-in-Middle Attack 256
Nerval's Lobster writes "The GCHQ agency, Britain's equivalent of the National Security Agency, reportedly used fake LinkedIn and Slashdot pages to load malware onto computers at Belgian telecommunications firm Belgacom. In an emailed statement to Slashdot, the GCHQ's Press and Media Affairs Office wrote: 'We have no comment to make on this particular story.' It added: 'All GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensure that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Intelligence and Security Committee.' Meanwhile, LinkedIn's representatives suggested they had no knowledge of the reported hack. 'We have read the same stories, and we want to clarify that we have never cooperated with any government agency,' a spokesperson from the social network wrote in an email to Slashdot, 'nor do we have any knowledge, with regard to these actions, and to date, we have not detected any of the spoofing activity that is being reported.' An IT security expert with extensive knowledge of government intelligence operations, but no direct insight into the GCHQ, hypothesized to Slashdot that carrying out a man-in-the-middle attack was well within the capabilities of British intelligence agencies, but that such a 'retail' operation also seemed somewhat out of character. 'Based on what we know they've done, they are doing industrialized, large scale traffic sweeping and net hacking,' he said. 'They operate a wholesale, with statistical techniques. By "statistical" I mean that they send something that may or may not work.' With that in mind, he added, it's plausible that the GCHQ has software that operates in a similar manner to the NSA's EGOTISTICAL GIRAFFE, and used it to redirect Belgacom employees to a fake download. 'However, the story has been slightly garbaged into it being fake [LinkedIn and Slashdot] accounts, as opposed to network spoofing.'" Update: You can read the official statement from Slashdot's parent company, Dice Holdings, here on our blog.
Re: @slashdot: use https per default! (Score:5, Interesting)
Using HTTPS is not the solution when the only thing people see is that some trusted certificate was used. If a trusted Certificate Authority was compromised or issued `fake' certificates for government spy agencies, the target wouldn't know that a MITM attack has occurred because the little green icon is showing just fine.
However, if we had something like a GPG content encoding, if the site hasn't already been trusted by the user, red flags will immediately be showing.
Like as like not, with the proliferation of CAs which exist, MITM attacks are easier than ever because people have been conditioned to trust HTTPS.
Re:Really? British intelligence went after slashdo (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a hard time believing that someone convinced them this site was worthwhile.
That's because you're letting your ego get in the way. This isn't about you. This is about one or more specific targets that they believed or suspected were slashdot users.
Re:British Intelligence Responds? (Score:4, Interesting)
Assuming this isn't a hoax, feathers successfully ruffled.
How often does GCHQ make an official statement in response to some random guys on the Internet claiming that they overstepped their bounds? It's surely not setting a precedent, so why has it respnded to this one?
["no comment"]
[junior PR flunky boilerplate sounding like it's from a FTSE 100 corp.]
Re:Heh. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny to see people finally realize that the world we're headed to is very similar to that of East Germany, with the slight difference that you won't be assured to have a house, a job and food every day. Probably these points were not among the good things to retain from the Commies, whereas global surveillance was.
Re:Heh. (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly! They claim that they use laws to control what they snoop, and have oversight. When the laws are "secret", the courts are "secret", and the oversight is internal how much should we trust them? None at all!
Not necessarily. Some things need to be secret. When we put spies on trial, we shouldn't showcase all the classified documents they stole for public inspection. It's evidence, but it's secret evidence -- and the sensitive nature of the documents is sufficient justification for doing so. The problem is not secrecy, anymore than keeping your password secret is a security vulnerability. The problem is when secrecy exceeds its mandate; when it crosses a line from matters of true national security to matters that are politically embarassing or unpopular. And as we can see in contemporary society, that line seems to be quite muddled.
What irks me is people's reactionary "teh guv'ment's tryin' to take away mah freedomz!" to every discussion presented about government surveillance and/or intelligence activities. They have to know that it's necessary at some level, but they reduce this wide breadth of space from no surveillance to police society to a binary. I don't understand why so many people engage in black and white thinking when the problem so obviously isn't as clear cut as the overwhelmingly vast majority of people argue it is.
I mean, the government's using circular logic, and that's wrong. But the people raging against it are using equally broken logic. And there's perfectly good discussion not happening because everyone flung themselves to the polar extremes. Why?
Re: @slashdot: use https per default! (Score:4, Interesting)
Although I like where your head is, wouldn't the CPU power required to do on-the-fly GPG decoding of content be prohibitive? Or am I misunderstanding the proposed solution?
A large amount of the content on the internet is static. The static assets can be stored on the disk, already signed. This has the added advantage that HTTPS cannot provide: The static assets are cacheable and they are tamper-proof, should the server be compromised.
When it comes to dynamic content, one can 'cheat' a little by reusing the same session key for the same connection. The startup cost is not much different than existing HTTPS which uses DH for key exchange.
It's not going to be much slower than what we have today with HTTPS for interactive sites, where humans are the slow link in the chain.
Re: @slashdot: use https per default! (Score:4, Interesting)
RFC 6844 [ietf.org] has a proposed DNS type for verifying the proper certificate was served (requires DNSSEC to make sure the DNS was not tampered with).
Re: @slashdot: use https per default! (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that certificates change regularly. What you really want is public key pinning, where you are warned if the public key changes, without regard to what CA signed it—not just the key fingerprint, either—the entire key. After all, you have the server's public key. Why would you ever start trusting a different public key for the same server?
AFAICT, there are only two valid to reasons rekey a server: if the key gets compromised (which, being a serious security problem, should be publicly disclosed on your server in some way) or because you're upgrading to a larger key. In the latter case, you should ideally sign the new key with the old key so that it is verifiable, and the browser should ignore that the old key is not trusted for key signing when it is only being used as a secondary signature for verifying a key change.
The death of morality (Score:3, Interesting)
... All GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensure that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight ...
Maybe in strict legal terms, what GCHQ has done, including the man-in-the-middle attack spoofing Slashdot's webpages to inject malwares to the intended (and/or unintended) victims, is Kosher, the official reply from GCHQ is but another confirmation that Morality Is Dead, for the regime holding power over many of those so-called "Democratic Nations"
I am no sociologist, so I do not know where the failure lies - it could be democracy itself, it could be society, it could be education, it could even be "trendy" - but...
... at the end of the day, when Morality dies, anything goes
What is more shocking is that, if the government is immoral, how long do you expect their subjects (the people, that is) to remain upright morally ?
Government (and/or regimes) are like parents.
If the parents are crooked, don't expect the children to be straight.
Re: @slashdot: use https per default! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, indeed. This meme that SSL is broken or useless is very damaging and needs to end.
The fact is that despite all the handwaving and noise, nobody has yet presented proof that a CA has been subverted by intelligence agencies, let alone knowingly. It's certainly possible that this has happened and one may think it is even likely, but in the absence of any proof it's hard to credibly argue the entire system is hosed.
The difficulty of course is finding such a proof. If a CA was found to have been routinely issuing certificates to intelligence agencies, it's very very likely that browser makers would revoke that CA and destroy the business. Their written policies are quite clear on this point and do not make governments special, that's why GoDaddy revoked LavaBit's SSL cert after learning the private key had been disclosed to the FBI. So far we don't have any evidence that the NSA or GCHQ were willing to risk destruction of a civilian business in order to reach one of their targets - though I guess there are still plenty of Snowden disclosures to come.
But even if there have been such certs issued, SSL is not useless. Firstly, it raises the complexity a lot. And secondly, there are initiatives underway to prevent subversion even by multi-billion-dollar intelligence agencies. For example the certificate transparency initiative [certificat...arency.org] is intending to upgrade the certificate format to contain a proof of inclusion in a public log. Browsers will start requiring the presence of these proofs in future, and thus it will no longer be possible to issue secret SSL certs that nobody can see except the victim. This is a large, complex upgrade of a massive infrastructure so it will take years, but eventually this system will raise the bar for SSL attackers to the point where they will either have to give up, or actually pass new laws that formally subvert SSL to the will of governments (at which point of course it does not matter if they are detected and there is no need to compromise CA's).
Which will happen is an open question at this point. However, Slashdot should get its ass into gear and switch on SSL and HSTS by default. Saying it's an option for logged in users just isn't good enough, especially when that option is so well buried I can't actually find it! SSL all the time should be the default, these days, there's just no reason not to anymore.