Gmail.com being MITM'd by Iran using this certificate

http://pastebin.com/ff7Yg663

by koenigdavidmj • 15 years ago

316 184 15 years ago

pastebin.com

0x0• 15 years ago

Found a pastebin with slightly more info: http://pastebin.com/SwCZqskV

packetlss• 15 years ago

In order to mitigate attacks like this Firefox users can use: http://convergence.io/

sp3326• 15 years ago

Interesting, but how do you use it?

orillian• 15 years ago

convergence is not compatable with FF 6.0 btw. You'll need to manually check if your using 6.0.

windexh8er• 15 years ago

There's also another, similar, project called Perspectives: http://perspectives-project.org/

The Syrian government was doing this recently as well: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/syrian-man-middle-agai...

Oh and don't forget about the EFF's SSL Observatory: https://www.eff.org/observatory

J_Dalton• 15 years ago

How easy is it to MITM the convergence requests themselves? And does it send all of my web-browsing habits to the notaries? How much money would I have to pay for someone to run a notary for me and would that be safe?

sp3326• 15 years ago

OK, how do we remove this CA from our computers?

koenigdavidmj2• 15 years ago

Firefox extension to do the trick is linked below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938623

yuhong3• 15 years ago

In Firefox, go to Edit->Preferences, click the Advanced icon, go to the Encryption tab, and then click View Certificates.

sp3326• 15 years ago

Thanks, I remembered it was something easy but my Google-fu was failing me. And what about Chrome/IE/Safari?

drtse42• 15 years ago

In chrome looks like you can't remove it, but at least you can disable the use of that CA to identify sites,ecc... from preference>manage certificates.

wonderzombie• 15 years ago

Chrome uses whatever the OS uses, as far as I can tell. Preferences > Manage Certificates just opens up the Keychain Access app. Upthread are instructions for how to do it from there.

evgen• 15 years ago

On a Mac, go to Keychain Access, hit the padlock in the upper left to unlock the system keychain with an admin account, select System Roots from the list of available Keychains in the upper left, find and select DigiNotar Root CA, get info (command-I or hit the i in the bottom area of this window), open the Trust section, for "When using this certificate" select Never Trust.

magoghm• 15 years ago

Anybody knows how to view/delete the root certificates on an iPad? From what I've seen, it seems like you can only view/delete the certificates you have installed yourself.

down_with_ssl2• 15 years ago

That's right. iPhone and iPad wireless carrier profiles come with special carrier root CAs. You can't delete them, and by using them, your carrier can easily MITM your IMAP password, Google cookie, online banking credentials, or anything else you do over SSL. Your carrier's unfettered access is in addition to the Department of Defence Root CA, the China Internet Network Information Center Root CA, and the others who enjoy the same privilege already. Apple just made it easier to hide by making it impossible for you to actually see the chain of trust in Mobile Safari.

Interestingly, this is why corporations and governments managing secret information continue to rely on Blackberry, where each device gets a locked certificate on activation. That provides the only serious protection from man-in-the-middle attacks in the wireless industry today. Remember the public pressure on RIM to support wiretapping in India? They were the only company not making it easy.

zrail• 15 years ago

I checked and the cert from gmail.com for me is from Thawte. Is this a targeted attack toward only those in Iran?

yuhong3• 15 years ago

I think so. This kind of thing are almost always targeted attacks.

uxp• 15 years ago

The Thawte certificate is the certificate issued to google by request of google. This certificate is apparently being used to MITM connections to gmail that originate inside Iran. Outside of Iran BGPing a major ISP into routing through them, or setting up a standard "phishing" mirror site, no one outside of Iran should worry much.

It still is a good idea to blacklist that root certificate on your internet devices though. If this certificate is being used, who knows what other websites it has issued legitimate but malicious certificates for.

drtse42• 15 years ago

...and issued directly by google for *.google.com

tlrobinson3• 15 years ago

Most likely. It would be pretty impressive if the Iranian government were able to MITM every Gmail user in the world.

down_with_ssl2• 15 years ago

Impressive? Do you remember the news that China published routing that sent all traffic for Facebook through Beijing? Given that the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) root CA comes with every browser these days, all it takes for a hostile entity is a fake BGP advertised route through a compromised router to make that happen.

wxs• 15 years ago

If you want to disable diginotar's root CA on your Mac (for Safari/Chrome) you can open Keychain Access, select the "System Roots" keychain at the top left, find the diginotar certificate in the list, and delete it (or disable it, which is what I did).

EDIT: This definitely works for Safari, not 100% sure if it does for Chrome after all.

technomancy• 15 years ago

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates # for debian-based systems

andreasvc• 15 years ago

I've always wondered what that package is actually used for, because programs like firefox, chromium, &c, maintain their own list of root CAs.

deweller• 15 years ago

So help me understand...

A government agency in Iran has obtained the private key of the root certificate for the DigiNotar Certificate Authority. And with that, they can decrypt and re-encrypt SSL traffic by pretending that they have the valid SSL certificate for *.google.com.

Is that the way this works?

ammmir• 15 years ago

essentially, they would be MITMing the connection and presenting an SSL cert issued by DigiNotar (instead of the actual CA that issued the cert to *.google.com). because the compromised CA is in the browser's trusted CAs list, it probably produces no user-visible warning.

marshray6• 15 years ago

More than likely someone hacked or socially engineered the DigiNotar CA into issuing just that cert, or some limited set of certs.

JoshTriplett9• 15 years ago

Either that or they've got the cooperation of someone who has access to that private key, potentially the CA itself. But a compromise seems more likely in this case.

modeless3• 15 years ago

That's one possibility, and quite scary because someone with that private key could hijack any SSL connection to any site, not just Google. More likely is that Iran caused DigiNotar to issue them a valid .google.com certificate via social engineering, bribery, or hacking. This is slightly less scary because only .google.com would be affected.

Either way, IMHO DigiNotar's root certificate should be revoked and they should be barred from participating in the CA system ever again. The seriousness of SSL MITM attacks is such that a "one strike and you're out" policy is warranted. With so much commerce running over SSL these days, possession of the private key of a CA's root certificate would allow you to implement plots worthy of a James Bond supervillan.

yuhong3• 15 years ago

In fact, guess what: http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2011/08/29/fraudulent-googl...

JoshTriplett9• 15 years ago

A quick check of Bugzilla didn't turn up a bug directly about this issue, but https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681902#c6 from one of the people who deals with CA issues at Mozilla mentions "the current DigiNotar incident", so they clearly know about it.

sp3326• 15 years ago

It took 3 months to get their customers transferred over to this new cert. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=622589 I wonder if the CA was compromised since earlier this year, or if it's more recent?

JoshTriplett9• 15 years ago

See also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682956#c2 , an explicit acknowledgment.

rmc• 15 years ago

Assuming this certificate stuff is legit, how do we know this is being done by Iran? What makes anyone think this is Iran?

JoshTriplett9• 15 years ago

The claims reported in various places suggest that people in Iran have actively observed this certificate used in MITM attacks on gmail connections. No hard evidence yet, and no idea what original source people keep repeating (possibly the pastebin itself).

dhbanes3• 15 years ago

It's weird, isn't it? From zero to accepted fact on the basis of some guys assumption mentioned in the title of a pastebin dump. The only other original source I've been able to find is this:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da61...

He even invokes the Comodo incident, which as we know turned out to be the work of a single individual and NOT Iran.

Propaganda spreads quickly, even in the HN circle where people usually pride themselves on requiring evidence as a prerequisite to belief.

marshray6• 15 years ago

This is perhaps the earliest-dated public indication of the attack: https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da6...

Hi, Today, when I trid to login to my Gmail account I saw a certificate warning in Chrome . I took a screenshot and I saved certificate to a file .

this is the certificate file with screenshot in a zip file: http://www.mediafire.com/?rrklb17slctityb

and this is text of decoded fake certificate: http://pastebin.com/ff7Yg663

when I used a vpn I didn't see any warning ! I think my ISP or my government did this attack (because I live in Iran and you may hear something about the story of Comodo hacker!)

microkernel• 15 years ago

Anyone can tell us if this is for real or a hoax? I am lacking sufficient ssl knowledge here...

koenigdavidmj2• 15 years ago

Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure seems to think that it is real: http://twitter.com/#!/mikkohypponen

sp3326• 15 years ago

Here's a bug report from the user who originally noticed it: http://www.google.co.uk/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=2da...

gmaslov• 15 years ago

This type of compromised-CA attack is why I never understood why browsers don't use the OpenSSH model: accept and store (prompting for confirmation) the certificate the first time you connect to a site, then throw up enormous red flags if the certificate ever changes.

The Firefox root CA list has dozens and dozens of organizations on it. Could a compromise of any one of them mean that this attack could be repeated?

recampbell• 15 years ago

But wouldn't the red flags go up when the certificate is renewed?

ajross3• 15 years ago

Or just when the host is migrated. This technique "works", I guess, but the false postive rate is staggeringly high. I see these errors daily (generally due to DHCP reuse of my test boxes' addressess). In decades of use, I don't believe I've ever once been MitM'd over ssh.

SSH users understand the issue and are happy to triage a "not in known_hosts" error. The general public won't have a clue.

kevinpet• 15 years ago

That security model is called TOFU/POP for Trust On First Use / Persistence Of Pseudonymity.

tptacek26• 15 years ago

A more general description for the same idea is "key continuity".

sp3326• 15 years ago

Yup. http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2011/03/how-the-comodo-... and then http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=com...

there• 15 years ago

the cert patrol add-on for firefox can be configured to behave that way:

http://patrol.psyced.org/

normally it just shows you a horizontal bar alerting you when a host's ssl certificate changes, and whether it thinks it was for a good reason like the old cert being near its expiration date.

annoyingly, google has a number of different ssl certificates installed on different servers/load balancers (some wildcard, some not, some signed by different CAs, some signed by google's root) so nearly every time i would use a google service, the add-on would be throwing warnings at me that must be manually clicked to be dismissed. eventually i gave up and stopped using the add-on.

caf• 15 years ago

In the latest version, you can now tell it to stop warning you about the changes from a particular domain only.

tptacek26• 15 years ago

Because that security model means that a compromised ISP can permanently MITM you the first time you visit a site on any computer for the first time. In exchange for losing the single points of failure, it creates a constant stream of opportunities to break the trust model.

You may think that's a good tradeoff. I don't, but reasonable people can disagree about it. However, it's completely untenable for financial information, because attackers after financial information aren't laser targeted and are perfectly happy with a constant stream of compromised sessions. Remember what TLS was designed for in the first place.

jfr2• 15 years ago

Wrong.

The OpenSSH model implies that you check the fingerprint of the public key before you send encrypted data using that key. That is why SSH shows you the fingerprint of the server key when you first connect, and you have to answer "yes" in order to accept the key and add it to your keyring. You are supposed to have talked to the person managing the system and that person should have given you the fingerprint of the key.

It is virtually impossible for the ISP to intercept and sniff the stream without changing the fingerprint.

The user still has to trust its SSH client.

mrb2• 15 years ago

You are absolutely right. Although I think it is undesirable to enable such a feature by default, as a technical user, I badly want it. I want browsers to cache certificate public keys and alert me when they change.

Note that Chrome's key pinning feature (http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/05/04/pinning.html) is a somewhat comparable idea, except the well-known key hashes are hard coded in Chrome and not user updateable.

pointyhat6• 15 years ago

SSL snake oil. SSL and the percieved trust around it has to die. It's a big lie, especially with broken CAs, lax security, poor encryption due to international policy and several technical and conceptual flaws.

Some critique here to back me up:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/11/state_of_ssl_analysi...

ebiester2• 15 years ago

Okay, so SSL dies. it's gone. Kaput.

Now what?

I get that a false sense of security is worse, but we haven't yet figured out a better way that is still decentralized and works with a wide variety of user skill levels.

Because people who aren't expert users deserve security too. And they deserve functionality.

pointyhat6• 15 years ago

SSL was never decentralised. It was always centralised with CA's which is the issue.

We need a reputation based, distributed public key architecture.

pnathan9• 15 years ago

people who aren't expert users deserve security too. And they deserve functionality.

Well, SSL certainly isn't giving serious security in the "My ISP has been intruded" attack model.

You can't have both security and ignorance. If you really want to be secure, you're going to have to learn how to be secure, and then to know how to implement it.

pyre• 15 years ago

And the solution is? Getting everyone on to PGP/GPG? Explaining to the general public what a web of trust is and actually get them to use it in the correct fashion (rather then clicking 'trust' the same way they click through all dialog boxes)?

pointyhat6• 15 years ago

SSL leads them into that already but clicking the "trust" button automatically.

We need a reputation based, distributed public key architecture.

beaumartinez3• 15 years ago

DNSSEC is an alternative.

(Edit: Well, not really—have a look at the thread below.)

tptacek26• 15 years ago

The irony here is, if you want "web of trust", you already have it; just remove all the certs from your browser and trust sites selectively.

tptacek26• 15 years ago

So you don't like the way SSL/TLS is configured in your browser and therefore we should throw out 15+ years of intense study for whatever flavor-of-the-month protocol is most popular when everyone agrees with you?

How about instead of "SSL sucks!", you propose things that will (from your vantage point) improve SSL/TLS? What, so you don't like that Mozilla gets to dictate what all the trust roots are? Neither do I. But that is not one of the worlds great compute or UX problems to solve. Propose a solution.

It's a virulent misconception that the SSL/TLS security model depends on Verisign and Thawte. The only place in the whole model we have that dependency is your browser's configuration and that stupid dialog it shows when a cert doesn't check out. You can replace just those two parts and get virtually any other trust model you want.

pointyhat6• 15 years ago

Yes I'd quite happily throw out 15+ years of intense study and research (inclusing SSL/TLS) as it occasionally breaks down and kicks you in the face (google for TLS MITM vulns).

There should be an explicit trust model where the service vendor ships your keys via an alternative side channel -or- a decentralised model which works on reputation or trust.

If it works, why do all the online banks use two-factor authentication these days?

Oh wait, there is the solution!

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

As I understand it, SSL (or TLS more properly) is fine, it's the HTTPS system and it's trust model that are broken.

</pedantic>

pnathan9• 15 years ago

The idea of having a distributed certificate mechanism over a peer to peer net seems like it might be a good starting point. Essentially, you'd self-sign and serve out your certificate on your ports; possibly connecting to some sort of super-node. You get connections from other members of the net, and they'd send you some certificates; you'd cache the certs and their IP addresses. Then after a timeout, you'd broadcast your certificates to all the interested IPs.

Part of the intrinsic concept is that there's no authoritative identity service. Without an authority, you can't crack the authority.

Of course, this is just a sketch of an idea; it has the usual issues with peer to peer nets such as "evil majority wins". Plus, it has the potential to eat a good deal of bandwidth.

Regardless, I think it'd be a good idea to explore, probably in an academic setting first.

vilhelm_s• 15 years ago

Chrome users should be protected from this by the public key pinning feature [http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/05/04/pinning.html], right?

ajross3• 15 years ago

Sounds like it. But this isn't an architectural solution. All this does is layer an additional level of "trust" requirements onto the existing protocol. The "pinning whitelist" is isomorphic to the root CA list and can be compromised in exactly the same way.

bwblabs• 15 years ago

Do we actually know how many SSL certs Google uses, and for what?

From what I can see:

- Google Search & Google+ (https://encrypted.google.com/ https://plus.google.com/) are using a *.google.com from GeoTrust/Google Internet Authority

- Google Mail (https://www.google.com/accounts/) is using a www.google.com from VeriSign/Thawte

Ofcourse I'm also afraid that this is indeed a MITM attack against Iranian users.

With SSL certs that costs less than $15 you can expect that things cannot be thoroughly checked, however a Wildcard DigiNotar SSL cert is costing you € 750 a year (in a 4 year contract http://diginotar.nl/OnlinePrijsindicatie/tabid/1417/Default....), you would expect that these things would not be possible.

If they however hacked the root CA, it's even more scary, also Vasco (the mother company) makes virtually every Two-factor authentication used for Dutch Banking..

blauwbilgorgel3• 15 years ago

Scary indeed. Also responsible for authentication of DigiD, online taxes, pension funds, Chamber of Commerce, Ministry of Security and Justice, local governments, etc.

joelhaasnoot2• 15 years ago

Didn't check it myself, but apparently DigiD for instance is on a different CA/root. DigiD is the Dutch "unified account" for all online government services: you can take out student loans, submit taxes, etc.

VladRussian4• 15 years ago

if root is compromised it sounds promising :

http://www.vasco.com/company/press_room/news_archive/2011/ac...

"...DigiNotar is an official Dutch certification authority, capable of issuing, validating and registering certificates (identities) of Dutch nationals and entities that are recognized throughout the European Union and are used to authenticate government applications. As such, DigiNotar provides VASCO with a strong foothold in the Dutch eGovernment market with the potential to expand the product line to government applications in other countries. Currently, DigiNotar’s market scope for its CA activities is limited to the Netherlands. VASCO may decide to introduce DigiNotar as a certification authority in other EU countries...."

all that security was riding on 10M euros (with such [meager] amounts in play, one would think that it would be easier for a player like Iran just buy an authority than to crack/hack it, though seems like VASCO was faster (if of course VASCO isn't in the game as well) :) :

"...VASCO acquired DigiNotar in stock and asset purchase for aggregated cash consideration of Euro 10.0 million..."

what is the cost in Netherlands to have a reasonably secure office building with some access controlled areas suitable for CA authority core operations? Sounds like very cheap.

joelhaasnoot2• 15 years ago

You forget their possible debt...

VladRussian4• 15 years ago

nope. VASCO is a NASDAQ-ed "Inc" and would have mentioned any additionally assumed materially important liabilities in the official press release.

mkramlich• 15 years ago

> to expand the product line to government applications in other countries.

... and so they have

emilsedgh4• 15 years ago

Posting from Iran, Im really worried about the current security status. Iran's opposition mostly exists on internet these days and its very seriously flawed.

Man In The Middle attacks are increasing and users usually ignore error messages about them. (Firefox throws an error dialog but it has an 'I understand the risks' button. People just ignore the error).

Also, last year many Iranian FriendFeed users were arrested and the goverment knew about all their private discussions on FriendFeed. (FriendFeed has been censored since the beggining. But it suddenly became uncensored for a day or two. On the other hand, FriendFeed generates an 'auth' key for each user and lets him see his RSS feed using that key. And puts the auth key in every page: goverment probably collected auth keys and used it to read discussions of people they arrested)

Goverments using internet to spy on their civilians is not a myth. Anonymity, trusting the cloud and related issues seem far more important when you suddenly find out a friend of yours has been arrested and his location and charges is unknown.

cookiecaper3• 15 years ago

Under such conditions it is obviously unsafe to trust any private communications on the open internet (including sites that use SSL to encrypt data on the wire). You should ONLY use systems that ensure your content is encrypted for a key that YOU (not your browser) explicitly trust. This means using GnuPG and exchanging keys in a reliable offline medium with anyone with whom you want to communicate, basically.

Alternatively, you can use i2p and i2p outproxies, but i2p may be vulnerable to similar poisoning attacks if the government had an interest in perpetrating them. That said, it's probably much safer to use an i2p outproxy for your browsing anyway, and definitely much safer to use eepsites.

emilsedgh4• 15 years ago

How could one technical individual protect himself is one thing, having a secure-by-design communication channel is another thing. Whole country is being spied like that and most people dont even know/care about it. They just want to use Facebook or some 'cool' service.

JoshTriplett9• 15 years ago

If you expect that you would only get targeted if you actively communicate about things your government doesn't like, but not just because you use a VPN or similar, then you should get a VPN in a country somewhat less likely to cause you problems.

If you expect that the use of secure encryption at all would get you disappeared, you're screwed. And the previous situation can turn into this one on a whim.

Either way, the long-term solution does not involve technology; it involves emigration.

reinhardt• 15 years ago

And longer term, revolution.

zuppy• 15 years ago

I don't know how is in Iran, but I can tell you how it was in Romania before 1989 (and I guess that's pretty close to what is happening there).

It was close to impossible to emigrate legally, they would use anything to stop you. They would make you lose your job (or even do that to members of your family), they would interrogate you and members of your family (and don't think about any human rights).

A friend of my father was shot on the spot when they saw he was using a boat to cross the Danube to Yugoslavia.

It's not that simple to escape, especially with your family. You're living in a different world.

Edit: spelling

mrb2• 15 years ago

"Man In The Middle attacks are increasing and users usually ignore error messages about them"

Note that the reported MiTM attack should not result in a popup warning, because the CA certificate used in the MiTM is supposedly technically valid. Does anybody know which browsers include this CA? Browser vendors should consider removing it based on ethical concerns, especially if this MiTM attack is being performed very broadly, at the country level.

mcpherrinm• 15 years ago

Mozilla is spinning up new releases to remove the cert.

See http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2011/08/29/fraudulent-googl...

Instructions on how to delete it yourself are available at http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/deleting-diginotar-ca-ce...

mypov2• 15 years ago

Azizam, unless you actually know the players involved in every hop of the loop, do not put your precious life in danger. If you are looking to organize, like a smart bache Terani you should go asymmetric on the the goons. Think sneaker nets, etc. I further suggest that you do not put your trust in superficially maintained hostilities between the west and the flea ridden mullahs. Remember those two brothers handed to Iran from US embassy. In one of those Persian Gulf states. They were hanged if you recall. Stenography, never signaling overt use of crypt, etc. are recommended. Qorbanat.

emilsedgh4• 15 years ago

Arrested people werent organizing anything. They just had lots of political talks like analyzing Iran's current situation.

Goverment isnt trying to spy specific people for specific reasons. They are trying to spy everyone.

dhbanes3• 15 years ago

Since you are posting from Iran, can you verify this certificate is indeed being presented?

Also, how are people sure this is being perpetuated by the Iranian government? I'm asking because I see no evidence in the pastebin dumps, yet many people here seem sure the Iranian government is behind this.

There was another indecent earlier this year for which Iran was assumed responsible. This turned out to be false (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9215245/Solo_Iranian_...)

emilsedgh4• 15 years ago

Yes. I can confirm that without using a proxy, DigiNotar's CA is being used.

Who might/could do this except for the goverment?

sepent2• 15 years ago

I can confirm it, too.

My brother works in a company that produces spying software for government. Days ago, he told me he himself has written several programs to spy on yahoo, hotmail and gmail but he thought they couldn't deploy the gmail program because of https. I guess, he should think again.

I am scared. My only hope was SSL and I can't trust that anymore?

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

What are the implications of this? It is potentially unsecured to visit gmail.com from anywhere? Is this web-interface only, or is IMAP/POP access also vulnerable?

cookiecaper3• 15 years ago

The consensus seems to be that Iran is poisoning intra-country connections to attach this certificate to gmail.com instead of the real certificate, so this would only be occurring where Iran controlled the network infrastructure. Since the certificate is signed by a trusted CA, no warning is provided to the user that the certificate may be unsafe.

GMail still shows a certificate issued by Thawte for me (in the USA).

VladRussian4• 15 years ago

>The consensus seems to be that Iran is poisoning intra-country connections

more precisely they can poison any traffic (CA-ed by Diginotar) that passes through the routers/wires under Iran's control, that can be anything what they have already hacked into before as well as just redirected traffic using BGP similar like this

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/nov/15/internet-tra...

Btw, aren't China and Iran collaborating usually? There is potential for synergy.

lawnchair_larry5• 15 years ago

I'm confused about how this was detected. The original report provided this screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/hs0H4.jpg

If it is a case of a root CA signing a cert for someone else, this shouldn't have actually produced an error. What did the MITMers screw up here?

stock_toaster2• 15 years ago

Chrome feature, as noted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938905

levigross• 15 years ago

This attack could of hit people in other countries as well. Small well places malicious BGP updates can reroute traffic into Iran.....

0x12• 15 years ago

If your communications can land you in jail or get you killed don't use the internet (or even a computer, keystroke loggers are easy to install and very hard to detect), no matter how clever you think you are, and no matter how many 'lock' icons appear in your browser.

In such cases paranoia is perfectly justified.

It's a real pity this requires a code update because that means that the change will take long to propagate and will likely never be really complete, at the same time I'm sure there are good reasons for that and that an automated process to revoke just any certificate could itself probably be used as an attack vector.

What would happen if they simply revoked the root certificate that was used to sign this fake?

iscrewyou3• 15 years ago

I am no hacker so I have almost no idea what's going on.

MITM = Man In The Middle.

Does this mean that Iran is eavesdropping on gmail users IN Iran? Or outside their country too?

Does anyone mind sharing what this means to the end user?

I did block the certificate on my Air as wxs mentioned. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938755

abraham• 15 years ago

The consensus seems to be that this only effects users in Iran who are not using Chrome. The result is any information sent to or from a secure Google domain could be silently intercepted and modified.

iscrewyou3• 15 years ago

Awesome. Thanks for explaining that.

marshray6• 15 years ago

Yes, this fraudulently-issued certificate is being reported seen in the wild from users of Iranian ISPs. It has not been reported anywhere else.

If you were using an Iranian ISP to log in to *.google.com, you may have been hacked.

iscrewyou3• 15 years ago

Thanks for explaining that, kind sir.

jsavimbi• 15 years ago

So Google wrote Stuxnet?

blauwbilgorgel3• 15 years ago

Update on Dutch news site nu.nl (without references or sources, so I can't confirm where they got this information from).

http://translate.google.com/translate?tl=en&u=http%3A%2F...

Fraudulent certificates were given out for:

().mozilla.org (backdoored software?)

().wordpress.com

().torproject.org

().yahoo.com

And Baladin (an Iranian social network)

Gmail.com being MITM'd by Iran using this certificate

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