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TLS MITM begins in Kazakhstan #6
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Uploaded a copy of the certificate files here: https://archive.org/details/qazca-ca-certificate |
I consider it quite ironic that public key for |
Censored Planet published a report on 2019-07-23. The most interesting observation, to me, is that the MITM is bidirectional: you can send an affected SNI from outside Kazakhstan to a TLS server inside, and still get a phony certificate. Here is an easy sample command line to test it:
The 95.59.142.120 IP address is iqala.kz from https://censoredplanet.org/kazakhstan#certificates. Other IP addresses in KZ will likely work as well, as long as there is a functioning TLS server behind them. Other interesting observations:
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Starting 2019-08-07, there were reports that the government of Kazakhstan ceased the MITM. They characterized it as a successful, temporary "test," and said that users who had installed the root CA certificate could delete it. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567114#c69 (archive)
The Kazakh security NGO TSARKA is claiming credit (archive) for moderating a discussion with the government to stop the MITM.
A Reuters story (archive) refers to but does not link to a tweet by the President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev that says he personally ordered the MITM. I found 4 recent tweets that are related:
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Censored Planet's live monitoring page (archive) confirms a stop of MITM late on 2019-08-06 UTC: @rensafi from Censored Planet gives a precise date and time for the end of interception, according to their active measurements: 2019-08-07 08:50 +0600 (Almaty time), which is 2019-08-17 02:50 UTC. The axis on the graph above shows Michigan time (Eastern Daylight Time), so the drop appears before midnight, at 2019-08-16 22:50 -0400. |
Mozilla and Google have blog posts today that say they will block the certificate in Firefox and Chrome. (Although the MITM has ceased, this will protect users who already have it installed from attacks in the future.) https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/08/21/mozilla-takes-action-to-protect-users-in-kazakhstan/ (archive)
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2019/08/21/protecting-our-users-in-kazakhstan/ (archive)
https://security.googleblog.com/2019/08/protecting-chrome-users-in-kazakhstan.html (archive)
I haven't yet found any related changes in the Firefox or Chromium source code repositories.
Using crlset-tools, I verified that the certificate's public key fingerprint is present in CRLSet version 5348:
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@darkk finds another article that says Apple will also block the certificate in Safari. https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/21/google-mozilla-kazakhstans-browser-spying/ (archive)
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A commenter at the Mozilla Bugzilla reported on 2019-09-06 that a second certificate has been made available at http://qca.kz/security.cer (link doesn't work outside Kazakhstan). I downloaded the file using a VPN Gate server and archived it at https://archive.org/details/qazca-security.cer-ca-certificate. For me currently, http://qca.kz/ returns status code 500, but direct links to the certificate files work. |
Saw the article https://myc.news/ It says that again in Kazakhstan they are blocking the certificate in Safari |
@gorbatkomark0 Do you have a link to the specific article? I cannot find it. I tried searching the site for "сертификат", "сафари", "казахстан" and did not find anything that looked like it was about TLS. |
Via @darkk, there are reports that ISPs in Kazakhstan have today (2019-07-18) begun to MITM TLS connections and instruct users to install a custom root cert. This is something that the government of Kazakhstan had threatened in 2016, but not followed through upon until now.
There is a Firefox ticket with links to more information.
Archive of certificate download site: https://web.archive.org/web/20190718174154/http://qca.kz/
Copy of certificate files, downloaded by me just now: qazca-20190718.zip
Cached images from imgur:
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