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School Tricks Pupils Into Installing a Root CA
First time accepted submitter paddysteed writes "I go to secondary school in the UK. I went digging around the computers there and found that on the schools machines, there was a root CA from the school. I then suspected that the software they instruct windows users to install on their own hardware to gain access to the BYOD network installed the same certificate. I created a windows virtual machine and connected to the network the way that was recommended. Immediately afterwards I checked the list of root CA's, and found my school's. I thought the story posted a few days ago was bad, but what my school has done is install their certificate on people's own machines — which I think is far worse. This basically allows them to intercept and modify any HTTPS traffic on their network. Considering this is a boarding school, and our only method of communicating to the outside world is over their network, I feel this is particularly bad. We were not told about this policy and we have not signed anything which would excuse it. I confronted the IT department and they initially denied everything. I left and within five minutes, the WiFi network was down then as quickly as it had gone down, it was back up. I went back and they confirmed that there was a mistake and they had 'fixed' it. They also told me that the risk was very low and the head of networks told me he was willing to bet his job on it. I asked them to instruct people to remove the bad certificate from their own machines, but they claimed this was unnecessary due to the very low risk. I want to take this further but to get the school's management interested I will need to explain what has happened and why it is bad to non-technical people and provide evidence that what has been done is potentially illegal."
I'd look real hard at the documentation that came with that software they had you install. I'd bet there's plenty of CYA in there along the lines of "By installing this software you agree, ect ect.
Just because you have a trusted root installed to use apps or the institutions wireless doesn't mean they were out to spy on you. It was likely the cheapest way to make secured applications run internally, or the easiest way for them to deploy eap without having to have you turn off server cert verification in your supplicant, which is way worse than having a trusted root.
All in all, it's just another brick in the firewall
i guess because you are using their network, you have to abide by their rules/tos/t&c... i bet theres something in there somewhere that allows them to do this! :/ if not... SUE SUE SUE! :P jks... FIRST POST! :P
Post the unedited screencaps or none at all. Otherwise this whole "article" is pure speculation.
I work at a school. Yes, we have all machines on their network trust us as a root CA. We do that with good reason.
Currently in most countries, especially the UK, there is an atmosphere of paranoia bordering on terror anywhere that minors and sex may come within a hundred meters of each other. Even so, teenagers tend to meet their stereotype and display a fascination with sexual imagery. This means that it is absolutely essential that schools maintain a comprehensive internet content filter. This is not an optional extra. Without it, it's only a matter of time (and not much time) before some student happens across Dirty Dave's Scat and Fisting Gallery and shows it off to all his classmates. This in turn results in many terrified parents, legal action against the school for destroying jimmy's innocent little mind, and columns in the Daily Mail demanding the head be fired.
If we could not filter the internet, there would be no option but to forgo it. If we could not filter the ssl sites, there would be no option but to block ssl entirely by blocking all traffic on port 443. There is no possibility of effectively filtering SSL without installing a root CA, and so that is what we have to do for any device on our network that needs SSL connectivity.
Got that? No filtering, no internet. That's just the way it is. I don't like censorship more than anyone else, but this is the real world and sometimes ideology has to take a back seat to practicality and an angry mob of parents. Besides, without effective filtering, the students would spend more time playing flash games, watching the yogscast, listening to music videos and checking facebook than actually doing their work. Giving the students a locked-down and heavily censored internet is still better than giving them no internet at all, which would hold them back academically.
Your first port if call is ahead of year, them the head teacher, if you are not comfortable with that report it to the school governors as they can demand the head report and take action. Failing any joy it would be the LEA, Local Education Authority and finally with the Information Commissioner's Office.
Just ask management a very simple question: Which policy requires IT to read pupils' communication? DON'T leave out the "policy" - because that is the part management is directly responsible for! Then just watch them boil...
how IT is changing the world - http://max.zamorsky.name
K-12 schools have a duty of care to their students, so this is just a case of them protecting themselves. Being your own device, you're still able to bypass your school - just remove the certificate and run through a 3G connection. Right or wrong, as an IT consultant who works with this type of technology in schools on a daily basis, your school management and parents will likely agree with these measures under the guise of protecting you.
K-12 schools have a duty of care to their students, so this is just a case of them protecting themselves. Being your own device, you're still able to bypass your school - just remove the certificate and run through a 3G connection. Right or wrong, as an IT consultant who works with this type of technology in schools on a daily basis, your school management and parents will likely agree with these measures under the guise of protecting you.
There are valid reasons for the school to have people install their certificate. It's also likely that the software was designed to be used for school computers and no one thought to adjust it for home use. Finally, WiFi networks don't go up or down slowly...
Instead of complaining and being a pain in everyone's side, why don't you write a nice tutorial with screenshots on how to remove the certificate and ask the IT department if you can distribute the flyer for them. This way you're a nice and helpful person instead of making everyone hate you.
Installing root CAs has been standard practice for years. Why are people seemingly suddenly so angry about it?
I don't see the problem with the tech itself. If you have a "BYOD's allowed" policy, that also usually states that "if you put your own device in, here are the rules". Rules may state installing the network owner's root CA and allowing for traffic to be inspected.
In most cases, this is intended to be benevolent - it's kind of hard to run threat detection algorithms on an encrypted connection. In business environments, DLP and similar can of course be used too.
Now, in here I think the key issue was that the users were not told about the practice, and were not asked to agree to these stipulations. And of course, the old adage about not attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence also applies here - if the issue got "fixed" then it might have been simply just that, incompetence. Somebondy enabled the same SSL interception on the student network that they are using for faculty, or similar.
This is a common problem in that most users lack the knowledge that you obviously have, and are willing to follow like blind sheeple, even with some very very bad advice.
This is by no means limited to IT. Any profession with specialists (with specialized knowledge) will have similar effects. Were you to go through medical school it's possible you'd disagree more with your doctor, but you simply lack the knowledge. Were you to go through law school, you might decide your lawyer is an idiot (and gives bad advice). Etc.
The difference is that whereas with medicine, bad advice will generate all kinds of law suits and maybe because people will die you have sort of an impetus to ensure your medical care is good (and there are boards to make sure practitioners meet some minimum standards regularly). With IT, probably the idiot who set up the network won't get fired, and because people do not have any real understanding, there will be no law suits, and nothing bad will happen to encourage better security practices.
Per the subject - that root ca only covers your school's applications. If you go to https://www.yourschool.com/ it ensures that your computer can vet out the complete certificate trust chain. However, if you can establish a connection to https://www.xhamster.com/ your school will not be able to peer into the encrypted contents of the connection unless you're connecting via a proxy that they control.
If you think "Root CA BAAAAD!" then you're not looking deeply enough into ssl or the security concepts behind the certificates to understand their ramifications. Stay in school and dig deeper.
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
You should go read up on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. What they did might qualify as a violation of that act, in that they might have been intercepting information w/o knowledge or consent. Having worked with digital certs, I can say that most people, (even tech savvy ones) usually don't understand the first thing about CAs and how they work, so 'accidentally' installing a root CA all over the place sounds like a typical n00b maneuver. Hard to say what their intent was. Further, when they changed the network policy, that might qualify as evidence tampering, depending on what they did and how they did it.
Someone (either the cops or the school board) should investigate what the hell was going on.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Now they know who you are because you are likely the only one who complained.
The safe thing would have been to post this anonymously without ever going to your school IT department.
Just because a root CA is installed doesn't mean someone's spying on you. In order for it to be used, the service in question would have to have a cert signed by it. In order to do pervasive spying, they'd have to have every tls enabled site on the internet complicit in it. They don't. This cert is likely for their own applications/services. WPA2 enterprise mode uses 802.1x which uses certs.. That's probably what it's for. Same if they use 802.1x for wired authentication. If you're worried about sniffing, make your own tunnel.
Network Admin probably installed a firewall / network appliance such as a Watchguard etc so they can filter adult content / web proxy servers and such. In my last job I worked in about 30 Primary Schools / Collages here in NZ and its common practice. Maybe you should use your phone and tether if your that paranoid. I think your over reacting and you shouldn't be acting all high and mighty. Your on his network with his terms, you don't have to use it. He's just doing his job and if he didn't filter HTTPS all the kids would be on porn sites all day.
Root CAs can sign anything, you'd still trust it. Certificates for individual services or even a wildcard cert for *.yourschool.com wouldn't be a root CA certificate. They can intercept all your traffic while you are using their network and so can anyone that has hacked them and got access to their private keys. Regardless of the risk (it's not very low usually in schools) they have been eavesdropping on you without telling you and I believe even the UK has privacy laws that explicitly prohibit that.
Someone bet their job on this the OP said. Well, I guess that eavesdropping on students is illegal, so they should quit their job and file a police report describing what they did.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
a) "we have not signed anything which would excuse it" - you can't. You're not able to sign enforceable legal documents.
b) "there was a root CA from the school" - it happens due to
1) WPA-Enterprise and/or NAC relies on keys. Do you use your school credentials for wireless? If so, you require key exchange for it to verify each party.
2) SSL monitoring systems rely on MITM to read the HOST headers. We couldn't give a rat's arse your bragging about banging Sally, however we do mind that it was to a website called HTTPS://www.breakuprevenge.com and both Sally and yourself are under legal age, it may have included a phone camera image, and it was all posted via the School Internet. Federal, State, and School pastoral care policy issues trump most whiny students objections.
c) It happens when at the start of the year. I would have twenty staff ask for different packages to be deployed in the first week of school, and your BYOD package may just happened to end up with a testing cert. Once had an antivirus package that hid all toolbars in Word and Excel - that ex-employee never applied a GPO at domain-level again.
All I'm saying is most school IT departments are asked to perform miracles of pastoral care because parents don't care and Teachers are busy trying to teach. We bare the brunt of school administration trying to enforce pastoral care not just for you, but all those in the school body
I'm sure if you had brought it to most IT departments attention in a courteous way, you might have been treated better.
Most schools have a tech-savvy student who is treated like an offsider, as well as one who has joined the Dark Side and ends up on the Watchlist. (yes, I've had "meetings" with Federal Police over a student's actions). Which one will you be?
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
>How about actually, you know, paying attention to what the kids in class are doing?
Submitter attends a boarding school, which makes the school liable for anything that happens after class as well.
how'd you know you are connecting directly to https://www.xhamster.com/? they can simply alter DNS to make everything go through their proxies.
Finally people start doing something about our CA problem. I'd wish a court forced all system to offer alternative CAs and one could deactivate the normal ones easily.
I'd trust my school a lote more then some unknown strange business company far away, known to work with people that want to hurt my privacy.
In Kentucky,this behavior would get that IT guy 5 years in the state Pen.AT the very least,some need to sue the school and the IT guy for the root CA.That will put a halt to this type of behavior.
The Geek Hillbilly
"I asked them to instruct people to remove the bad certificate from their own machines, but they claimed this was unnecessary due to the very high risk of legal action if all the parents found out."
Fixed it.
It's a smoke screen when they tell you that the risk is small. The fact is that you don't know who had, has and will have access to the root key. You don't know which certificates have, and will be created from that key. Even if they destory that key, you don't know wheter it hasn't been stolen and somebody else might create certificates from it.
Their intent may be just fine. For instance, you want want to have an internal CA installed so that you can deploy SSL-enabled services without having to buy certificates from a commercial CA.
Of course it allows SSL traffic interception, which is likely to be illegal, but nothing proves it was done, or even planned. The the real problem here is that the CA framework allows any CA to sign any certificate.
If you fear your SSL traffic is intercepted, install a browser extension that track certificate change. Firefox has certpatrol, for instance.
Installing their certificate on your machine may well be a criminal offfenc eunder the COmputer MIsues Act, RIPA and various other laws. Talk the a solictor at the local citizens' Advice Bureau, it won't cost you anything.
Where are all the people who say "it's their network!" when it is snooping in the workplace we are talking about?
This is a freakin school, which is actually supposed to have a watchful protector role over students. In loco parentis, you know.
And a couple of humbling observations:
.
Assuming you are under 18, your parents' role in this is more significant than yours. If you are over, it gets far more interesting!
Pushing your own Root CA certificate to clients for the purpose of intranet services is not newsworthy. The reason the previous case was interesting was that the trust was then exploited for a man-in-the-middle attack when users were connecting to other sites.
I work in schools.
I work in UK schools.
I work in IT in UK schools.
This is normal. Sorry, but there's nothing shocking here.
You join our domain, we get the right to push any and all security measures to your client that we deem necessary. If you don't want to allow it, don't join our domain (which also means we probably won't authorise you to use our Internet connection, etc.)
The domain will have a "Default Domain Policy" that almost certainly includes software you don't want (but we insist you have), settings you'd rather not have (but which we will enforce on you) and things like this - installation of a required domain certificate so we can check your not using OUR SCHOOL FILTER to do illegal / illicit things.
Chances are if you read your network acceptable usage policy, it states this. The alternative is you don't get network access. Because we are LEGALLY RESPONSIBLE for what is accessed through the network on our network, as well as the protection of our internal data and services.
Complain all you like. The alternative is that we block SSL site-wide. That means no Facebook at all, by the way. Or GMail. Or Hotmail. Or anything else that uses SSL by default.
We have a legal duty to monitor, record and analyse the logs of Internet traffic to ensure our child-protection policy (a legally-required policy) is followed. Additionally, it's OUR resource. If you want to use your own external 3G connection on your own time, argue for that. Chances are it will fail.
If you want to use the SCHOOL connection on SCHOOL time for NON-SCHOOL business, that's not going to happen. However if you want to use it for SCHOOL BUSINESS then you are required to allow us to apply our domain policy. If that, at any particular place, happens to include SSL certificates, monitoring software (potentially even INVISIBLE monitoring software like Securus, Ranger, etc.) then that's what you get.
Sorry, but as an IT Manager specialising in schools, and working in state, private and boarding schools from primary to further education, this is bog-standard and has happened for years. I believe even places like LGfL (a London-wide, government-backed school IT services supplier) do it.
There's a reason - we are required to protect our systems and protect ALL the children. That means everything gets summarised, logged and monitored. If we then need to dig into detailed logs, we can enable that option and do that too. Because - as in a previous school I worked for many years ago - we get things like members of staff browsing child pornography on school time. Yes, they are that stupid. And yes, they get caught. And, sorry, but our child-protection and data-protection policies take precedence over you going on your private Facebook after hours and we can't spend the time to distinguish hours, locations, staff-types, etc. for everyone.
If you don't like it, do not join your computer to a domain. If you are on the domain, it's literally our DOMAIN. Our rules. Clearly stated. That you would have agreed to.
Please, also don't act like your the first person ever that this has happened to. It's been standard practice for at least the last 15 years I've been working IT in schools in the UK.
First, a school network is not a public network and it can run any policy it wants, including intercepting and monitoring traffic. You don't have to sign anything, using the network is implicit consent to the rules it is run by. The only legal requirement in my country (so your laws may differ) is disclosure of those rules, you must be able to look them up somewhere.
Second, regarding danger. The danger is exactly equivalent of the lowest security among the machine(s) that have a copy of the school root certificate (the private key part). If any of them gets compromised and the attacker gets a copy, he can do everything the school does, including interception and manipulation of traffic. If the school rates that as "low", then it assumes that users of the network don't do anything of personal importance, like online banking.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Never underestimate the determination of an adolescent boy in search of porn.
It's their network and they can do what they want with it. Don't want to use it? Tether a smartphone then.
All the comments I've read so far have been on whether or not the school is morally right in deploying a Man-In-The-Middle attack. While an interesting question, for me this is missed the big point: which OS/Web-browser is so insecure that it accepts a root certificate from the network like this?
When a Web-browser or OS accepts a new Certificate Authority certificate there is an tacit acceptance of trust: you trust that whoever holds the corresponding private key will behave responsibly --- given online banking is secured via the same security infrastructure, that's some level of trust! There's no reasonable way this can happen automatically: you, personally, must indicate that you trust the CA involved. This normally this happens transitively: by installing Firefox, or using your OS you trust the people to have selected trust-worthy CAs.
While people can point to this as another nail in the SSL/TLS coffin, it doesn't help when software is so broken like this. Any Web-browser or OS that accepts a new Root CA (either automatically or without warning the user exactly how dangerous is accepting it) is so broken that you should immediately stop using it for any secure interactions.
| What, you were expecting
-O_O- +---- something witty?
Most schools do this and workplaces, my university in the UK included does as well (hoping that banking sites are whitelisted is probably wishful thinking). I'd be very surprised if you are actually able to get your school to change it's practices in the long run.
Undoubtedly the reason for installing the cert would be to monitor/filter SSL traffic via a proxy. These days it's quite trivial to setup a transparent proxy that uses a MITM attack with a spoofed cert to monitor your traffic. Have a look at untangle. It does this out of the box. Just put the CA on the client and you can intercept all SSL traffic. Obviously it's not difficult to look at the cert chain to detect this, but even if you do discover a spoofed cert, getting around it isn't trivial.
Area51 - We are watching...
I've never been in a large organization that didn't use their own root CA cert, and I've certainly made sure it was done everywhere I've worked.
Has nothing to do with pulling a MITM on you. You aren't worth the fucking time and effort, get over yourself, you aren't special, no one cares what you're doing.
Its more likely they just didn't want to spend several thousand dollars making certs for everything that needs an SSL cert because none of the registered root CAs will let you sign your own domain certs ... so they can get paid for every fucking cert you use. At one organization I worked with, we shaved off nearly 20k a year by going to our own internal CA.
Yep, we could have MITM any of those people.
Guess what, it would be easier and less suspicious to use a virus rather than a MITM. A MITM takes work, you have to setup the relay to be the actual MITM. Viruses to steal data are point click next a few time, select some options, click finish - with the current level of virus toolkits you can buy.
So, back to my original point.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Your post is constructive right up to phrase "the last 15 years" which apparently justifies how little your network reveals to the surveilled about the actual extent of the surveillance, even to the point of having software installed that they know little to nothing about on their own equipment that could open back doors to the device when employed outside of the school network if by some extraordinary turn of events proves to be slightly less than 100% bullet proof in its coding, implementation, and deployment. Nothing ever goes wrong with WEP or SSL.
Would it damage the small little minds to know more about how this all became "bog standard" without so much as a public whimper? Probably. Does that mean your Slashdot post is filtered on your own school network? Probably.
In my world, forged SSL certificates should be clearly marked as such. There should even be a "forger identity" field and a "forger authority" field (containing the pertinent parental agreement UUID).
None of this would interfere whatsoever with your legal authority to protect your network or your success in achieving this protection. It would increase the awareness of the surveilled of what externalities they have actually taken on downstream of their agreement with you to allow you to do so.
The fact that you've been doing this for fifteen years already without any of this in place is a sad argument.
If this is the school's equipment so that the school absorbs it's own externalities of having badly-coded surveillance kits forcibly installed (I'm guessing the rock stars on that coding team were on the guaranteed forcible-installation side of the house) and the equipment is emblazoned with a giant warning "abandon privacy all ye who input here" there should still be a giant warning screen that comes up whenever a user tries to access a major financial institution (I'm told the government tracks the identities of these organizations) which warns the user "you are attempted to access a financial institution through a forged SSL root chain which is potentially a far leakier pipe than regular SSL, are you really sure you want to do this?"
So you're justified in doing what you do, but you're also so damn sneaky about doing it, that fires spring up in public opinion when the least of what goes on is exposed to public discussion.
No need to hammer the state of affairs in the daily consciousness so that these public fires don't flare up. Because fifteen years.
My bank has a security mechanism where they show a set of images unique to my account so that I can detect impostor sites that entice me to enter my credentials where they shouldn't go (the impostor site doesn't know the unique images associated with each banking account). There really should be a law against these security fingerprint images being conveyed through a forged-certificate SSL proxy no matter how legitimate the usage agreement. Once those images are scraped and laundered, one more safeguard we've be taught to trust is down the spiral tube.
If it's rational, necessary, and you're proud of it, do it out in the open as democracy conceptually demands, with plenty of loud warning signs where the externalities impose heightened risk.
News at 11... Standard practice. It's their network. It's not a public network. If your BYOD computer joins a Windows domain, typically a GPO will install a root CA to various things can be self signed. If you using WPA-Enterprise, you need a cert installed for this also, not necessarily a Root CA, but doing so make life easier down the track for the schools IT dept. The Root CA will allow inspection of SSL via the school (transparent) proxy. If you are so paranoid about the traffic being snooped on, look at the sites cert chain. If it's spoofed to the School's Root CA, you'll know they can see your traffic. Just go buy a 3G stick or hotspot your phone and bypass the school network when you want some privacy. Then the problem shifts from the school to your parents.
Area51 - We are watching...
No, this explanation doesn't pass muster.
If you can't allow secure web-browsing then don't allow it.
There is no excuse for breaking the security system used for online banking.
Apart from any moral issues, consider the liability if someone else gets hold of your private key and empties everyone's bank accounts.
| What, you were expecting
-O_O- +---- something witty?
but are they actually using this root certificate to "transcrypt" (or whatever the term is for decrypting your traffic and then re-encrypting it with the desired external certificate) - or are they just adding a new certificate to your machine.
I can see plenty of reasons they'd want to do this - for example just allowing you to connect securely to your internal school webmail without them having to pay somebody else for a cert or getting your browser to bleat about how it can't validate the certificate every time you connect.
Our company has three root certificates installed, and I can't find a single MITM on any domains.
There are other legit reasons for issuing internal root certs, such as accessing secure internal resources, like intranets, email, domain authentication, attendance/payroll systems, etc.
Try going to a secure site, like facebook, and check to see if the cert was hijacked, then you know for sure.
I don't get all these "I have to do X to access the internet at work/school/library/etc" or "X insists I install Y to access their network". If you want to use the school/work network with your own device, you have to adhere to their terms which presumably indicate they install a root CA to allow them to filter content. Don't like, don't use your own device. Don't like being monitored, don't use their network to access the internet for private use.
At least it seems to be a nice package which you can presumably as easily uninstall.
Why is this news? All MDM solutions have the capability to install a Root CA, and most enterprises choose to do so - it makes authenticating to internal applications/ VPN/ webmail much easier.
Just try running a school without internet. All the "for the children" morons will fail plenty fast enough.
Installing a root certificate on people's own hardware just opens the school up for lawsuits and hacking though. Ain't terribly hard for clever student hackers to get their hands on that root certificate. Voila, you've a root certificate valid on the machines of almost everyone you know!
"I'm at a boarding school, and I'm annoyed that I don't get to do anything I want. Here's a way that I can prove I'm clever, and try to gain sympathy by making it sound ("...school TRICKS people into installing...") like it's the perpetration of some sort of subterfuge or a liberty/civil rights issue."
Want freedom? Don't go to boarding school aka juvenile prison.
Don't like the idea of someone looking over your shoulder while you're surfing? Become an adult, pay for your own web connection, and wank, er, surf away.
-Styopa
Because the USA pushes its policies on other countries through treaty obligations. If it hasn't yet, it will soon.
The important lesson you are about to learn is this: Pick your battles.
This is a battle you cannot possibly win.
Why not? Because you're still a pupil.
Virtually every argument you can come up with for why that certificate shouldn't be there - no matter how well-reasoned - is going to be dismissed by staff. Even if you can come up with a well-reasoned argument that no sensible adult would counter (you probably can't; there are very good reasons for a school to want to monitor everything that are likely to be perceived as overriding any concerns you have about privacy), you'll be crushed.
At this level, arguments like this inevitably wind up being less about who is technically right or wrong and more about who has the power. As far as the school is concerned, the person who wins the argument has the power - and there is no way they will ever let a pupil win such an argument because it means conceding power to a pupil.
In your position, I'd install some sort of plugin that allowed me to verify that my HTTPS session was using the "right" certificate - and if not, I'd tether my laptop to a personal mobile phone.
How is your school supposed to perform SSL communication without a Root CA? I suspect they have Intranet websites and those sites must have digital certificates.
If you want to use the SCHOOL connection on SCHOOL time
At a boarding school, what is not "SCHOOL time"?
Do you have a good reference to the use of the root CA to decrypt all SSL traffic. You can just tell me here if you want , maybe not all /.'s
know about this.
Their network, their rules. Don't like it, dont use it and buy/build your own. its really quite simple. You are NOT entitled to anything on another persons property.
Now, should they explicitly tell you they are installing certs that are required for access, perhaps it would have been polite, ( tho few would understand it ) but i'm sure there was far reaching something somewhere that you agreed to anyway, so they really dont have to tell you anything.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
is CA supposed to be an acronym for something? CA Inc? Computer Associates? California, Canada? I don't know what CA stands for.
Wayne? Why does slashdot always mention this?
I just did that on my computer at my school.....
The concept of compulsory public schooling is wrong-headed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The film takes a look at public school education in America and concludes that schools are not only failing to educate, but are increasingly authoritarian institutions more akin to prisons that are eroding the foundations of American democracy. tudents are robbed of basic freedoms primarily due to irrational fears; they are searched, arbitrarily punished and force-fed dangerous pharmaceutical drugs. The educational mission of the public school system has been reduced from one of learning and preparation for adult citizenship to one of control and containment."
Consequences that flow from it, like random adults needing to surveil unrelated children all day via hidden means are also wrong.
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree. "
We can have sympathy for all the people caught up in the madness, but it is still madness. Alternatives:
http://www.educationrevolution...
As a starting point why not just give the money that goes to public schools to the parents of young children so the parents can spend more time with their children and also hire tutors and such? My essay on that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
But ultimately we need a basic income for all from birth, like John Holt talked about in "Escape from Childhood".
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Just go here and check the signature of the certificate you are getting against the one listed there. If they don't match you know there's someone fucking around.
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
Please back up with citations...
We are required to PROVE we have filtering in place for the Feds to provide us with E-Rate funding. E-rate is a couple pennies a month on everyones phone bill in the U.S. that goes to schools and libraries to offset their internet costs. For me to provide a 55mb up/down connection at at cost of about $3500 a month, our school gets 75% of it paid for thru E-Rate using our Free and Reduced Lunch numbers to set the percentage. No filter/ no Internet, at least not at that speed which is very good for a rural school.
Brag all you want kids about how you get around the filter. We (school techs) are not worried about the 1 or 2 that get thru because you would be an idiot to tell everyone and get it shut down.
Here is the secret to being a kid in the internet age " Dont tell people what you can get away with and cause grief for me, and I wont tell the administration what you get away with and cause grief for you".
Anyone can get thru with a little brains and some work, just don't scream and holler about it and you'll get away with it. When your an adult you will look back on all the things you thought you were doing in secret and realize just how obvious it was to everyone and how many people you owe a thank-you to for not calling you out.
"our only method of communicating to the outside world is over their network"
Do you live in the middle ages? If convicts can get cellphones into prison, I'm sure you have access to one. Also there is always ip over semaphore.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc...
lose != loose
Don't get kicked out of school and you won't have to go to secondary school. Count yourself lucky if your biggest problem involves digital certificates.
Sony has the school now
In the Uk the relevant law is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which, among other things, makes it illegal to intercept communications in the way described in the article, unless certain exemption conditions have been met.
For example, one exemption is to allow employers to do this where they own the network.
It is not clear, since the OP does not post details on the Terms and Conditions under which the access was granted. However, I think the fact that the school initially denied what they had done and then reconfigured the network is quite telling.
If the OP wants to take this further, they are going to need proper legal advice. However, this all sounds like a bit of a PR own-goal by the school.
BUT you still need to advise parents and students as to what you are doing; and
Ensure that you have policies and controls that ensure that everyone knows what you are doing, and how it will not be used for other purposes (e.g. sniffing credit card details from student purchases, etc.);
Without that the job is only half done.
As someone who is part of the elected 'management' of a public school, I can say with some certainty, if you were request to address management in private, opposed to in a public forum, and respectfully indicate that the institution has engaged in a (potentially) illegal activity, they should sit up and take note. Especially if you recommend a simple solution to what could have been a simple mistake, you're more likely to get a positive response.
As far as explaining to non-technical people, I would recommend giving them a real-world example. Such as saying that you've locked up your house, but you leave one window open on the second floor. While it's not likely that someone could get in because it's on the second floor and there's no obvious way in, it's not a reasonable practice if you want to know that your home is secure.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
It's absurd that we censor kids of all the bad shit going on in the world. It's ridicules. There going to figure it out in short order anyway. Obviously kids looking at pornography at school aren't doing what they are suppose to be doing. It's not worse than playing some stupid flash game at school. While kids shouldn't be doing either during class time (generally speaking anyway) it's ridicules to censor everybody.
old news, schools have been doing this for ages. work places too. congratulations OP - you've discovered the real world 10+ years too late.
there is software that does exactly what you are saying, you can buy devices that do this for newbie IT administrators, you can buy these devices for whole ISPS.
boo, move on. just because you are one of the ignorant minority doesn't make it shocking news.
You haven't signed anything probably because you are a minor. Your parents probably did. It's likely detailed in some waffle saying "monitoring the school network". The great thing about contracts is that most people sign them without truly understanding them.
It was never their problem to begin with. Their school just took it upon themselves to play the wankers who want to control every iota of their student's lives.
Guess what, they don't have that right, in fact, it's criminal to even think about doing what they've done, and more than criminal that they did it.
They should be imprisoned along with every school official who thought up, implemented and or supported that program, along with every school official who didn't support it, but didn't put a stop to it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, the possibility of doing wrong is obvious but that root CA installation is very common when dealing with 802.1x authentication with Windows clients. Its a side-effect of how stupid Windows' handling of certificates is.
cf. this vendor's suggestion https://kb.meraki.com/knowledg... to disable certificate checking altogether to make it work instead.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Person in charge of the computer there I bet that would give other pause.
I work for an MSP that provides leased lines and managed services for UK schools. In my experience it is common practice for the schools to enforce the installation of root CA's for the express purpose of encrypting SSL traffic, despite the accusations of oppression and spying the only purpose this serves is usually to permit a UTM or firewall to filter web content for the standard sort of content, porn, games, proxies.
The reasons for this are threefold, firstly schools in the uk have a requirement placed upon them by the local education authorities and an expectation by parents that the students will not be permitted to access "inappropriate content" (porn games self harm drugs 4chan ect) and secondly a legal responsibility placed upon them by the Digital Economy Act 2010, the DEA2010 is quite another topic for another time however in essence it passes responsibility for all traffic on a network to the network provider, for example section 14 theoretically makes a provider liable for a £250,000 fine in the event that copyrighted material is downloaded on a providers network with out antiquate preventative steps being taken and notice served to the user in question. Arguably a school would be considered the provider of internet services to its students, especially in a boarding school. And lastly in a school and more so in a boarding school the school is seen as being responsible for the welfare of its students especially in the absence of their parents in a boarding environment. When a student goes home the responsibility then falls on the parents but while they are in the school liability is with the institution.
All of this leads us to filtering the internet, the connections must be filtered to comply with the above requirements and for any of you less informed HTTPS better referd to as SSL traffic, is encrypted. By that very nature it would be almost impossible to filter any content passed over SSL. there are ways to block URL's or deny all SSL traffic, but so much of the internet relies on SSL (Google for one uses it by default for example) that it would render much of the internet inaccessible. As a result the only way to enable the students to effectively access the content they require with out crippling it, is to filter the internet for the content on the pages and the only way to do that is to install a root CA that is controlled by the school to enable the devices i listed at the start to scan the contents and filter out the parts that do not comply with the requirements listed in the second part above.
While in theory this does allow for the recording and modification of SSL traffic if someone had the time and desire to do so, I am yet to see any instances where it has been done, and at that point you would be crossing into dangerous legal ground. But as it stands the decryption of traffic to enable filtering of the internet is permitted, and is usually something you agree to by pressing Accept to that little box that usually pops up when you log into a school computer known as an "Acceptable use policy".
The TLDR here is,
Its common practice and perfectly legal to install a root CA to allow use of a schools internet
If it were not then you would simply be denied access to the internet
Its usually something you agree to in order to access a schools internet as part of an AUP
While it COULD be usedto log or modify data i have never seen it done, and even if it were strictly speaking its there network they can do what they like
Do you install your own root cert on other people's computers? Because that'd definitely be over the line. There's no way to keep it from being used off of your network.
Do you install it without specific notice? That's also over the line.
And remember that you are also intercepting the communication of the other end of the communication. If you don't think the other end would willingly permit you to do that, you are also over the line. Hint: banks and the like are NOT gonna be happy about it.
So tough beans. If your choice is "no MITM spying, no Internet", then the right answer is "no Internet".
Or since they're probably using a web filtering solution of some sort, category/site-based blocking of the banking sites should resolve that legal issue in short order.
You go to secondary school, so you are pretty young. Good that you took a stance. Good you made a /. post out of the story. Carry on, lad, you'll go a long way.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Oh come on, everybody knows about dike swarms, dikes and sills, pegmatite dikes :-)
Paddy Steed
St Edmunds College (Prep probably)
If you're going to out a place for supposed unethical & illegal practices (unethical perhaps), don't be a pussy.
I want to expose this school. It's St Edmund's College in Ware, Hertfordshire. An independent Roman Catholic boarding school.
http://www.stedmundscollege.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Edmund's_College,_Ware
Thank you for your time.