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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."
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 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.
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.
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
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
This is the UK, totally different wiretap law - this doesn't breach it, its their network and they can intercept what they wish.
Your understanding of what is required is a little off - the root CA holder can indeed "retroactively" sign any certificate they want, and your browser would merrily accept such a signed alternative cert without raising any errors because it would never see the original cert. The very act of installing the root CA in the browser allows them to completely replace any other cert signed by any root CA and not cause errors to occur. The only opportunity they would have however to do this would be if they were proxying the traffic between you and the internet.
The entire department of education out here (.AU) installs a root CA with the express purpose of intercepting HTTPS to "protect the children". There are secondary certs installed at every school so that 802.1x doesn't crap out when you try to sign in (in point of fact, pretty sure windows installs the profile by default when you bind a machine).
;)
There is the potential for creepy, but pretty sure 99% of the techs at schools aren't actually smart enough to intercept traffic. Being one of the 1% who can (actually not a school tech, a consultant, but anyway) I can say in all honesty that there is better porn available for free on the Internet. I'm only going to look if you kick up a fuss about my ability to look
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
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.
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.
I use zScaler Cloud for my work proxy, and I choose to have them decrypt all traffic using their CA cert that we have to install on all user laptops. This is critical because they are using heuristics to detect activity types (e.g. don't rely on a "list" of anonymizers, detect that anonymizing is being done and block it). Even if they are sitting at home, the proxy is decrypting all their activity. And the analytics are amazing.
The big difference is between this and the OP, though, is that my company owns these laptops. I display banners and let it be known that you have zero expectation of privacy. Hell, I use my personal iPad for personal browsing at work so as not to be tracked.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.