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Mozilla To Support Public Key Pinning In Firefox 32
Trailrunner7 writes: Mozilla is planning to add support for public-key pinning in its Firefox browser in an upcoming version. In version 32, which would be the next stable version of the browser, Firefox will have key pins for a long list of sites, including many of Mozilla's own sites, all of the sites pinned in Google Chrome and several Twitter sites. Public-key pinning has emerged as an important defense against a variety of attacks, especially man-in-the-middle attacks and the issuance of fraudulent certificates. The function essentially ties a public key, or set of keys, issued by known-good certificate authorities to a given domain. So if a user's browser encounters a site that's presenting a certificate that isn't included in the set of pinned public keys for that domain, it will then reject the connection. The idea is to prevent attackers from using fake certificates in order to intercept secure traffic between a user and the target site.
This is a good idea, but I bet it will not work well on corporate networks that do MITM attacks: every cert will be wrong. This same thing happens if you use the SSL Observatory add-on. This clearly shows how the public key infrastructure implementation is completely flawed.
Sorry! I'm totally wrong! The corporate MITM will work just fine once it is updated:
The UA will not be able to detect and thwart a MITM attacking the
UA's first connection to the host. (However, the requirement that
the MITM provide an X.509 certificate chain that can pass the UA's
validation requirements, without error, mitigates this risk
somewhat.) Worse, such a MITM can inject its own PKP header into the
HTTP stream, and pin the UA to its own keys. To avoid post facto
detection, the attacker would have to be in a position to intercept
all future requests to the host from that UA.
Lets patch an inherently broken system with another inherently broken system that does not scale and will cause a whole new range of unwanted side-effects and problems.
What ever public-key pinning is. How about a stable 64-bit version for Windows, and actually fix the bugs in their software (yeah, Thunderbird too) that have been actively open for *years* instead of wasting time a mobile OS that nobody uses, and features that aren't really relevant. Hell, just working on the things that are broken might fix the issues they're pushing through as new features.
The ones "no one" *wink* *wink* knows is compromised by state agents.
If Mozilla would just implement DANE that would solve the problem.
When will Firefox support killing CPU-hogging tabs individually?
That's the only killer feature from Chrome I'm waiting for to switch back to Firefox.
In Chrome, if I've got 50 tabs open (not uncommon) and one of them starts spiking my CPU, I can pull open Activity Monitor (on OS X) and kill the "Google Chrome Helper" that's eating all the CPU.
That kills the one tab that was the problem, not the whole browser. And lets me reload it when I actually care about that tab again.
I haven't found a similar way to imitate this workflow in Firefox.
The whole noscript / flashblock / adblock / etc approach hasn't worked. Tried it with Firefox, still had constant CPU issues after whitelisting sites I need JS or Flash turned on for, still had no way to kill runaway processes individually.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
The default is:
1. Allow User MITM (pinning not enforced if the trust anchor is a user inserted CA, default)
So CAs inserted by the corporate networks will be allowed, only verified for CAs shipped by Mozilla
... will have air gapping and sneakernet.
My salute to FF -- you are not the problem, but you are not the solution either.
And that is the intention, I don't want MITM attack by my company or anyone else.
Then perhaps you should browse personal sites on your own dime, not the company network.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Why does the list have to be hardcoded? Why not pull the records from DNSSEC... there's a whole specification for this, RFC6698
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Sorry! I'm totally wrong! The corporate MITM will work just fine once it is updated:
Props for correcting yourself. Integrity's sexy.
Then perhaps you should browse personal sites on your own dime, not the company network.
Then what's the problem? Mozilla will no longer let employees do that.
If you ask google.com for a certificate and it sends you one that's not for google.com, your browser will already warn you.
But...if the government of Mitmistan signs a certificate that claims to be google.com, your browser will accept that, even though it's actually being used by the government to hijack your browser session.
The whole CA thing worked OK when there were only a few CAs, but it's a disaster today when there are about a bazillion of them and any of them can sign a certificate pretending to be any site in the world.
So people who care about privacy should avoid working for companies that are being forced by regulations to care more about privacy? That somehow does not seem to be the best recipe for success in helping companies who should be caring about privacy.
...Pale Moon for ever!!!!
http://www.palemoon.org/
How about they refund the purchase prices of the browser?
I have yet to encounter corporations applying policies or default configurations to firefox. Often there are just instructions left for configuring the browser in my experience (as opposed to the corporation Chrome, IE installs).
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Without commenting on whether, and in what circumstances, it's wise for companies to operate MITM firewalls:
It seems to me that this change should, in fact, make such firewalls more secure, because it'll encourage web server admins to start using PKP, which will allow the firewall to better verify the remote server identity. (Whether the creators of the firewall software will actually implement this feature is of course another question, but anyway...)
In fact, PKP itself will be more effective if it's implemented at the firewall, because in that case only *one* user has to visit a given site for *everyone* to be protected against future MITM attacks.
Usually certificates have an arbitrary high cost, expire yearly, need to be reissued because you need to add a subdomain (and "wildcard" certificates are usually very expensive). I can see trouble for all but a few domains, who will register certificates for decades, maybe because they have their own c.a.
If you are the IT director of a big corporation, you have no option but to MITM SSL traffic. The alternative is providing a perfect way for malicious insiders to steal corporate secrets (like a whole pile of credit card numbers or the blueprints/source code for the companies latest products). And providing a vector for malware or attacks to bypass all the edge-level intrusion detection systems.
And providing a way for the people on the inside to access things that they shouldn't (whether its pornography, pirated content, or anything else). That last one is even more important in, say, a school or educational environment or library than in a corporate network.
Not DANE the people, DANE (DNS based Authentication of Named Entities) http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc... Mozilla are in a position to both publish TLSA record and authenticate the CERT.
You mean what corporate networks are doing is wrong. That is the biggest flaw.
They should move to a model of a proxy configured in the browser. The browser then can trust the proxy.
New things are always on the horizon
You can also configure every browser to use a proxy-server and then block all the other webtraffic at the firewall.
New things are always on the horizon
So they have given up on certificates alone, don't they?
We've had some source code theft recently at my job, so we have an SSL MITM proxy that generates a work SSL cert for everything. At first I hated it, but it is a work comp, and they provide a dirty LAN, so just bring your device if you want to browse your mail.
But, this would break Google searches for me. I wouldn't be able to look at any Google site, no Google searches, no wikipedia, no stackoverflow on my work comp with this. Make this a hard to find, no normal person would be able to find it, only geeks can flip the switch, config to turn this off please.
Except that the proxy server will have to MITM SSL for it to work.
This AC makes a key point: It is the auditors who decide the real policy. Sometimes that is good since I don't want politicians deciding those details. But the bad part is that the auditors, when faced with ambiguous language, will overreact and require nearly impossible things like keeping all web pages served for the next 10 years.
I am unclear on all this, but "the browser then can trust the proxy" seems to mean that same thing as the MITM. The proxy issues a cert, and the browser has to trust that cert. It is a form of MITM attack: except you know and (supposedly) trust the MITM.