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Dell Accused of Installing 'Superfish-Like' Rogue Certificates On Laptops (theregister.co.uk)
Mickeycaskill writes: Dell has been accused of pre-installing rogue self-signing root certificate authentications on its laptops. A number of users discovered the 'eDellRoot' certificate on their machines and say it leaves their machines, and any others with the certificate, open to attack. "Anyone possessing the private key which is on my computer is capable of minting certificates for any site, for any purpose and the computer will programmatically and falsely conclude the issued certificate to be valid," said Joe Nord, a Citrix product manager who found the certificate on his laptop. It is unclear whether it is Dell or a third party installing the certificate, but the episode is similar to the 'Superfish' incident in which Lenovo was found to have installed malware to inject ads onto users' computers.
He is running a pre-installed Windows?
First thing I do is wipe any new computer clean. The OEMs can't be trusted anymore.
https://edell.tlsfun.de/
I don't think it is "accused" any more. It's pretty much proven.
No chance.
This "install your own root CA" trick is being used widely in corporate environments to allow proxies to snoop your HTTPS connections ; caused no end of trouble with clients using independent Firefox installs (Chrome uses the system certificate store, Firefox has it's own) navigating to our pages (with properly signed certificates) and being told they were a security risk.
We also had something that directed traffic while we were out of the corporate network through a third-party proxy that used the same trick (Websense).
Reading the FA: yes, the private key is on the machine.
Not only is the private key supplied with the certificate, unlike with SuperFish the certificate can also be used to sign executables. Which means that the bad guys can now sign their malware with eDellRoot and gain unwarranted trust. It figures that slashdot doesn't provide a good link. Try http://arstechnica.com/securit...
No chance.
This "install your own root CA" trick is being used widely in corporate environments to allow proxies to snoop your HTTPS connections ; caused no end of trouble with clients using independent Firefox installs (Chrome uses the system certificate store, Firefox has it's own) navigating to our pages (with properly signed certificates) and being told they were a security risk.
Firefox told them it's an untrusted cert and a security risk because it's an untrusted cert and a security risk.
What you are doing is bad, evil, and wrong. And it's technically illegal under the DMCA as well, because you're breaking encryption. No, an employee agreement that says you can monitor their computer use doesn't get you past the DMCA.
Fuck you and all the places that do this. If I were asked to implement such a thing at my job I'd raise all hell and strike.
... y'know... it has to be said, this is precisely why thinkpenguin (and other FSF-Endorsed hardware) do wipe-it-down-to-the-bedrock products, even to the extent of replacing the standard BIOS with coreboot, and why the purism librem laptop exists (and was successfully funded last year). but even there, the problem is that for the past 15 years all intel processors have to have an RSA-signed bootloader that goes into EEPROM on-board the processor, where there's absolutely no chance of obtaining the source code for that proprietary firmware blob. you have absolutely no idea what goes into that bootloader, but it's already been demonstrated that your laptop - and your desktop - can be woken up by external network signals - without your consent or knowledge - *even when you powered them down*.
the only possible solution here is... to not use intel (or AMD) processors. and that opens up a whole can of worms, which is why i've been sponsored to make an upgradeable laptop. if any one CPU is ever found to have problems, the whole CPU Card can be popped out and replaced... *without* having to throw away the entire laptop.
designing a laptop from the ground up so that its main CPU module can be replaced... only two years ago that could have been said to be "total paranoia". now we have the kinds of stunts being pulled by Dell, Lenovo and the NSA which were only previously believed to *potentially* be carried out...
It's not just laptops. We confirmed it was on a Dell Precision 5810 desktop workstation, purchased early May 2015.