Nelson B wrote:
Ian G wrote:
[...] that whole 40-bit key thing was nothing to do with banking. It
was all to do with the crypto export restrictions,
Banks told their users "40 bits isn't good enough", and "we won't
let you do online banking with us with a browser that can only do
40 bit crypto"....
:-) OK, so Banks told the Users. Who told the Banks
that 40 bits wasn't good enough for them?
40-bit crypto was fine for banking and probably still is,
as we lack any viable threat model for eavesdropping, and
That's not true.
Transparent proxies abound. All the residents of the nation of
china have 100% of their international traffic eavesdropped.
The world's largest ISP still uses transparent proxies for all
non-SSL traffic. Many other ISPs do also.
Good point. So all ISPs can sniff on traffic. Now,
the question is, why have ISPs had a very low incidence
of snooping and eavesdropping? You'd think that by now
there would have been dozens even hundreds of cases of
such? After all, we know there is a non-trivial amount
of credit card traffic going over HTTP, and ISPs are
ideally placed to do perfect DNS attacks.
I've heard of about one, maybe two if we push it. I
think the reason is that your average ISP is staffed
with the wrong sort of person to do insider attacks,
whereas banks, telcos, and other places have no such
good luck.
(By viable threat model - I didn't mean it was possible,
but that it was economically attractive.)
And there are proxies operating now that do real MITM attacks
against SSL that passes through them. To use these proxies,
you must agree to an end user agreement and download their
software that installs their root CA cert. The end user agreement
prevents the user from taking any action against them for their
snooping. The user even agrees to "hold them harmless" against
any legal action that might come against them as a result of the
user blowing the whistle. Recent reports say there are tens of
thousands of users of it.
Right, but we've excluded them, right? They could
set up 40 bit, 128 bit, 4096 bit for all we care,
and the proxy would still read A-OK. What this
means is that the user has been forced to accept
the ISP as an insider into their PC. Nothing SSL
can do about that except ... operate over HTTP :)
iang
--
News and views on what matters in finance+crypto:
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