I thought certificate transparency was the thing that was supposed to prevent exactly what this article is describing. What if anything is incorrect about my model of the world in this respect?

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codedokode 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The wrong part is that Let's Encrypt was willing to issue a valid cert to anyone who can temporarily redirect traffic. The authorization should have been done better, for example, sending a certificate to operator's email.

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zinekeller 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Basically, CT did indeed worked as designed, but there was no monitoring by the domain authors (which to be fair there are a dearth of solutions of the time).

On a related note, Let's Encrypt also issued the presumably-interception certificates. This can be possibly something that requires interception at the VPS level (otherwise we already detected the BGP leaks). Presumably, Hetzner was forced to do a raw interception and then redirecting all relevant ports to a middlebox for inspection and CA issuance (and since that the ACME spec is well-defined, they can simply check if the handshake contains the TLS ALPN challenge and then redirect them to special code that will reply with the correct things).

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jerrythegerbil 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Certificate transparency worked exactly as designed in this case. Monitoring public certificate transparency logs for anomalies is a different story entirely.

By breaking the software facilitating https via ACME itself, no anomalous certificate transparency logs would have needed to have been created at all.

The front door is locked quite tightly with a watchful security camera, but the window has been left unlocked. Also no one is watching the camera feed.

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perching_aix 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nothing, although it's more mitigate than prevent per se. They simply did not have alerting set up against the CT logs. It is one of the lessons they highlighted in their own postmortem.

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ls612 an hour ago | parent [-]

Yeah I suppose the prevent part came from the Browser/CA forum giving the CA that did it the death penalty like they did for Kazakhstan's CA in 2015 but if the men with guns point them at executives of browser providers and say "trust this CA or else" then CT is more of a cosmetic system than anything else.

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perching_aix 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

[delayed]

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XorNot 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Do the executives implement program features?

The most striking thing about these types of conspiracy theories is people seem to completely forget that whoever you imagine you can threaten generally doesn't have the ability to do the thing you want them to do: they'd have to delegate it.

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ls612 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

So given that this is widely accepted to have actually happened why has the CA involved not received the death penalty like the Kazakh one did?

	▲	perching_aix 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Because unlike in that case, the CA in this story is not suspected to have done anything wrong, despite what the post's wording might suggest. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340259

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edelbitter an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

CT indeed worked out pretty well. At least until bots started hammering crt.sh making it unreliable, and those that want to be alerted to newly issued certificated appeared in the logs need to pay for some purpose-built service instead of just adding a relevant query to their feed reader.