Comment by xyst a day ago
Wonder what has replaced “Xkeyscore” given the wide adoption of TLS. I know ISPs, especially national ISPs like AT&T (see: titanpointe - 33 thomas st, nyc) would feed data to NSA since traffic at the time was mostly via http (rather than https). I suppose the unencrypted dns queries are still useful (although DNSSEC is supposed to defend against snooping/deep packet inspection)
Load Balancing && WAF or CDN enablement usually suggests at least a decrypt step or two in the HTTP(s) chain. WAF for layer7 payload inspection, or the default wildcard cert'ing your Cloudflare site for instance.
There's also significant aggregation of traffic at handfuls of service providers amongst service categories, all generally HTTP(s) type services too ... Mail, CDN, Video, Voice, Chat, Social, etc. Each of these are still likely to employ Load Balancing & WAF.
Most WAF/Load Balancing providers have documentation about when/where to perform decrypt in your architecture.
How many Cloudflare sites are just using the Cloudflare wildcard cert?
From there, plenty of 3 letter agency space to start whiteboarding how they might continue to evolve their attack chain.
Often the connection between the load balancer and app backend also uses TLS. I've operated a large / complex service on AWS and all internal communications at each level were encrypted.
Of course, in principle, a cloud provider could tap in anywhere you're using their services – ELB (load balancer), S3, etc. I presume they could even provide backdoors into EC2 instances if they were willing to take the reputational risk. But even if you assume the NSA or whoever is able to tap into internal network links within a data center, that alone wouldn't necessarily accomplish much (depending on the target).
It is MITM, but is it an attack? Literally the website owner hires Cloudflare explicity to decrypt and filter the traffic. Attack implies that it's unwanted behavior, yet the reality seems to imply that its wanted behavior by the site owner at a minimum, although continued use of the site by visitors also suggests that they want that behavior (or they'd go elsewhere).
Isn’t the attack assuming that NSA/FBI/TLO has full access to the MITM connection at will? I mean that doesn’t seem too far fetched does it give various revelations over the years and things like The Patriot Act actually passing when it’s obviously unconstitutional
Worse is how most email providers require SMS confirmation or a secondary email.
A lot of pages are now behind CF, hosted on AWS,... It would surprise me if these providers didn't share their data with the 3-letter agencies.
I'd argue any data center of cloudflare is just as valuable to fiber tap, just like the undersea fiber cables.
Lots of juicy Internet protocols are still running in cleartext. OCSP, for example, and DNS, as you noted. And the IP-level metadata of TLS connections is still enough to uniquely identify which entities are communicating with each other in many situations. I very much doubt XKeyscore has been retired.
>> Wonder what has replaced “Xkeyscore” given the wide adoption of TLS.
A nationwide invisible firewall, with man in the middle decryption and permanent storage of all unencrypted data. All run by the major backbones and ISPs.
Start an NSA cutout called Cloudflare. Configure sites to use an SSL/TLS connection to Cloudflare, then a separate SSL/TLS connection from Cloudflare to your actual machine. Then have the marketing team call it "Strict" encryption. Make it free so everyone uses it.
It is also a lot easier since ceetificate pinning has fallen out of favor. Many sites use LetsEncrypt. The Certificate Authority system itself is not reliable.
In a way it is the perfect solution from a Govt perspective. Other countries have systems at this scale and larger. China for example.
What makes the CA system reliable is browsers insisting on Certificate Transparency before trusting a cert. If an attacker creates an evil cert by stealing the ACME verification traffic, there's a permanent record of it. Big corps can monitor the ledger to see what certs have been handed out to their domains.
DNSSEC is an authentication mechanism. It does not encrypt queries or responses.
You might be thinking of DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) or DNS-over-TLS (DoT).
There's also DNSCurve.
DoH and DNSSEC don't use ECH (encrypted client hello)
From what I remember, only DoT uses ECH
https://media.ccc.de/v/chaoscolloquium-1-dns-privacy-securit...
ECH can be used regardless of DoT, DoH, dnscrypt, or plain as long as your resolver passes HTTPS queries.
You can easily test this: dig @8.8.8.8 https pq.cloudflareresearch.com
>Wonder what has replaced “Xkeyscore” given the wide adoption of TLS.
Cloudflare is a US-based company that does MITM attacks on all traffic of the websites that it protects. It's part of how their DDoS mitigation works.
Many people still use large US-based mail providers such as Outlook or Gmail.
Many large services use AWS, GCP or Azure. Perhaps there are ways for the NSA to access customers' virtual storage or MITM attack traffic between app backends and the load balancer where TLS is not used.