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On 14 October 2014 12:59:48 BST, Ralph Holz <[email protected]> wrote:

>On the second point - I am not quite so sure we should call it an attack.
>In my experience, there are quite a few companies that use these boxes for 
>entirely legitimate reasons -

Quite a few nation state attackers that have actually deployed them widely 
would no doubt argue their use is also legitimate, likely for the prevention of 
terror, disharmony, and other bogeymen.

Regardless of the intentions behind their use, MITM proxies do subvert the 
security properties of TLS as designed and deployed, and are thus correctly 
regarded as an attack in the general sense. I think it should absolutely be 
described as such.

>especially in the context of industrial espionage.

TLS interception proxies are indeed useful in that context: they present an 
extraordinarily attractive vector for an attacker, especially when a target has 
willingly deployed one and expects to see it in normal use.

I contend that they are not as useful for counter-espionage as some may think, 
especially given the additional threat they pose. Informed, consenting people 
could instead grant permissions on the endpoints to someone wishing to audit 
traffic (such as an antivirus utility), and this is the best place to perform 
scans as presumably legitimate users have legitimate admin rights and this does 
not affect the design or deployment of TLS.

Also of course in most deployments, both ends have not provided consent, which 
is worth bearing in mind in some contexts.

Anyone who's deployed one of these TLS interception middleboxes should perhaps 
take the opportunity to re-examine and test their assumptions about their 
usefulness, necessity, and their security. I would probably recommend they 
SHOULD NOT be used - there may be a valid reason in a specific deployment, but 
the risks should be weighed up and normally I feel this introduces more risk 
than it eliminates. To the extent it is accepted practice, I feel that is a 
problem.

- --
/akr
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