Nokia Admits Decrypting User Data Claiming It Isn't Looking 264
judgecorp writes "Nokia has admitted that it routinely decrypts user's HTTPS traffic, but says it is only doing it so it can compress it to improve speed. That doesn't convince security researcher Gaurang Pandya, who accuses the company of spying on customers."
From the article, Nokia says: "'Importantly, the proxy servers do not store the content of web pages visited by our users or any information they enter into them. When temporary decryption of HTTPS connections is required on our proxy servers, to transform and deliver users' content, it is done in a secure manner. ... Nokia has implemented appropriate organisational and technical measures to prevent access to private information. Claims that we would access complete unencrypted information are inaccurate.'"
If it was so good then why didn't you tell us? (Score:2, Troll)
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Then you would have looked somewhat better. Now you're worse than Dropbox.
Well, see, they did tell you. It says, on Wikipedia and Nokia's developer page, that the browser in question uses a proxy. Their developer page [nokia.com] and the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] page.
Re:If it was so good then why didn't you tell us? (Score:5, Informative)
They don't just tell you - they advertise it. It's one of the phones biggest selling features.
The issue in countries where the phone is sold is network traffic. It's costly. VERY costly. This browser does what opera mini did for about a decade - it works through nokia's special proxy that fetches the page for you, renders it in unique way that saves a lot of traffic and then sends it to your phone's browser.
Re:If it was so good then why didn't you tell us? (Score:4, Insightful)
They advertise the feature without advertising the implications.
Of course, that's called "marketing". Push up the upsides, burry the downsides.
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
security researcher Gaurang Pandya
What are this guy's credentials apart from being a guy with a blog?
Amazon Silk browser does the same, Opera mini does the same, what's with this jumping on the Nokia hate bandwagon? Perhaps they should stop proxying HTTPS traffic, but remember in third world countries data comes at a HUGE premium, so these services are a god send, especially with a lot of sites moving to HTTPS by default. I would hope that Opera/Amazon/Nokia are atleast as credible as your ISP though it's an additional point of failure.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your ISP cannot decrypt SSL traffic.
Not everyone lives in a third world nation and surely they should be able to opt out of this.
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Your ISP cannot decrypt SSL traffic.
Not everyone lives in a third world nation and surely they should be able to opt out of this.
You can "opt out" by using a real browser instead of one that's designed to be proxy-assisted. Why is everyone getting so worked up about this? If you're not living in a third world nation, why would you be using this browser anyway?
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon Silk and Opera mini clearly states that every single connexion goes through them in clear. I do not think nokia does.
My ISP does not do that. When I negogiate an HTTPS session, my ISP does not intercept it and perform a MITM attack. apparently nokia does.
That's so much not ok.
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Amazon Silk and Opera mini clearly states that every single connexion goes through them in clear. I do not think nokia does.
ok, you "do not think"
My ISP does not do that. When I negogiate an HTTPS session, my ISP does not intercept it and perform a MITM attack. apparently nokia does.
Wow.. in two lines you went from "I do not think" to "apparently nokia performs a MITM attack"
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I know this is slashdot and we do not read much what people so that we can rant and seem smart. But come on, it is written in TFS and TFT (the F-ing title). "Nokia admits decrypting user data." From their own admission, they are performing a MITM attack, that is to say, they are putting themself in the middle of an encrypted connexion making each party believe they are directly and securely talking to each other.
Whether they clearly explained it to the user, I do not know, but I am sure they are performing
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this is slashdot and we do not read much what people so that we can rant and seem smart. But come on, it is written in TFS and TFT (the F-ing title). "Nokia admits decrypting user data."
Would you rather they didnt encrypt the data and sent it over the air like that instead?
You claim to know that this is slashdot, but dont seem to know to at least make an attempt to understand the technologies that you are talking about? Worthless blabber.
Hint: the phone is not the endpoint of the browsing session - the phone is a remote terminal for a server that is the endpoint of the browsing session
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Are you saying the device does not have a tcp/ip stack? Because if it does, there is no reason the data MUST be decrypted. The device could (and I would expect it to) talk directly with the remote server.
TFA mentions the user of the phone was able to track the DNS request, so clearly the device can talk TCP/IP.
The piece of software is called "Nokia Xpress Browser". It is not called "Nokia VNC client". I do understand the technology. I implemented (a much simpler version of) such a system in PHP 10 years ago
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As I said before, what Opera Mini is doing is the same thing. Though, I am not sure Opera Mini is doing it for https (maybe it does I just don't know). But Opera Mini tells you all the traffic is routed through them. Nokia Xpress Browser does not appear to tell the user (since some users are surprised of the behavior)
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As I said before, what Opera Mini is doing is the same thing. Though, I am not sure Opera Mini is doing it for https (maybe it does I just don't know). But Opera Mini tells you all the traffic is routed through them. Nokia Xpress Browser does not appear to tell the user (since some users are surprised of the behavior)
Opera Mini does indeed do it for https http://www.opera.com/mobile/help/faq/#connection [opera.com]
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What are this guy's credentials apart from being a guy with a blog?
He's a software developer, mostly focusing on database integration. He has no professional security experience beyond what you'd get in that role. source [linkedin.com]
what's with this jumping on the Nokia hate bandwagon?
You can't opt out of it; The platform is locked. Also, it's a cell phone, so there's a strong link between all internet traffic and a realworld identity. This isn't like Opera or Amazon, for which there are anonymizing options available to the enterprising individuals who wish to use said services (or don
CORRECTION (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong profile linked. Correct [linkedin.com] profile. Stupid misclick. Ugh. In other news, his background is not a software developer, but a network admin with some cisco experience. Like many in that area of IT, there is some exposure to security. I wouldn't call him an expert in MIM attacks, but he's not a layperson either.
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You sit there in the lap of luxury completely ignorant of your own past, and don't even realize that you are complaining about others being able to browse the web at all because they still do not sit in the lam of luxury like you do.
Listen kiddo, I was on the internet before it was the internet, and I had a computer before the original Nintendo you grew up with was even a gleam in an electrical engineer's eye, so don't tell me I'm ignorant of my own past. I've forgotten more about IT than you're likely to ever know. Don't make me get my old IBM XT keyboard out of storage and beat you with it.
That said, it's in storage for a reason. The world moved on. So did cell phones, which were originally the size of bricks and had an LED readout a
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Dementia must have settled in for you. Ashas are sold in third world countries, where costs of netowork traffic over 3G are still extremely high in relation to median income.
First world has indeed mostly moved on. Third world hasn't even started yet.
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Who cares what his credentials are? He's making a claim that a lot of people can verify. Is his claim false?
They are, which is not at all. My ISP doesn't have certificates installed in my browser, and aren't secretly decrypting my SSL traffic (unless SSL is fundamentally broken in a way which isn't publicly known yet).
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For the most part my 'ISP' can't break into my SSL connections. They don't have a certificate authority my machine will trust, so any kind of MTIM they might do without a herculean effort on their part anyway is going to be impossible. These phone users had essentially no idea.
So the moral of the story is DO NOT DO NOT trust that SSL is secure on any device you don't directly control the CA certificates present, and probably you can't trust and SSL code you can't audit to make sure it trusts only the CAs
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According to Amazon's statement to the EFF Silk does _not_ intercept HTTPS traffic:
SSL Traffic
Amazon does not intercept encrypted traffic, so your communications over HTTPS would not be accelerated or tracked. According to Jon Jenkins, director of Silk development, “secure web page requests (SSL) are routed directly from the Kindle Fire to the origin server and do not pass through Amazon’s EC2 servers.” In other words, no HTTPS requests will ever use cloud acceleration mode. Given the prevalence of web pages served over HTTPS, this gives Amazon good incentive to make Silk fast and usable even when cloud acceleration is off. Turning it off completely should be a viable option for users.
(from https://www.eff.org/2011/october/amazon-fire%E2%80%99s-new-browser-puts-spotlight-privacy-trade-offs [eff.org])
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It doesn't matter what his credentials are, if he's right, which he appears to be based on Nokia's response.
Of course he is "right", in that he through incompetence has "discovered" that there is a class of mobile browser "front-ends" (not really full web browsers) that do server based rendering and compression to save bandwith and increase speed on slow connection. Which has been well known (at least for people interested in mobile browsers) for years, fx all Opera Mini browsers do this, on all platforms, with millions of users.
They are not really full web browsers but fancy terminals, you use a server to brow
Listen... (Score:5, Funny)
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This is precisely what the government said about 10 years ago. "We're reading the headers, but we're not reading the message bodies!" As if 2 CRLFs is some kind of blinder.
Fedware (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't access your personal information with our closed source NSA backdoors, we just plug this strange Narus device into our routers.
The reason Nokia is able to do this (Score:5, Informative)
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The issue is that the phone is not good enough to run a real browser. So instead the mini browser get simplified instructions from the servers where the actual HTML parser is. So basically you are running a remote browser on Nokia's or Opera's servers.
If that's what Nokia is doing, then the article is totally inaccurate. In the article there is no suggestion the phone isn't capable of running a full browser. The proxies are just used to compress the data better before being sent to the client.
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The issue is that the phone is not good enough to run a real browser. So instead the mini browser get simplified instructions from the servers where the actual HTML parser is.
So basically you are running a remote browser on Nokia's or Opera's servers.
If that's what Nokia is doing, then the article is totally inaccurate. In the article there is no suggestion the phone isn't capable of running a full browser. The proxies are just used to compress the data better before being sent to the client.
it is what nokia is doing and they blatantly copied the idea from Opera, they call it a proxy browser.
these phones are extension of the s40 platform. nokias cheapest range, albeit even in that range I guess you could technically run a real browser(reportedly 128mbytes of ram for 3xx range, 32mbytes for the asha 2xx range, fyi nokias real browser sucks a** with 256 so good luck running it on 32mbytes minus OS). these articles are stupid because you could have written this based on data they released back the
How? (Score:2)
Isn't that the whole point of HTTPS, to ensure that a man-in-the-middle attack (in this case, a probably benign proxy) is impossible?
Also, why? Doesn't every website now compress html/css/js with mod_gzip?
Re:How? (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't that the whole point of HTTPS, to ensure that a man-in-the-middle attack (in this case, a probably benign proxy) is impossible?
It is only impossible without the collusion of a trusted certificate authority. When was the last time you reviewed the list on your browser? Oh, and did YOU do anything to determine if any of those organizations were trustworthy.
If you get a mobile device from your mobile provider, there is a pretty good chance that they stuck their own root CA in there somewhere. Maybe they just use it for SSL connections to their own websites/email/etc. But, trusted is trusted in the world of SSL which means they could just MITM every connection you make.
Ditto for any PC you use at work. Chances are your employer has a trusted CA somewhere in there, which means they can MITM any SSL connection you make to any service on the web.
If they didn't actually modify your browser you can probably spot this by pulling up the certificate info for your connection and noting who issued it.
This is why I believe SSL offers a false sense of security. Moving to certificates distributed over DNSSEC would cut out the middlemen, and it would improve security. Only the domain registrar for google.com could tamper with their certificates, for example. That still isn't perfect, but it is better than any CA anywhere on the globe.
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Chances are your employer does not do that. It is such a huge legal minefield most avoid it. The last thing I need is someone claiming that my proxy server was used to steal their bank details.
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Mine does (Australian government department). Interestingly they specifically exclude the local banks.
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We just kill all https sessions for anyone who is proxied.
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So how does your purchasing department work? You can't buy anything without https.
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How is that different from an ordinary server cert? I just got a cert for my own domain; that doesn't let me masquerade as a bank. If I get my browser from Mozilla, how do I know that my ISP isn't snooping? If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that the entire HTTPS spec is a total wreck, and we'd be better off without it than a false illusion of security?
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If I get my browser from Mozilla, how do I know that my ISP isn't snooping?
You trust two things:
1. That Mozilla didn't put the root certificate for an untrustworthy firm into their browser. (Ha! Have you seen the list of root certificates with most browsers these days? Seems everyone and his dog can send their CA certificate in to the browser vendors).
2. That the trustworthy root certificates that are in there will not subsequently be used for nefarious purposes - eg. to sign a wildcard certificate and then hand that over to your ISP.
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How is that different from an ordinary server cert? I just got a cert for my own domain; that doesn't let me masquerade as a bank. If I get my browser from Mozilla, how do I know that my ISP isn't snooping? If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that the entire HTTPS spec is a total wreck, and we'd be better off without it than a false illusion of security?
You aren't a CA. The person who issued you the cert is. THEY CAN masquerade as a bank if they want to.
The issue is more with things like mobile devices - chances are you didn't buy your phone from Mozilla. When the day comes that Ubuntu is selling phones I'd say chances are they'll stick their own CA on them, and thus they could MITM any connection (which isn't to say that they would).
I'm not saying that we're better off without SSL at all - that is as ridiculous as the warnings you get when you connect
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Why wouldn't this be exactly the same problem, just a different set of people where you have to trust all of them?
The scope of their authority is at least limited. If I connect to mail.google.com, only those who control the root servers can issue a certificate for .com, only those who control .com can issue a certificate for google.com, and only google.com can issue a certificate for mail.google.com.
Sure, I'd rather not have to trust Verisign to not falsify a google.com certificate, but at least we're down to only one company for any particular domain. The maintainer of .com could not issue .de certificates, and vice
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True, the point is that if you modify the source of Firefox or Chrome to not show a SSL error when the certificate is yours, then you have the situation of the Nokia browser, but that doesn't means SSL is broken because of that
If you don't like it (Score:2, Interesting)
Blast them all you want for getting left behind in the app ecosystem but iOS, Android, and WP can't hold a candle to RIM's security. [blackberry.com]
Re:RIM isn't any better (Score:5, Informative)
If you're using BES, it's all encrypted - it goes through RIM's servers, but RIM can't read it.
Hence the big kerfuffle about governments insisting on access to BES data, and RIM's refusal to give it -- they literally can't.
Consumer email/BIS access is a different story. RIM does have access to that, and presumably government as well (similar to what any other provider gives).
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Root cause is elsewhere (Score:2)
"In a secure fashion..." (Score:5, Insightful)
...my ass
Right up until the government shows up and demands that they send all the traffic to them first, and forbids them from notifying their customers.
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At which point customers will have problems beyond the scope of the issue at hand. Far beyond.
Benjamin Franklin (Score:5, Funny)
Wasn't it Benjamin Franklin who said "They who can give up essential security to obtain a little speed increase, deserve neither security nor speed"?
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Not relevant to this story. That quote is about people surrendering rights because they think the net effect will be safety. This is like your postman steaming open your envelopes and claiming he's only looking for anthrax. Nokia users aren't volunteering their secure channels to get some level of protection.
DMCA? (Score:2)
Doesn't this violate the DMCA?
It's a documented and advertised feature (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't trust Nokia to not snoop on your data then why are you carrying around a device made by Nokia that contains a camera and a microphone and a cellular connection to the internet (and probably a gps though I don't know the details of Nokia's phones)?
How is this not a violation of some law? (Score:3)
This seems awfully like wiretapping and unauthorized interception of data communications. If it isn't illegal to decrypt an encrypted transaction if you are not the intended recipient, perhaps it should be. I'd wager it *is* illegal under EU data protection laws, but IANAL. It's probably OK in the US, due to some obscure law permitting just this activity, passed at the request of some large corporation.
Kindle does this too (Score:2)
Kindle: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/amazons-kindle-fire-silk-browser-has-serious-security-concerns/1516 [zdnet.com]
Amazon Silk's terms and conditions state that Amazon will keep your the Web addresses you visit, the IP addresses you use, and your Kindle Fire's unique media access control (MAC) addresses for 30 days. With that information, Amazon can track your every Web move.
On top of that,
Re:How do they even do that? (Score:5, Informative)
There must be serious flaws in HTTPS if they can decrypt the traffic for hosts that they don't control the certs for.
They control the browser. According to the article, the necessary certificate is installed on phones as Nokia ships them.
Re:How do they even do that? (Score:5, Insightful)
There must be serious flaws in HTTPS if they can decrypt the traffic for hosts that they don't control the certs for.
They control the browser. According to the article, the necessary certificate is installed on phones as Nokia ships them.
This is exactly what i was thinking/fearing. This is some scary shit, basically you ought to treat HTTPS on your Nokia device like HTTP, unless you really really trust that Nokia knows what they are doing and how to keep a secret. The striking thing is that users obviously have no idea they are handshaking with Nokia instead of their bank, doctor, etc. Are there at least alternate browsers available?
Any browser publisher is the same way (Score:3, Informative)
This is some scary shit, basically you ought to treat HTTPS on your Nokia device like HTTP, unless you really really trust that Nokia knows what they are doing and how to keep a secret.
Any web page retrieved through HTTPS is parsed into an unencrypted DOM within the web browser. You have to trust that the browser publisher knows what it is doing and how to keep a secret.
Re:Any browser publisher is the same way (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because having the browser display the page locally is just exactly the same as having a remote server decrypt your connection as a man in the middle.
Re:Any browser publisher is the same way (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing stops the browser from transmitting information to a third-party server.
=>
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The point is... you can find a browser that doesn't fuck you over and use that. Yes, they can be bad, but for things like, say, open source browsers, you can read the code and see what it is doing. Or you can find some security researcher who will find all of those vulnerabilities and tell you about them.
You have zero control and little transparency even, when Nokia decides that it would be just great to decrypt your traffic. I understand that faster traffic is good, but a third party decrypting for any
Re:Any browser publisher is the same way (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is... you can find a browser that doesn't fuck you over and use that.
And you can find a phone that doesn't take advantage of you and use that. The trouble is, this sort of "doesn't take advantage of you" isn't exactly a selling point among the mass market, which means a product like this won't be produced for a mass-market price.
for things like, say, open source browsers, you can read the code and see what it is doing.
But do most people verify that the binary they download matches the source code? And do they diverse-double-compile [dwheeler.com] their compiler toolchain to make sure it isn't infected with a "Reflections on Trusting Trust"-style virus [bell-labs.com]? I'm under the impression most end users take this on faith.
Re:Any browser publisher is the same way (Score:4, Funny)
And you can find a phone that doesn't take advantage of you
Which part of "Microsoft Product" did you not understand?
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At a certain point, if you are going to have control over the browser to that extent, you need to be responsible for either maintaining the security standards so that HTTPS works as advertised, or you need to make it abundantly clear that you, as the provider, can now read their encrypted traffic.
And, let's be clear here, if someone compiled a binary that did not match the source code, I do have the option of compiling myself, but it is more likely that someone who is more likely to do it, like a security r
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That's when malware would have had to infect my sha1 and sha256 sums to fake me out for the last 20 versions worth of upgrades
Or just sneak a backdoor into the official tree. Once.
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Re:Any browser publisher is the same way (Score:4, Insightful)
> If it's open source YOU have the power to stop it from doing anything like that
In principle and theory, yes. In practice, maybe not. You would almost certainly use libraries installed on the device, unless you plan to roll your own from scratch (and that's going to eat a lot of SRAM). They could still sniff and snoop at the library level.
Or, they could simply sniff and snoop whatever is displayed on the screen. Your open-source browser is "clean," but Nokia is, in essence, a snoop looking over your shoulder. Character-recognition software is small and fast nowadays.
Waiting for a Slashdot story about how THAT is happening, by the way. Some manufacturers and providers are already admitting that they can access the mike and the camera on your smartphone to "see" and "hear" what you're up to ...
Ergo, I have no doubt whatsoever that even using an open-source browser won't protect you. The only real answer is to ensure that you never do anything really sensitive on a smartphone. I certainly don't.
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The problem then is that the software AND the hardware are closed.
But I think you're on the right path. Nobody is going to be able to build a phone from scratch without relying on other people's work, from the API libraries to the silicon, and have it be even remotely functional.
Modern technology is basically billions of man hours distilled into a single object, repeated multiple times into a useful device. How many of those hours have roots in being malicious, or a snoop, or a government planting seeds?
Re:Any browser publisher is the same way (Score:4, Insightful)
you trust Google over Microsoft?
one of those companies has a business model that relies on gathering as much information about you that it can and selling it to advertisers.
the other one sells software.
Re:Any browser publisher is the same way (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, because having the browser display the page locally is just exactly the same as having a remote server decrypt your connection as a man in the middle.
Is this your first time using a web browser on a mobile device?
Data has been being received, rendered and compressed by remote servers for years. Opera billed it as a major feature of their browser in 2005, but even then it was nothing new.
Re:Any browser publisher is the same way (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I understand, the browser is not doing HTTPS at all to the bank/docter etc, its doing HTTP or HTTPS to the nokia proxy and proxy is doing the HTTPS to bank/doctor. In this scenario HTTPS is not broken, the phone is. Total fail Nokia
it's doing a special protocol to nokias servers(encrypted).
just like opera mini has been doing for years.
they did this as a feature catchup. also it enables them to actually RENDER THE FUCKING PAGES THE PHONE WOULDN'T OTHERWISE BE ABLE TO. that's how these light browsers manage to do their magic on really shitty hw.
sometimes slashdot feels like full of fucking idiots who have been living under 324 feet of rock without internet.
if you don't like it, buy a phone that costs more than ninety bucks(no subs).
here's a shocking reveal of opera mini passing all data through their servers on slashdot from 2006 http://tech.slashdot.org/story/06/01/24/227227/opera-mini-mobile-browser-officially-released [slashdot.org]
Re:Any browser publisher is the same way (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference is that Opera Mini is explicitly advertised as a "proxy browser". If you choose to use it, you know what it is about, and what the implied security risks are.
Here, we're talking about a stock browser in a smartphone, doing this by default with no warnings given to the user. I don't care why they thing it's a good idea, it's a major compromise of security.
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Also your eyes get to see the unencrypted content. You have to trust that your eyes know what they are doing and how to keep a secret.
Re:How do they even do that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your trust is extended because of the expectations involved. The user/owner of the device is not informed that, unlike his PC or other smart phone devices, Nokia is handling encyption differently. As https is used primarily for the purpose of securing data traffic between the user and their banks or their other services which need security, the expectation has always been that it would not involve the maker of the device which is being used.
I "trust" my car maker to build a good car. I do not "trust" them not to install cameras in it without my knowledge and then tell me later "there are cameras, but we are not looking at the video feed."
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MS-Nokia partnership = it's worth investigating if any aspect of this decryption means that windows software is also accessing the unencrypted data.
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I don't trust Microsoft in the slightest, but I can use their stuff on my PC because I have the ability to audit and control what comes in and out of my computer. If they try something, either I can discover it myself, or one of a hundred security researchers will be able to find it. Also, the application software encrypting my data is installed by me and under my control and ability to inspect.
The idea with HTTPS is that you know that you *cannot* trust the intervening internet/cellular carrier infrastru
Re:How do they even do that? (Score:5, Informative)
On their own phones, they just install a browser and their own trusted wildcard cert.
Then anything you browse to, the browser trusts and encrypts but just to the "wrong" destination.
On any decent machine, or decent browser under your own control, you wouldn't let it happen. And if you did, SSL would be similarly "broken".
SSL is a trust mechanism only. If your phone trusts Nokia, the padlock icon means nothing beyond that you're talking to Nokia. If your phone DIDN'T trust Nokia, it wouldn't be an issue and they would have to pass your traffic through unchanged (and still encrypted!) to the destination servers or risk SSL warnings on your browser.
This is why you don't ignore browser certificate warnings, and why you NEVER install a certificate on your computer (or allow software to). I've seen software that installs a trust certificate for the vendor when installed (as administrator), that would be show up and be allowed in the IE certificate store too (so browsing to any site with a cert signed by that cert would let you think you were talking to Google, etc.)
See also Google's TURKTRUST issue lately - if you trusted TURKTRUST, you thought you were talking to Google and weren't. If you didn't, you would just have got an error and still been secure.
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On their own phones?
Nokia is not selling these devices?
This sort of language that makes it sound as though the OEM is the owner not the purchaser needs to stop.
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Show me where you can edit the list of trusted SSL certificates and I'll concede and call it a user's phone.
Your idealisms are unfortunately blocked by fact, and that knowledge was reflected in my post.
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All you are proving is that no one should be buying these.
It is not idealism to expect a sold product to have been sold. That is how things have worked for my whole life. Even my current smartphone, but I made sure to buy one I could own.
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Show me where you can edit the list of trusted SSL certificates and I'll concede and call it a user's phone.
Your idealisms are unfortunately blocked by fact, and that knowledge was reflected in my post.
Show me a way to allow this without creating a huge potential security hole and I'll concede this should be something that's easy to do.
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The same way you do on your computer?
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There must be serious flaws in HTTPS if they can decrypt the traffic for hosts that they don't control the certs for.
I guess if Nokia controls both the proxy server and the mobile device then their implementation of HTTPS can be designed so that the mobile device trusts the fake cert on the proxy server.
Re:How do they even do that? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How do they even do that? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How do they even do that? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, this IS wiretapping. I don't care if they've got a tiny tiny line item in their terms of service that say they're doing this, NO ONE expects their https encrypted session with their bank to be in the clear on Nokia's servers.
I'd really really like to see the RCMP charge Nokia Canada's CIO just on principle. Just because big companies have lawyers and huge t.o.s. don't mean they should be treated any differently than joe blow secretly inserting software on his aunt's computer to listen in to her voip conversations.
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HTTPS is only as secure as the implementation. The implementation in their browser deliberately implements it poorly, and accepts Nokia's server saying "yes, I verified the certificate on the remote server" as being valid verification of the cert.
It's easy when you're god (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really, it's relatively trivial to establish a man in the middle attack if you completely control the communication channel. A requests a secure channel to B from C. Instead C establishes a secure channel with A *claiming* that it's B, while also establishing a secure channel to B claiming that it's A. Theoretically any node your connection passes through could do this, but given the fluidity of internet routing algorithms only the ISPs at either end are likely to be able to actually pull it off. Or
Re:It's easy when you're god (Score:5, Informative)
It's sad that this is modded so high; it's completely wrong.
You're describing a MITM attack [wikipedia.org], which is prevented by SSL and TLS by using certificates -- C can only fool A into thinking it's B if C knows B's private key (in which case, C has essentially stolen B's identity).
What happens in Nokia phone's case is that the browser happily trusts C to forward things to B without looking at what's being transmitted (the browser accepts C's certificate authority).
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There must be serious flaws in HTTPS if they can decrypt the traffic for hosts that they don't control the certs for.
The flaw isn't in HTTPS; the flaw is in browsers that trust whatever the programmer wants them to trust, as opposed to what the end user wants them to trust.
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Re:illegal here (Score:4, Insightful)
It may be illegal in the US as well
Just like warrantless wiretapping...oh wait!
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it depends if you count this as breaking encryption.
its more like them running a browser on there server and giving you remote access to this browser. so its not 'breaking' encryption any more than you are when you visit the a HTTPS site.
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Likewise, its debatable whether it counts as 'interception' for the purposes of RIPA.
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or openmoko.
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Uh, my ISP can record all the SSL connections they want, because they can't decrypt what I'm sending.
So are Nokia spending their Microsoft billion on astroturfing Slashdot, or does it just look like they are?
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Uh, the technical solution is... drum roll please... don't conduct man in the middle attacks on SSL sessions.
And my technical solution is... never buy a Nokia phone.
As for 'discrediting the other party', anyone who thinks that a third party cracking my SSL session to my bank is no big deal has already discredited themselves. The fact that we have a dozen or people people in this thread saying it's OK is a clear sign of how far Slashdot has sunk.
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How can they do compression without decrypting? And MITM cannot be done without decrypting. You have decrypt before re-encrypt.
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Yes? Unless you're a tinfoil hat type, you likely know that this has been done for about a decade by opera.
I used to use opera mini ages ago on my old symbian phone. It's a really nice tool to save network traffic costs.
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Apple executives:
Please send me all your super sensitive and secret documents. I promise I won't look at them.
Google executives:
Please send me all your super sensitive and secret documents. I promise I won't look at them.
Do you seriously think that any of the widespread modern smartphones don't have far, FAR better ways of spying on you if they wanted to then proxy-browser?