• tal@lemmy.today
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      6 months ago

      If ISP routers are anything like the west that means they control the DNS servers and the ones on router cannot be changed, and likely it blocks 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 and so on, as Virgin Media does (along with blocking secure DNS) in the UK for example, which definitely opens up a massive attack vector for an ISP to spin up its own website with a verified cert and malware and have the DNS resolve to that when users try to access it to either download the software needed to access this Grid System or if it’s a web portal - the portal itself.

      Browser page integrity – if you’re using https – doesn’t rely on DNS responses.

      If I go to “foobar.com”, there has to be a valid cert for “foobar.com”. My ISP can’t get a valid cert for foobar.com unless it has a way to insert its own CA into my browser’s list of trusted CAs (which is what some business IT departments do so that they cans snoop on traffic, but an ISP probably won’t be able to do, since they don’t have access to your computer) or has access to a trusted CA’s key, as per above.

      They can make your browser go to the wrong IP address, but they can’t make that IP address present information over https that your browser believes to belong to a valid site.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          6 months ago

          I don’t see why they wouldn’t, or couldn’t do this

          There are only 52 organizations that Firefox trusts to act as CAs. An ISP isn’t normally going to be on there.

          https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Included_Certificates

          https://ccadb.my.salesforce-sites.com/mozilla/CACertificatesInFirefoxReport

          If whatever cert is presented by a remote website doesn’t have a certificate signed by one of those 52 organizations, your browser is going to throw up a warning page instead of showing content. KT Corporation, the ISP in question, isn’t one of those organizations.

          They can go create a CA if they want, but it doesn’t do them any good unless it’s trusted by Firefox (or whatever browser people use, but I’m using Firefox, and I expect that basically the same CAs will be trusted by any browser, so…)

            • Zeoic@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Well for one, ISPs are not the government, and two, if any CA was caught doing this, browsers like firefox would drop them. Hopefully google would too, but who knows. Thats an aweful lot of risk on their part.

                • Zeoic@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  Exactly, and with ISPs not being the government, they can not force CAs to do anything. And yes, if a CA complys with an insane law that allows anyone to skirt around security and privacy (their ENTIRE purpose), they will lose the faith of the public, and people will drop them. Whether it was legal or not doesn’t matter much for public sentiment.