Technology

59589 readers

2962 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

what if the hacker provided the public key for https connection? (www.youtube.com)

submitted 6 months ago by Moxible@monyet.cc to c/technology@lemmy.world

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So this video explains how https works. What I don't get is what if a hacker in the middle pretended to be the server and provided me with the box and the public key. wouldn't he be able to decrypt the message with his private key? I'm not a tech expert, but just curious and trying to learn.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] lostmypasswordanew@feddit.de 81 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (19 children)

All TLS/HTTPS clients have a set of Certificate Authority keys which they trust. Your client will only accept a public key which is signed by a trusted CA's key. A proper CA will not sign a key for a domain when it has not verified that the entity that wants it's key signed actually controls the domain.

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 59 points 6 months ago (18 children)

A proper CA will not sign a key for a domain when it has not verified that the entity that wants it's key signed actually controls the domain.

Most browsers trust many certificate authorities from all over the world.

Any of them could...

be compelled by authority
be compelled by threat
be hacked
have a lapse in ethics
have a rogue employee
etc.

...and yes, it has happened already.

HTTPS as most of us use it today is useful, but far from foolproof. This is why various additional measures, like certificate pinning, private CAs, and consensus validation are sometimes used.

[–] nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl 15 points 6 months ago (7 children)

It is indeed true that some CAs have seriously misbehaved; however, browser builders are rather strict on the presence of the CAs they trust. Misbehaving or even simple errors are reasons for getting kicked out, after which certificates signed by those CAs are now no longer valid.

[–] lily33@lemm.ee 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I'm somewhat skeptical. What if LetsEncrypt decided to misbehave tomorrow? Would the browsers have the guts to shut it down and break all sites using it?

[–] nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl 3 points 6 months ago

Yes, they will. We’ve seen it before in mostly less serious cases: Diginotar, Türktrust, Symantec, etc. As brittle as the CA system can be, when there is real enough trouble, CAs do get revoked.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 1 points 6 months ago

Not the browser companies. The parent CA would revoke Let's Encrypt's certs and publish that revocation in the certificate revocation list. When the browser (software, running on your system) downloads the new CRL, they will automatically stop trusting LE.

load more comments (4 replies)

load more comments (14 replies)