[tor-talk] !!! Important please read. !!!

[Gerardus Hendricks]

On 1/8/14 1:44 AM, TheMindwareGroup wrote:
> https://wiki.thc.org/ssl

Thank you for linking that resource. It explains the issue really well. 
I don't think the issue they are describing matches your doom scenario 
though.

Yes, the CA system sucks horribly. It is best to assume that many of the 
world's intelligence agencies have a spare sub-CA of their national 
certificate authority. It goes too far to say that "all SSL streams are 
compromised". But there exist people that can decide them to be, indeed.


> In short ssl is there
> playground, so even if ssl is used we still cannot trust it cos they
> can get into any ssl stream they like. Im not sure if this is true,
> cos i dont know how the key/shared secret is created, but the document
> hints that it might be based on the servers ssl certificate.

You cannot passively decrypt a stream with a CAs private keys. That key 
is only used for signing (fake) certificates. You would need the 
server's private keys, or even the temporarily shared secret in the case 
of EDH.

An active attack would be necessary to listen in on a stream. Active 
attacks are resource-limited and at least in case of the NSA, risky. You 
don't want to show everyone your fake certificate, so your attack must 
be targeted and used sparingly.