It doesn't matter if every certificate authority is compromised or just one. One is all that is needed to sign certificates for all websites.
It is striking that we don't see that. We reliably see people saying "obviously" the Mossad or the NSA are snooping but they haven't shown any evidence that there's tampering
Why would they use the one approach that leaves a verifiable trace? That'd be foolish.
- They can intercept everything in the comfort of Cloudflare's datacenters
- They can "politely" ask Cloudflare, AWS, Google cloud, etc. to send them a copy of the private keys for certificates that have already been issued
- They either have a backdoor, or have the capability to add a backdoor in the hardware that generates those keys in the first place, should more convenient forms of access fail.
It is NSA practice to avoid targets knowing for sure what happened. However their colleagues at outfits like Russia's GRU have no compunctions about being seen and yet likewise there's no indication they're tampering either.
Although Cloudflare are huge, a lot of transactions you might be interested in don't go through Cloudflare.
> the hardware that generates those keys in the first place
That's literally any general purpose computer. So this ends up as the usual godhood claim, oh, they're omniscient. Woo, ineffable. No action is appropriate.
So your stance is that spy agencies aren't spying on us because if they were, we'd know about it?
Of course spooks expend resources to spy on people, but that's an expenditure from their finite budget. If it costs $1 to snoop every HTTP request a US citizen makes in a year, that's inconsequential so an NSA project to trawl every such request gets green lit because why not. If it costs $1000 now there's pressure to cut that, because it'll be hundreds of billions of dollars to snoop every US citizen.
That's why it matters that these logs are tamper-evident. One of the easiest ways to cheaply snoop would be to be able to impersonate any server at your whim, and we see that actually nope, that would be very expensive, so that's not a thing they seem to do.
I don't believe that the NSA is omniscient. I believe they have 95% of data on 95% of the population through mass surveillance, and 99.9% of data on 99.9% of people of interest through targeted surveillance.
You think abusing public CAs for mass surveillance is a genius idea, and that its lack of real-world abuse proves that mass surveillance just doesn't happen - full stop.
Unfortunately you fail to consider that if they tried to do this just once, they would be detected immediately, offending CAs would be quickly removed from every OS and browser on the planet, the trust in our digital infrastructure would be eroded, impacting the economy, and it would likely all be in exchange for nothing.
On the other hand if you're trying to target someone then what's the point of using an attack that immediately tips off your target, that requires them to be on a network path that you control, and that's trivially defeated if they simply use a VPN or any sort of application-layer encryption, like Signal? There is none.
> That's never been my stance
It took you about a day to go from being absolutely sure of a thing, to absolutely sure you've never believed that thing.
Just stick to your original claim that I responded to - I addressed it in the second half of my previous comment which you glossed over.
It's very difficult and expensive to attack our encryption technologies, and so it's correspondingly rare. We are, in fact, winning this particular race.
Encryption actually works not because surveillance is now utterly impossible but because it's expensive. How you went from my pointing out that there's no evidence of this mass surveillance to the idea that I'm claiming these outfits don't conduct targeted surveillance at all I cannot imagine.
Again, I didn't. You concluded that the lack of evidence of public CA abuse indicates lack of surveillance, full stop, as if that's the only viable way of conducting surveillance. Here's a reminder:
> It is striking that we don't see that. We reliably see people saying "obviously" the Mossad or the NSA are snooping but they haven't shown any evidence that there's tampering
That's a reasonable observation with an unsupported and faulty conclusion. It doesn't even matter whether you meant mass surveillance (preceding context) or targeted surveillance here because the conclusion is bunk either way. I discussed that earlier but you keep glossing over it in favor of these absurd tangents.