SSL and Malicious Hardware/Software

[Ryan Phillips]

Matt's blog post [1] gets to the heart of the matter of what we can trust.

I may have missed the discussion, but I ran across Netronome's 'SSL
Inspector' appliance [2] today and with the recent discussion on this list
regarding malicious hardware, I find this appliance appalling. 

Basically a corporation can inject a SSL Trusted CA key in the keystore
within their corporate operating system image and have this device generate
a new server certificate to every SSL enabled website, signed by the
Trusted CA, and handed to the client.  The client does a validation check
and trusts the generated certificate, since the CA is trusted.  A very nice
man-in-the-middle and would trick most casual computer users.

I'm guessing these bogus certificates can be forged to look like the real
thing, but only differ by the fingerprint and root CA that was used to sign
it.  

What are people's opinions on corporations using this tactic?  I can't
think of a great way of alerting the user, but I would expect a pretty
reasonable level of privacy while using an SSL connection at work.  

Regards,
Ryan

[1] http://www.crypto.com/blog/hardware_security/
[2] http://www.netronome.com/web/guest/products/ssl_appliance

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com