Comment by dns_snek
15 days ago
> 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.
> Why would they use the one approach that leaves a verifiable trace?
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.
That's the most naive take I've read online this year.
So your stance is that spy agencies aren't spying on us because if they were, we'd know about it?
Your "I bet they're God" stance is even more naive. They're not God, they've got a finite budget both in financial terms and in terms of what will be tolerated politically.
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.
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