Comment by mschuster91
6 hours ago
> You have to compromise a lot to be able to make a MITM here.
It's trivially easy to mount an ARP spoofing attack. I did that at school two decades ago and on-the-fly rewrote <img src=...> to hardcore porn images for funsies.
mitmproxy [1], a popular toolkit for making that easy, has the option to generate "eMudhra" certificates on the fly now.
It is trivially easy to compromise things, all you need is physical access to the network.
I don't know why you're downvoted, any public wifi access point in a shop could be compromised and users would never notice.
Client isolation is very common on wireless and wired LANs these days in enterprise and guest network environments. You also have tools like dynamic arp inspection to block poisoning attempts via the network switch.
If you get past all of that, you still need a victim who is actively using a cli tool on macOS using https.
It’s not impossible, but the conditions are much more specific than those needed to inject porn into a webpage on a poorly configured school network in 2006.
…and yet it doesn't help at all if a laptop sees an AP with strong signal in its vicinity and connects to that instead of the meticulously configured AP that sits behind the counter with a slightly weaker signal.
You’re not actually making the point you think you are. This comes back to the original comment stating you need to compromise a lot to MITM here.
So you need to somehow trick macOS into remotely connecting to the wrong bssid, and then arp poison a user who happens to be using a macOS cli tool that’s using https.
Sounds pretty targeted and unlikely to happen.
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> all you need is physical access to the network
Yeah that's not so much "trivially easy"
Do you have a cell phone? Do you use Wifi? Do you use an ISP who, in the last few decades, has performed any form of interception or traffic-tampering?
I hazard that the answer to all three of those is "yes".
> all you need is physical access to the network.
yeah, it's trivial to punch somebody in the face in the morning, all you need to do is to be by their bad in the morning when they are waking up.
You don't have physical access to the network, doesn't mean other actor aren't here. Working for providers, governments, or being able to impersonate them. This is a serious issue, it shouldn't be downplayed.
If you think it's not that important, it becomes a critic about TLS and basically saying that ciphers for web traffic are useless.
Public wifi hotspots tend to give you that opportunity. Large commercial hotspots have inter-client communication blocked, but your average coffee shop style network? You're lucky if it even is an isolated VLAN from the shop's cash register lol.
Have you never used wifi at a coffee shop?
Physical access to networks isn't that hard to come by.
Great, you have an inconvenient way to possibly-maybe see some random's gmail inbox at Starbucks.
You'd be better off just mugging them in the parking lot.
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I have, but good luck predicting where I'm going to have my next cuppa. Outside of petty crimes mentioned, I don't see how it could be industrially weaponised to make actual damage.
Regardless, real bad actors are busy compromising your next `npm install` anyway. Much better reward.
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