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aleksejsyesterday at 10:22 PM2 repliesview on HN

The jabber.ru post referenced here presents clear evidence (in the section titled "Network") that the malicious actor was able to reroute traffic going to the legitimate jabber.ru server. An attacker in this position does not need an RCE to get a cert, they can just get one issued the normal way, because they do effectively control the IP address that the domain is pointing to.


Replies

8organicbitsyesterday at 11:16 PM

One suggestion for anyone concerned about this weakness. You can use the CAA record to pin the domain to a specific certificate authority, issuance method, and account. This is imperfect, as CAA record validation (edit: of CAA extensions) is not mandatory yet. But by March 2027 all the CAs a supposed to have support.

Sprinkle some DNSSEC on the CAA record too, if you'd like.

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ValdikSSyesterday at 10:28 PM

That's right, it's easier to setup such MiTM using an intermediate server, because only getting the private key of the certificate won't get you the user's traffic due to PFS.

You either need to disable PFS on the server, or export TLS master keys for each session in some way, or MiTM.