Pierluigi Paganini
December 04, 2015
The Government of the Kazakhstan plans to implement a new internet control policy for all the population starting from January 1st 2016, and to accomplish that will order the population to install some rogue security certificated leaving Kazakhtelecom( the ISP) able to do MiTM.
This information was announced Monday, and state that all the other operators are obligated by law to do the same, meaning that all HTTPS connections in Kazakhstan will be inspected.
We don’t know exactly how they will accomplish that, but the idea behind is that every device (computer, mobile, etc.) is installed with a root CA certificate similar to the ones announced in Lenovo and Dell’s computers, called Superfish.
Everyone with this certificate will be subjected to Man-in-the-Middle attacks because the web browser instead of connecting directly to a website like Google.com, will first pass through Kazakhstan control servers before going to Google.com.
It looks like after this information was released, Kazakhtelecom took it out from their website, but details about how to install the certificates will be released soon.
Making people to install a “malicious” certificate doesn’t sound nice mainly because will make the Kazakhstan government able to grab people’s passwords and other important data, and allows the government to control the population, and to censor whatever they want.
“According to the law, telecom operators are obliged to perform traffic pass using protocols that support coding using security certificate, except traffic, coded by means of cryptographic information protection on the territory of the Republic of Kazakhstan,”
“The national security certificate will secure protection of Kazakhstan users when using coded access protocols to foreign Internet resources.” Reads a translation from the original Kazakhtelecom.
Kazakhstan has a long history of censorship, it is considered one of the governments in the long list of the enemies of the Internet by privacy advocates. I have extracted the number of Tor users in the country, the graph shows that the number of users connected to Tor is doubled in the last couple of years.
The Internet monitoring and censorship activities are increasing as never before, is this the future we want for us?
Someone wants to spy on you everything you do.
About the Author Elsio Pinto
Edited by Pierluigi Paganini
(Security Affairs – Kazakhstan , censorship)
