The case of the fraudulent SSL certificates
The case of the fraudulent SSL certificates
Posted Mar 24, 2011 18:07 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)In reply to: The case of the fraudulent SSL certificates by giraffedata
Parent article: The case of the fraudulent SSL certificates
Normally, SSL/TLS would prevent the MITM from observing the cleartext of the traffic, since (a) the MITM needs the proper private key to decrypt what you're sending, and (b) the client verifies that the public key used to encrypt outgoing traffic corresponds to the domain name. The bad guy can only observe the unencrypted traffic by substituting a different certificate, one which would not be approved by a registered CA for use with that domain, thus giving away the MITM attack.
The existence of a fraudulent certificate nullifies (b), since the client will see a certificate certified for the right domain name, but (presumably) the bad guy has the corresponding private key and can thus decrypt the traffic (and re-encrypt it with the right certificate before forwarding it to PayPal, or visa-versa).
