Communications of the ACM
Kazakhstan Spies on Citizens' HTTPS Traffic; Browser-Makers Fight Back
Google, Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft said theyre joining forces to stop Kazakhstans government from decrypting and reading HTTPS-encrypted traffic sent between its citizens and overseas social media sites.
Credit: Thomas Jackson/Stone/Getty Images
Google, Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft said they are partnering to stop Kazakhstanâs government from decrypting and reading HTTPS-encrypted traffic sent between citizens and overseas social media sites.
All four of their browsers recently received updates that block a self-signed root certificate the Kazakh government has been requiring some citizens to install, which causes traffic sent to and from select websites to be encrypted with a government-controlled key.
The Censored Planet website said the certificate operated against dozen of Web services that primarily belonged to Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
Computers with the certificate installed used a key that the Kazakh government also could use to decrypt data in transit.
Censored Planet said the percentage of hosts within Kazakhstan experiencing the interception was about 11.5%, up from 7% in 2019.
From Ars Technica
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