What if I told you, businesses routinely do this to their own machines in order to make a deliberate MitM attack to log what their employees do?
In this case, it’d be a really targetted attack to break into their locally hosted server, to steal the CA key, and also install a forced VPN/reroute in order to service up MitM attacks or similar. And to what end? Maybe if you’re a billionaire, I’d suggest not doing this. Otherwise, I’d wonder why you’d (as in the average user) be the target of someone that would need to spend a lot of time and money doing the reconnaissance needed to break in to do anything bad.
They (the service that provides both web protection and logging) installs their own root certificate. Then creates certs for sites on demand, and it will route web traffic through their own proxy, yes.
It’s why I don’t do anything personal at all on the work laptop. I know they have logs of everything everyone does.
I’m talking about home hosting and private keys. Not businesses with people whose full time job is to make sure everything runs fine.
I’m a nobody and I regularly have people/bots testing my router. I’m not monitoring my whole setup yet and if someone gets in I would probably not notice until it’s too late.
So hosting my own CA is a hassle and a security risk I’m not willing to put work into.
The domain certificate is public and its key is private? That’s basically it, if anyone gets access to your key, they can sign with your name and generate certificates without your knowledge.
That’s my opinion and the main reason why I wouldn’t have a self hosted CA, maybe I’m wrong or misled, but it’s a lot of work to ensure everything is safe, only for a self hosted setup.
You can set up your own CA, sign certs and distribute the root to every one of your devices if you really wanted to.
Yeah I know about that, I’ve done it. It’s just a PITA to do it even slightly carefully.
That sounds like a bad idea, you would need your CA and your root certs to be completely air gapped for it to be even remotely safe.
What if I told you, businesses routinely do this to their own machines in order to make a deliberate MitM attack to log what their employees do?
In this case, it’d be a really targetted attack to break into their locally hosted server, to steal the CA key, and also install a forced VPN/reroute in order to service up MitM attacks or similar. And to what end? Maybe if you’re a billionaire, I’d suggest not doing this. Otherwise, I’d wonder why you’d (as in the average user) be the target of someone that would need to spend a lot of time and money doing the reconnaissance needed to break in to do anything bad.
Ah, you mean they put the cert in a transparent proxy which logs all traffic? Neat idea, I should try it at home
They (the service that provides both web protection and logging) installs their own root certificate. Then creates certs for sites on demand, and it will route web traffic through their own proxy, yes.
It’s why I don’t do anything personal at all on the work laptop. I know they have logs of everything everyone does.
I’m talking about home hosting and private keys. Not businesses with people whose full time job is to make sure everything runs fine.
I’m a nobody and I regularly have people/bots testing my router. I’m not monitoring my whole setup yet and if someone gets in I would probably not notice until it’s too late.
So hosting my own CA is a hassle and a security risk I’m not willing to put work into.
Yeah that’s your situation. Some people are fine with it
As opposed to what, the domain certificate? Which can’t be air-gapped because it needs to be used by services and reverse proxies.
The domain certificate is public and its key is private? That’s basically it, if anyone gets access to your key, they can sign with your name and generate certificates without your knowledge. That’s my opinion and the main reason why I wouldn’t have a self hosted CA, maybe I’m wrong or misled, but it’s a lot of work to ensure everything is safe, only for a self hosted setup.