Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by collinmanderson 2968 days ago
> I’m not sure why this doesn’t break SNI, or exactly when or how the certificate gets switched out over to Signal’s cert and private key.

They way I understand it, the connection really _is_ using amazon’s cert+key, not Signal’s cert+key.

Is signal (the server side) using amazons’s cert+key? Not technically.
2 comments
zaroth 2968 days ago
Interesting. Reading their developer guide [1] pg 293 - CloudFront servers have all the private keys anyway, so it hardly matters—from a security perspective—which key is used to establish the TLS connection to the CloudFront endpoint. The connection between CloudFront and Signal’s own severs would be encrypted with Signal’s key.

I also found this paper on domain fronting to be a very good read - Blocking-resistant communication through domain fronting [2]

[1] - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...

[2] - https://www.bamsoftware.com/papers/fronting/

link
caf 2968 days ago
Exactly. This works because the point of TLS in this instance is for the Signal client to be sure it's talking to Amazon CloudFront. The certificate for an Amazon service also hosted on CloudFront is certainly good enough to prove this, provided the client knows to expect it, which it does.
link
nebulous1 2968 days ago
That would mean that Amazon was supplying Signals content as authentic Souq traffic, something that I doubt was happening.
link
cryptonector 2968 days ago
Amazon was supplying Signal's content as souq.com but with the request making it clear it was for Signal.

How might this be noticeable? Like so:

     - (irrelevant) the SNI and certificate presented by the server don't match the request -- only the hoster can see this, so what might they care?
     - (serious) metering: if the hoster uses SNI for metering... then Signal would be stealing the fronter's bandwidth
     - (mild) DNS metering: the fronter's domains will see more DNS lookups not related to serving the fronter's content
Nothing that couldn't be addressed contractually. Signal could pay the costs that would otherwise be unfairly born by the fronter, and whatever makes the hoster comfortable with the whole thing (if making the fronter good is insufficient for that).
link
computerfriend 2968 days ago
The metering isn't based o he SNI header, so the second point doesn't apply. And since the frontier's domains are presumably using the CDN's DNS servers anyway, it's not an issue either.
link
nebulous1 2968 days ago
2 is hypothetical as none of the fronts are doing this, and even if a front "could" that doesn't matter as the fronts in question do not. We can agree that if this was happening then it would be an issue.

3 seems just wrong. Where does the DNS lookup take place? Why would the fronting server look up the SNI entry?

Are you 100% confirming that the encryption takes place using Souq's cert? Obviously it isn't going to display in a browser, but I'd wonder if there was something else you could do with it.

link