[dspillett]

I'm not saying it is right for people to be monitored, but that I would never trust that I wasn't being so I'd not be daft enough to do something I don't want the company to know about using their resources.

And there are perfectly valid reasons for companies to monitor traffic: data exfiltration, accidental or malicious, is a significant concern for companies that hold and process PII and for the people who have their PII held/processed by those companies. It is not as black & white as “monitoring and surveillance bad” unless you only care about your personal privacy.

[sillystuff]

Some of these "security" products that MiM TLS traffic allow configurations that objectively reduce your security. You can configure Palo Alto devices to accept a self-signed cert from the Internet, but present your trusted MiM cert to the on-site user. Now the user isn't aware that they are the victim of a second MiM outside the organization.

The organization also exposes itself to greater liability. E.g., a rogue employee could use the trusted MiM CA cert for their own MiM e.g., capturing banking credentials of co-workers or accessing user/employee PII they would otherwise not have access to.

Yes, monitoring traffic by MiM https to external sites can alert you to / possibly prevent accidental exfiltration, but it doesn't prevent intentional exfiltration. It is, however, very effective at monitoring employees. The thing it is best at, might be its true purpose in an organization.

[dspillett]

> but it doesn't prevent intentional exfiltration

It can prevent accidental exfiltration, or deliberate exfiltration by a relative incompetent, which are the majority of such problems.

You are right in that they will not stop deliberate actions by a competent disgruntled or a competent external attacker who has access (but you have a much wider set of problems in this latter case).

Maybe I'm old-fashioned (I am definitely a “working in an office, living at home” person which seems to mark me out as a dinosaur in the coming remote-work age!) but I don't think it is my employer's responsibility to provide me with unfettered unfiltered internet access to do personal stuff with. Work stuff on employer provided Internet which they can monitor all they like, personal stuff on my own devices & connections which they can keep the hell out of.

[Xelynega]

Does this mean that it's OK for an employer to put cameras in employee bathrooms? The argument can be made that it's not the employers responsibility to provide me with unfettered access to a space to do personal stuff with, just like internet access, so why not?

[xist]

Cameras in bathrooms? Complete hyperbole. If you're going to argue, atleast offer logical escalation concerns. day 1, inspect your ssl. day 2, cameras in bathrooms.

[sillystuff]

If the employer needs to back-door encryption to discover your personal activity, how is it their business what you are doing? Your activities obviously caused them no public issues. If they did, the encryption back-door would not have been necessary for the discovery.

In more civilized areas of the world privacy rights are explicit, and even things like employers snooping on employee email accounts on company owned email servers is illegal. When at work, you are selling your time to your employer, but that doesn't imply that the employer owns you while you are at work.

As to the sibling comment about cameras in workplace bathrooms, yes employers did this and now there are laws prohibiting it. Now, employers just account all your time using bossware leading to e.g., folks at Amazon having to pee in bottles or wear diapers on the job to not get fired. There is no line that some capitalist employer will not cross unless we place limits with consequences to reign them in-- e.g., we no longer have employers forcing small children to crawl into running machine tools to clear a jam while risking a limb being sucked into the mechanism and turned into hamburger meat-- but, we did, it was common-- lives of the poor (especially children) were cheap, but stopping an assembly line was expensive.

[slt2021]

I am afraid you are talking about stuff you have absolutely no idea about.

Palo Alto appliance should be configured with both Forward Trust and Forward Untrust CA certificates, and the issue you described will not exist. If some people misconfigure - thats their fault for not following instructions.

Secondly, rogue employee doesnt have access to CA key that is stored in Palo Alto appliance. Only your firewall admin will have it, but if your main firewall admin went rogue, capturing colleagues’s data is the least of your concerns. Insider threat of that calibre is equally applicable to rogue CEO or CFO stealing all money from the bank. Or your ActiveDirectory admin getting CFO’s credentials and corporate bank credentials.

[sillystuff]

You seem to acknowledge that you currently can configure the device in the manner described while simultaneously being extremely aggressive. A conversation I had with PA support gives me the impression that PA didn't have 'Forward Untrust' when they first started back-dooring TLS i.e., the PA support person did not counter my point of negative security implications of their MiM back-door for invalid certificates encountered externally. This conversation was something of an on-site debate between PA reps and a few of our tech staff. PA pushing for spying on users and tech staff trying to come up with technical reasons why it was a bad idea (management already loved the idea of spying on the users, so no appeal to decency was going to work. Management arranged the debate without telling staff it would happen until the last minute while it was planned ahead with PA for weeks; IT staff at that college were good people who had a history of advocating for user privacy).

Having PA MiM TLS connections is the organization back-dooring itself as well as the external sites the users connect to. This back-door is available for abuse by IT staff, management and/or an attacker(internal or external).

There is a rule that seems to eventually always be proven-- if you provide infrastructure that can enable abuse, eventually it will be abused. Even if you and everyone else involved in the decision at your organization have good intentions, your future coworkers / management may not. Presumably the FBI and NSA have more thorough back ground checks of their employees than the average employer, and both have had employees abuse their access to surveillance data to e.g., stalk ex-girlfriends. And, even if the employee isn't rogue themselves, when the order comes from above, many will obey immoral/illegal orders-- e.g., Ronald Reagan, as president, had the FBI spy on his daughter's boyfriend. The safest option is to not to install the back-door in the first place.

PA's ability to tie Internet activity to specific users' identities was central to their sales pitch-- our tech staff assumed this was targeted at windows shops, but we used non-MS stuff including our LDAP servers and hoped this could kill the surveillance project-- PA countered that they could, at a last resort, do things like e.g., scrape radius logs to associate identities.

PA appears to be a competently run company that probably knows what messages are most effective at selling their product, and they really pushed user surveillance. Therefore, I suspect that many organizations who purchased PA products based that decision on the user surveillance capabilities (explicitly to enable abuse by management).

PAs main feature seems analogous to an illegal phone wire tap, and IMO should be illegal (especially without notification to the victims-- both on-site and off-site). It is curious how corporate circumvention of encrypted communications without permission of the external site hasn't been seen as a CFAA violation while a simple 'view source' on a browser can result in SWAT pointing a gun at your child.

[slt2021]

Forward Untrust Certificate has been a feature since day one, the earliest document mentioning Forward Untrust I was able to find online is for PANOS 6.0 which is like 8 years ago?

in company of thousands users nobody has the energy to spy on employees - it is simply not worth the effort. Why would company spy on own employees, it is not something that brings profit for the company.

The only purpose of SSL decryption is to decrypt traffic and enforce policies: prevent users from going to shady websites, downloading malware, clicking on phishing links, stop viruses, trojans and hackers' command&control comms. It is because majority of http traffic is TLS encrypted, that security vendors no other choice other than decrypt and inspect.

Nobody is looking over zillions of logs, looking at what pages a random employee is browsing in a given day - aint nobody got time, energy, nor infrastructure to do that.

User identity (also device identity, and app identity) is used as to classify traffic and it is then up to company admins to create policy for enforcement.

Whatever the policy is - it will be enforced, and it is the same policy&terms you agree to by signing employment contract.

Which says something like - your work laptop and corporate Internet connection can only be used for work related stuff and not personal stuff, etc, etc.