France Government used Rogue Google SSL
Digital Certificates to Spy on users
Google has found that the agency of government of france is using unauthorized Digital
certificates for some of its 0wn domain to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on a private
network.
Google security engineer Adam Langley described the incident as a "Serious Security breach",
which was discovered in early December. Rogue digital certificate authority ANSSI, who closely
work with the French Defense
“In response, we updated Chrome’s certificate revocation metadata immediately to block that
intermediate CA, and then alerted ANSSI and other browser vendors. Our actions addressed
the immediate problem for our users”
Google has immediately blocked the misused intermediate certificate and updated Chrome’s
certificate revocation list to block all dodgy certificates issued by the French authority. In a state-
ment, ANSSI said that the intermediate CA certificate was used to inspect encrypted traffic with
the user's knowledge on a private network with a commercial device i.e. Snooping on its own
users’ Internet usage. According to the, the inspection of SSL traffic on their own networks can help
organizations prevent data leaks or discover malicious connections initiated by malware. It could
be a critical threat if one such signed certificate was ever fall into the wrong hands. Microsoft
warned that, "An attacker could usethese certificates to spoof content, perform phishing attacks, or
perform man-in the-middle attacks against a large number of Google-owned domains, including
google.com and youtube.com." Last year, a Turkish certificate authority called 'Turktrust' was
revealed to have issued two subordinate certificates for the domain gmail.com, and that these
certificates had been used to intercept Gmail users’ traffic. NSA is also alleged to have used man
-in-the-middle attacks through unauthorized certificates against Google in the past. Google said
, "We're now working to bring this extra protection to more users who are not signed in."
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