“log into router and add static route for target traffic”

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/785152-166819124-mitm-google.html

This is how the NSA is man-in-the-middling selected ‘targets’. It’s simple, just add new static routes which redirect all the target’s traffic away from a real Certificate Authorities’ IP addresses, to an NSA run Certificate Authority Server’s IP address.

In other words. When the ‘target’ attempts to connect to Verisign.com, he/she will be redirected to nsa.com, which is running a fake Certificate Authority server setup by the NSA. Although these would be IP addresses, not Domain Names. Static routes work using IP addresses.

This is accomplished through changing ‘static routes’, inside an ISP’s network. Specifically, by editing static routes inside ISP corporate routers.

So the ‘router’ you see in picture of the classified slide, isn’t a residential home router. It’s most likely an ISP’s corporate router.

Which is why you see multiple inbound ‘Google Requests’ coming into the router, and multiple ‘Targeted / Non-Targeted’ requests coming out of the router.

The ‘Non-Targeted’ requests are from ISP subscribers the NSA doesn’t care about. The ‘Targeted’ requests is the actual subscriber the NSA cares about intercepting.

As for Google’s SSL/TLS private session key stored on Google’s own servers. The NSA doesn’t need to have this key in their possession.

The NSA runs their own Certificate Authority Server, which stores a public key for the spoofed Google Server. Which the NSA is also running. So the ‘target’ encrypts against the NSA’s spoofed public key. Establishing an encrypted session to the spoofed NSA Google Server.

The spoofed NSA Google Server then establishes a second encrypted session to the real Google servers, using Google’s real public key, obtained from a real Certificate Authority.

Then the NSA just sits there in the middle and reads everything unencrypted. Because the NSA server is in control of both session keys. The spoofed Google key, and the real Google key.

Here’s a visualization to help explain how this works:

1. Spoof a Certificate Authority thru static reroutes.

Target >——> NSA Certificate Authority
_________^Spoofed Google Public key

2. Establish encrypted session with spoofed NSA Google Server.

Target >—> spoofed Google Server(MITM)
_______^Spoofed Google Private key

3. Establish encrypted session from spoofed server to the real Google Server.

spoofed NSA Google Server (MITM) >—> real Google Server
________________________________^Real Google private key

4. The end result looks like this:

Target >—> NSA Spoofed Google Server(MITM) >—> Real Google Server
_______^NSA Spoofed Google private key_______^Real Google private key

I hope I did a good job explaining this. It’s hard to do without picture to aid the explanation.

In summery, the REAL Certificate Authorities themselves are probably not compromised. The NSA is using static routes to re-direct a specific ‘targets’ traffic to the NSA’s FAKE certificate authorities, they are running themselves.

The NSA Certificate Authority then has the target encrypt against it’s fake public key, and redirects it (thru static routes) to the NSA’s fake Google server. A session connection is established using the NSA’s fake private key.

Then the spoofed NSA Google server sets up another encrypted connection with the REAL Google server, and simple relays information back and forth between the target and real Google server. The NSA is now able to sit in the middle, reading and decrypting everything.

This leaves one question. How did the NSA come into possession of a Certificate Authorities root certificate? Without a root certificate, web browsers will refuse to connect to the NSA’s fake Certificate Authority Server.

The answer is simple. The NSA either hacked into a Certificate Authority and stole the root certificate. Or the NSA used one of their super computers to brute force the root certificate’s private key, by analyzing their public key.

I suppose they could also force an American CA to make give them a copy of their private key. I’m going to go with the hacking into a CA and stealing the key, as my pick of exploitation.