Software Privdog worse than Superfish

February 22, 2015 – 9:31 PM

tl;dr There is a software called Privdog. It totally breaks HTTPS security in a similar way as Superfish.

In case you haven’t heard it the past days an Adware called Superfish made headlines. It was preinstalled on Lenovo laptops and it is bad: It totally breaks the security of HTTPS connections. The story became bigger when it became clear that a lot of other software packages were using the same technology Komodia with the same security risk.

What Superfish and other tools do is that it intercepts encrypted HTTPS traffic to insert Advertising on webpages. It does so by breaking the HTTPS encryption with a Man-in-the-Middle-attack, which is possible because it installs its own certificate into the operating system.

A number of people gathered in a chatroom and we noted a thread on Hacker News where someone asked whether a tool called PrivDog is like Superfish. PrivDog’s functionality is to replace advertising in web pages with it’s own advertising “from trusted sources”. That by itself already sounds weird even without any security issues.

A quick analysis shows that it doesn’t have the same flaw as Superfish, but it has another one which arguably is even bigger. While Superfish used the same certificate and key on all hosts PrivDog recreates a key/cert on every installation. However here comes the big flaw: PrivDog will intercept every certificate and replace it with one signed by its root key. And that means also certificates that weren’t valid in the first place. It will turn your Browser into one that just accepts every HTTPS certificate out there, whether it’s been signed by a certificate authority or not. We’re still trying to figure out the details, but it looks pretty bad.

Source:
https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/865-Comodo-ships-Adware-Privdog-worse-than-Superfish.html