Thursday's revelations that Lenovo PCs ship with adware that intercepts sensitive HTTPS-protected traffic have focused intense scrutiny on Superfish, the company that markets the intrusive software. But lost in the furor is the central role a company called Komodia plays in needlessly exposing the passwords and other sensitive data of not just Lenovo customers but also a much larger base of PC users.

As this post was being prepared, Komodia's website was only sporadically available, with the company's homepage saying it was under distributed denial of service attacks. There's never a legitimate reason for people to carry out DDoS attacks, but the underlying anger directed at Komodia is understandable. The company proudly markets HTTPS-decrypting and interception software that's used by more than 100 clients, including Fortune 500 companies. "With a simple-to-control interface, you can intercept website traffic and network applications from any program language," a promotional video boasts. The company's website brazenly refers to one of its software development kits as an "SSL hijacker."

The fake secure sockets layer certificate found on Lenovo machines preinstalled with Superfish came from Komodia. It was bundled with a password-protected private encryption key, presumably to prevent it from being used by malicious hackers to create websites that spied on users as they visited HTTPS-protected pages. But as Ars reported Thursday, the measure was laughably easy to bypass, since it took Errata Security CEO Rob Graham just three hours to discover that the password was—you guessed it—"komodia".

If white-hat hacker Graham could do it with ease, there's no reason to think less-ethical hackers, government spy agencies, or even script kiddies haven't already done the same thing. And once they do (or did), they have a master private key that will decrypt traffic traveling between the user and any HTTPS-connected website on the Internet. When in a position to monitor the connections between end users and the websites they browse—say, at a coffee shop—these bad actors can use the certificate to intercept and decrypt encrypted traffic flowing both ways.

A spokesperson for Superfish confirmed that the company hired Komodia to provide some of the technology that hijacked HTTPS connections on Lenovo computers. That explains why the fake certificate is registered to Superfish but is protected by the password "komodia". But it turns out that private keys Komodia has generated for other clients similarly expose end users to potential abuse.

Lenovo wasn’t alone

Marc Rogers, a principal security researcher at CloudFlare, has identified Komodia-provided keys in three other pieces of PC software that also intercept the encrypted traffic passing between end users and encrypted websites. One is parental control software from Komodia called "Keep My Family Secure," a second is parental control software marketed by an outfit called Qustodio, and the third is a known as Kurupira Webfilter. Many of the characteristics of all three pieces of software are the same. They install a fake certificate in a PC's root certificate level, a highly sensitive piece of real estate. In each case, the key is signed with a 1,024-bit RSA key, uses a SHA1 algorithm, and bundles both a public and a private key. And in each case, the private key can easily extracted using the password "komodia." Rogers published his findings Thursday in a blog post headlined "Will the madness never end? Komodia SSL certificates are EVERYWHERE."

In fairness to Komodia and Superfish, many applications—some provided by Microsoft or trusted security companies—install custom root certificates on end user machines. In most cases, the programs do this because they have a legitimate need to monitor encrypted data passing between an end user and a website or mail server. Antivirus software, for instance, requires this capability so that it can detect malicious code being pushed through HTTPS-protected connections. Most of the time, this process is safe since the software installs a unique digital root certificate on each end-user computer. That makes it impractical for attackers to use the certificate maliciously.

The Komodia keys used in the Lenovo Superfish debacle and the three cases analyzed by Rogers are altogether different. They use the same key for each group of customers. That is, the key for Lenovo Superfish is the same for each user, the key for the Komodia parental control software is the same for each user, etc. In all four cases, the private keys are protected by the password "komodia".

Script kiddies unite

What this means is that anyone with these applications and a modicum of hacking ability has everything they need to in many cases decrypt, read, and even modify data passing between any HTTPS-protected website and end users who have the same software title installed. It wouldn't be hard, for instance, to incorporate the certificates into a running instance of the publicly available SSL Sniff to target software users as they use insecure networks.

But Komodia's poor design choices don't end with the use of the same key and weak password. Over the last half decade or so, software makers have gradually phased out those encryption ciphers such as RC4 and MD5 that are known to be vulnerable to crippling attacks that can decrypt SSL traffic. But Rogers said the Komodia software accepts these connections. Rogers credited @TheWack0lian with making the discoveries illuminated in his post.

"Basically, that means the last five or more years removing weak ciphers has been pointless for those customers," he told Ars.

There's another potential attack that could be waged on machines that have Superfish software with the Komodia certificate installed. If someone were able to compromise the backend Superfish server, they might be able to force it to send JavaScript to end users that would expose websites or data connected to their private viewing.

It's hard to know just how prevalent these dangerous Komodia keys are. A company spokesperson declined to comment to Ars, citing the confidentiality of the company's clients.

So for now, let's review: We know of four Komodia certificates that make it trivial for hackers to man-in-the-middle HTTPS-protected websites. We also know that Komodia has more than 100 customers, some of which are Fortune 500 companies. At a minimum, that means the security hazard that Lenovo users are exposed to extends to people with these three additional applications—and those may be just the tip of the iceberg.

Post updated to correct language about SHA1.