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Enabling Secure HTTP for BBC Online

bbc.co.uk

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: Enabling Secure HTTP for BBC Online

#51

And just yesterday I told someone to visit BBC when trying to connect to public wifi that requires a redirect to a login page first. Guess I'm going to have to find a new go-to http site now

There really should be a new, better solution to captive portals.

Re: Enabling Secure HTTP for BBC Online

#52
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Washington Post. Buzzfeed. The Guardian. New York Times still dosent have HTTPs.

Their traffic is too high for them to afford it (and probably wouldn't outweigh the SEO uplift)

I am actually -1 on this idea. They should be able to afford terminating SSL on the load balancer end. It doesn't change the architecture for as long as the load balancer terminates the traffic. Securing HTTPS internally is an expensive move. CPU wise has always been an argument (or more like an excuse). If your load balancer is doing computation other than forwarding requests and decryption SSL session, you should double check your architecture. If small startup will millions of views can sustain SSL traffic, why not NYT? Most their traffics are just serving static files and results are usually cached anyway.

Instead, the burdens are on testing and developing the migration. For example, they'd have to inventory and edit everywhere they use http:// (hardcoding the scheme in your front-end code) instead of //. Furthermore they have to support third-party ad networks deliver active scripts (like javascript) over HTTP. Having HTTP while on HTTPS will create mixed content warning and for active contents browsers will block these violations immediately, thus breaking the website.

To me, the decision of not migrating to HTTPS because of infrastructure capacity is always a myth. Someone has to prove that with data.

Re: Enabling Secure HTTP for BBC Online

#54
post #24

And just yesterday I told someone to visit BBC when trying to connect to public wifi that requires a redirect to a login page first. Guess I'm going to have to find a new go-to http site now

http://something.com or use what Google does when Chrome notifies you of a login gateway to public wifi: http://www.gstatic.com/generate_204

wow. For those too lazy to do the extra search step: http://www.something.com/faq/

Re: Enabling Secure HTTP for BBC Online

#55
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Washington Post. Buzzfeed. The Guardian. New York Times still dosent have HTTPs.

Their traffic is too high for them to afford it (and probably wouldn't outweigh the SEO uplift)

The most commonly cited answer I've seen for these kind of questions hasn't been the cost of serving HTTPS but rather the delays in getting the ad networks to support HTTPS. Some sites reported that they had fewer bids (and thus lower revenue) for ads on HTTPS pages, which is something I'm sure the NYT management watches very closely.

Re: Enabling Secure HTTP for BBC Online

#56

And just yesterday I told someone to visit BBC when trying to connect to public wifi that requires a redirect to a login page first. Guess I'm going to have to find a new go-to http site now

Space-bar heater :) ON a more serious note, I always use http://example.com . Being reserved and maintained by the IANA for documentation and testing, it's the most stable site I can think of.

Be aware that plenty of ISPs sadly MITM example.com. I ran into this when our test suite that curl'ed example.com and checked its output failed when we ran our binary on a new provider.

Re: Enabling Secure HTTP for BBC Online

#58
post #3

> The CPU overhead of TLS encryption has historically been significant. We’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes to improve both the software and hardware layers to minimise the load impact of TLS whilst also improving security. I thought that it hasn't been significant overhead for a while now? related: https://www.maxcdn.com/blog/ssl-performance-myth/ https://istlsfastyet.com/

I can see they've only enabled Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral and RSA key exchange cipher suites. That means users will either use ECDHE and get forward secrecy, or old clients will just use "RSA" (which means the client sends a "pre-key" back to the server encrypted with the server's public key) which works but doesn't give you forward secrecy.

What they HAVEN'T enabled is Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral suites, which give older clients forward secrecy at a big CPU hit.

So this is an example of performance-tuning your TLS settings. There's also stuff to do with session tickets, session resumption, and eventually they'd also be served using ECDSA certs, once all clients support it, or there is at least a great way to only show the older RSA cert to old clients.

Re: Enabling Secure HTTP for BBC Online

#59
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even a 2012 MacBook Air can sign an SSL key in only 6.1 milliseconds. The BBC has to deal with machines much older and much less powerful than that.

Even if it took an ancient machine 10x longer than a 2012 MacBook air, that 61 milliseconds more is really not all that much time in the grand scheme of things. I'm sure the people using these machines that are "much older and much less powerful" than a 2012 macbook air are not expecting sites to load as fast as a newer machine, and probably don't care about the loss of less than 0.1 seconds to load time. If you're r…

I think the best thing you can do to speed up HTTPS is to move to HTTP/2. Check this out: https://www.httpvshttps.com/

Re: Enabling Secure HTTP for BBC Online

#60
post #9
post #5

> HTTPS has been around since 1996 A blog post about spending several years updating to a protocol that's been around for 2 decades and has been standard for full sites for years. This makes me feel like anyone who has an account on BBC should be afraid of their security practices. Calling a plaintext password leak from BBC right now. EDIT: People are taking this comment more seriously than I intended. I don't actual…

Calling FUD on your comment. It hasn't been "standard on full sites for years", and still isn't now. Only recently with the 'HTTPS everywhere' move has the idea that public sites with no authentication should support HTTPS. And even now, that's not a universally supported opinion, because of its effect on caching. The BBC has used HTTPS on pages with forms that submit secure data, as has been the historic standard. M…

Yup. Until very recently, you did most of your shopping on Amazon.com using unsecure HTTP, right up until you clicked Checkout. Only recently did they move all of the product browsing over to HTTPS.
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