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SSL considered bloated

naughtycomputer.uk

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: SSL considered bloated

#21

I really hope I'm not the only person who mentally groans whenever I see yet another "X considered Y" clickbait title. It's the tech equivalent of "this one weird trick" or "X Happened And You Won't Believe What Happened Next".

What's clickbaitish about the title? If the article is aligned with title, then the title is fine.

Re: SSL considered bloated

#23

> Seems to me a bit like equipping everyone with armour to make shooting them more difficult. Solving the problem the wrong way? I don't know, making humans immune to bullets would be an elegant solution to the gun control debate which doesn't involve disagreements over the second amendment, and would make everyone win.

At the very least it seems like a great solution until we can do it the "right way", whatever that might be.

Re: SSL considered bloated

#24

I really hope I'm not the only person who mentally groans whenever I see yet another "X considered Y" clickbait title. It's the tech equivalent of "this one weird trick" or "X Happened And You Won't Believe What Happened Next".

No, it's not just you:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

Re: SSL considered bloated

#25
amusingly, the "one-line" server is not only "not really one line", but also contains a number of errors and other incongruities:

1. there's no reason to put : at the start

2. z=aa is the same length as z=$r

3. there are double quotes where there shouldn't be and none where there should

4. the sed quoting is wrong and only works since file names cannot be empty

5. useless use of subshells

6. won't work on echos which don't parse escape sequences or don't accept -e

7. parsing ls

but most importantly, the whole first part can easily use TLS with "openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -nodes -subj /CN=localhost -keyout server.pem -out server.pem; openssl s_server".

Re: SSL considered bloated

#26

> Seems to me a bit like equipping everyone with armour to make shooting them more difficult. Solving the problem the wrong way? I don't know, making humans immune to bullets would be an elegant solution to the gun control debate which doesn't involve disagreements over the second amendment, and would make everyone win.

Just move to autralia/europe.

Re: SSL considered bloated

#27
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely my thought on SSL. I'm no expert (correct me if I'm wrong), but if I understand the technology correctly: if your http website connects to an https login page, who is to stop someone from spoofing a link to a fake login page on the http website.

EV certificates help.

EV certificates may improve a user's awareness of a spoofed page, but cannot do anything to make it more technically difficult to execute.

Providing an HTTPS login with an otherwise HTTP site is vulnerable to redirection to HTTP or to another site.

There is lots of evidence that suggests that in this configuration, cookies are often not set up properly (secure only) and can therefore be transmitted and stolen over HTTP.

Re: SSL considered bloated

#28

> Seems to me a bit like equipping everyone with armour to make shooting them more difficult. Solving the problem the wrong way? I don't know, making humans immune to bullets would be an elegant solution to the gun control debate which doesn't involve disagreements over the second amendment, and would make everyone win.

Just move to autralia/europe.

...Why?

To be clear: I proposed, if even possible, that would actually be a good way to resolve this debate.

"Yes, you can keep your guns, they're just totally ineffective at harming people now".

I wasn't taking a stance for/against gun control, or more broadly for/against the US Constitution. Telling someone to "just move to [some other country]" is needlessly hostile; the message it sends is, "You aren't welcome here."

The author of this post proposed a straw man of a "crazy sounding idea" to illustrate "solving the wrong problem"; what I'm saying is that it would be the right problem to solve if it were even possible.

(As far as my actual politics go on this matter: I'd like to see mandatory gun safety taught in places where they aren't illegal to prevent accidental misuse. Friends of friends have lost their lives to mishandled firearms. That's all you'll get out of me on HN.)

Re: SSL considered bloated

#29
There are several other very important reasons missing from this article, which I think invalidate part of the argument.

One is widespread use of open wifi networks. I know many people don't bother to redirect traffic through a VPN when on open wifi, which means anyone on the network can monitor their traffic. This might be mostly innocuous, but at the worst, they can steal login credentials and personal info.

The second is ad/analytics tracking networks. By using SSL, you force your trackers to be SSL as well. Small comfort for those who despise this anyway, but it's better than these networks moving plain text identifiers and info about you around, allowing it to be monitored as you surf around the web.

I believe the third is widespread government surveillance/mass spying. By using SSL you do two things: prevent (or at least complicate) the 3rd party interception of data, and also decrease the signal-to-noise ratio (making it less likely that any given encrypted stream is actually something valuable and worth breaking).

Re: SSL considered bloated

#30
I was really expecting a serious discussion about useless and dangerous flags, outdated encryption, expensive and dangerous renegotiations... I got a one line complaint about "network traffic" (take a read about latency and bandwidth difference!), caching, and bad tooling (go learn some better tooling, it's out there).

There are plenty of things to complain about in TLS, but the article touches none of them. What a bummer.

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