SSL considered bloated • Hacker News Board

Re: SSL considered bloated

#31

Post by pif » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 2:35 PM UTC

king_magic wrote: post #18

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".

You forgot "What every X should know about Y" ;-)

Re: SSL considered bloated

#32

Post by kardos » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 2:39 PM UTC

This post focuses only on the technical costs of TLS. The reality that we currently live in contains a hostile network where unarmoured packets are the easiest of targets. The movement to put TLS on everything is a reaction to the hostility and is overwhelmingly driven by #1: A legitimate interest in security.

Re: SSL considered bloated

#33

Post by nailer » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 2:40 PM UTC

Trusted (ie, no warnings) HTTPS localhost for Mac requires about 10 mins to set up. After that:

    https-server

Will give you: https://certsimple.com/images/blog/localhost-ssl-fix/trusted...

Details: https://certsimple.com/blog/localhost-ssl-fix

Re: SSL considered bloated

#34

Post by phonon » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 2:41 PM UTC

tscs37 wrote: post #16

SSL/TLS is bloated but that's not a reason not to use it. Rather it's a reason we need some TLSv2 that just removes the crap and focuses only on three encryption/authentication modes: * Desktop: High throughput, lots of CPU, minimal latency * IoT: small throughput, very little CPU, latency acceptable * Mobile: small to medium throughput, some CPU, minimize latency A lot of bloated protocols are still good, they're bl…

https://security.googleblog.com/2014/04/speeding-up-and-stre...

Re: SSL considered bloated

#35

Post by krupan » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 2:52 PM UTC

Somewhat related: I went to check something on my home router for the first time in months and learned that:

a) it uses an old version of SSL to serve up its admin page

b) all modern browsers refuse to load that page and no longer offer an override

I had to dig up and load an old unpatched browser so I could turn off SSL completely on my router so I can continue to administer it. Am I more secure now? I'm not sure.

Re: SSL considered bloated

#36

Post by mjmasn » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 2:54 PM UTC

Total clickbait. More like websites with black backgrounds and bright green monospace fonts considered unreadable.

No major browser will be supporting the insecure mode of http/2. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that is a good thing. I like to know that the page I'm interacting with hasn't been tampered with, whatever website I'm on. Nefarious certificate authorities aside, TLS is the way to do that.

Besides, connections (especially mobile) are getting faster all the time. I'd say encouraging better connectivity is a more worthwhile pursuit than allowing everyone to turn off TLS.

Re: SSL considered bloated

#37

Post by Olap84 » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

Missed the biggest point which is cognitive overhead. HTTP is simple to understand and it has thrived because of this. What a pain it is to get Wireshark to decode TLS traffic, which is not just cognitive overhead but debugging overhead too.

Re: SSL considered bloated

#38

Post by mschuster91 » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

> It stops proxies from caching responses between different clients. There is no way to fix this.

There is, at least in corp environments. We have, via proxy.pac, a couple of ordinary proxies which act as regular cachers with low TTL, and additionally a huge (read: multiple TB storage) proxy which caches with extremely high TTL the auto-updaters from Apple, MS, Debian, Ubuntu as well as the media CDNs of some major newspapers.

It works because our machines have its CA certificate locally installed.

Re: SSL considered bloated

#39

Post by fkooman » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 3:00 PM UTC

tscs37 wrote: post #16

SSL/TLS is bloated but that's not a reason not to use it. Rather it's a reason we need some TLSv2 that just removes the crap and focuses only on three encryption/authentication modes: * Desktop: High throughput, lots of CPU, minimal latency * IoT: small throughput, very little CPU, latency acceptable * Mobile: small to medium throughput, some CPU, minimize latency A lot of bloated protocols are still good, they're bl…

It seems to make more sense to just have ONE that can accommodate all those scenarios in a secure way. One doesn't solve bloat by introducing more bloat.

I'd say more can be won by removing e.g. ASN.1 and X.509 for certificate handling and encoding that are a very difficult (impossible?) to get right and switch to something simple that solves the 99% use case of current TLS.

Re: SSL considered bloated

#40

Post by atemerev » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 3:08 PM UTC

The problem with SSL/TLS is that it is binary. There's currently very strong pro-binary movement in the ranks of Internet infrastructure engineers, probably originated in Google. Yes, binary protocols are marginally more efficient, but they are inherently harder to understand, debug, and generally see what's happening, especially in high-stress conditions when something fails in production. Binary protocols are more complex than text protocols, and more complexity leads to negligence and security problems (e.g. recent OpenSSL bugs). Secure systems are simple systems (OpenBSD gets it right).

Text-based protocols are the greatest thing that UNIX brought to the world. There should be more of them, especially in security sensitive areas.