Live data from Hacker News

Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .gov Domains

cio.gov

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .gov Domains

#11
post #3

As a practical question: what is the expected capacity of the preload stores of browsers? Hundreds of thousands, millions or much more domains? Because at some point it seems like everyone with moderately high security requirements may want to have their certificates pinned / preloaded.

[deleted]

Re: Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .gov Domains

#12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any plans to force IPv6 adoption in the same manner?

IPv6 is a federal mandate for agencies: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/eg... And NIST has a dashboard of adoption: https://usgv6-deploymon.antd.nist.gov/cgi-bin/generate-gov

Fantastic! Thanks!

Re: Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .gov Domains

#13
post #2

Co-author of the post here, happy to answer questions. =) This is a GSA initiative, not an 18F initiative. But 18F has a recent post detailing executive branch progress on HTTPS that may also be relevant: https://18f.gsa.gov/2017/01/04/tracking-the-us-governments-p...

Does this include DOD? I suspect DOD is probably already doing this, but just wonder if they fall under the umbrella.

Re: Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .gov Domains

#14
What are the odds that the private keys for all of the .gov domains are also sent to the NSA? I guess if you are worried about another nation spying on your traffic you would be fine. I would expect that all of this traffic is decryptable by NSA though.

Re: Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .gov Domains

#15

What are the odds that the private keys for all of the .gov domains are also sent to the NSA? I guess if you are worried about another nation spying on your traffic you would be fine. I would expect that all of this traffic is decryptable by NSA though.

I think we can pretty safely assume all information given to the government is in the hands of government agencies, one way or another.

Re: Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .gov Domains

#16
post #2

Co-author of the post here, happy to answer questions. =) This is a GSA initiative, not an 18F initiative. But 18F has a recent post detailing executive branch progress on HTTPS that may also be relevant: https://18f.gsa.gov/2017/01/04/tracking-the-us-governments-p...

Does this include DOD? I suspect DOD is probably already doing this, but just wonder if they fall under the umbrella.

DoD does have some .gov domains, so it would affect them in that way. But .mil is not affected.

Re: Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .gov Domains

#17

What are the odds that the private keys for all of the .gov domains are also sent to the NSA? I guess if you are worried about another nation spying on your traffic you would be fine. I would expect that all of this traffic is decryptable by NSA though.

Would you otherwise have an expectation that your data sent to the government would be kept secret from the NSA?

Re: Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .gov Domains

#18

What are the odds that the private keys for all of the .gov domains are also sent to the NSA? I guess if you are worried about another nation spying on your traffic you would be fine. I would expect that all of this traffic is decryptable by NSA though.

I think it's safe to assume that would be impossible to keep secret. The number of people that would need to be "in on it" is huge.

I can vouch personally that at least one civilian department doesn't do this.

Re: Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .gov Domains

#19
post #3

As a practical question: what is the expected capacity of the preload stores of browsers? Hundreds of thousands, millions or much more domains? Because at some point it seems like everyone with moderately high security requirements may want to have their certificates pinned / preloaded.

Seems like you could use a bloom filter to store whether a domain has a pinned cert, and then use an api provided by the browser to remotely fetch the pinned cert. This has privacy implications, but does step around the storage. Chrome does something similar for CRL, but bloom filters fit that use case better.

Re: Automatic HTTPS Enforcement for New Executive Branch .gov Domains

#20
post #9
post #3

As a practical question: what is the expected capacity of the preload stores of browsers? Hundreds of thousands, millions or much more domains? Because at some point it seems like everyone with moderately high security requirements may want to have their certificates pinned / preloaded.

I think that's an open question. Right now, it's not the millions, that'd be too much to bundle with browsers. But browsers may well change their delivery mechanism for preload information to allow this to scale higher. In any case, .gov won't add much to the load -- right now there are all of 5,500 .gov domains, and the rate of adding/removal is on the order of dozens every month at most.

> right now there are all of 5,500 .gov domains

Is that just domains from which web content is hosted, or just second level domains regardless of whether web content is hosted? Because I can't imagine that there are only 5,500 total .gov domains.

Post reply on HN