101–110 of 268 posts
Let's Encrypt is one of the best things that happened to the web recently. I wish we had more choices though. Relying so much on a single party is unnerving.
Do we have conclusive evidence yet that LE is not a honey pot? I mean, if I were the NSA...
Let's Encrypt is one of the best things that happened to the web recently. I wish we had more choices though. Relying so much on a single party is unnerving.
Do we have conclusive evidence yet that LE is not a honey pot? I mean, if I were the NSA...
When I read things like that, I always think of the paper "The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users". [1] Yes, content injection is bad, but the chance of it happening multiplied by the damage it could cause to your users is probably less than the the effort required to shift a static blog site to HTTPS. (Do not underestimate the leap in difficulty from copy-pasting from an Nginx tutorial to understanding h…
Cpanel comes with easy to use Lets Encrypt module. Auto-new the certificate and sends optional email alerts each time it renews or fails. Web hosts are making it easy to use Lets Encrypt, which surprised me. I thought they'd be reluctant to give up the revenue from high margin certificate sales.
Let's Encrypt is one of the best things that happened to the web recently. I wish we had more choices though. Relying so much on a single party is unnerving.
Do we have conclusive evidence yet that LE is not a honey pot? I mean, if I were the NSA...
Also, why would they do this? It's smarter to compromise the existing CAs.
What if your website is only accessible for you from within your LAN? Such as your router, LAN, or your settopbox? If you have DHCP as well and don't control the DNS or don't have root (such as on IoT devices) then you cannot use Lets Encrypt. Or am I missing something?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what would happen if Let's Encrypt started charging for their service AFTER HTTPS became compulsory. Seems like a great (but evil) business strategy. All these CAs could just start increasing their prices and we'd all be forced to pay. If you understand human behavior, then you know that this WILL happen eventually.
This might even make sense as "a great (but evil) business strategy" except Let's Encrypt isn't a business, it's provided by a charity, ISRG, the Internet Security Research Group, set up for exactly this purpose by people from Mozilla (a charity) and the EFF (another charity) I suspect that the people behind ISRG weren't as paranoid as the Free Software Foundation about being corrupted by some hypothetical evildoers…
https://github.com/letsencrypt
If you needed to set up another ACME-compatible CA on the same model (which could then be a drop-in replacement compatible with the existing client base), it would be a lot less expensive (although it would require datacenter build-out, hiring an operations team, and a variety of PKI-specific stuff like key ceremonies, HSMs, cross-signing, CPS, and audits).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we have conclusive evidence yet that LE is not a honey pot? I mean, if I were the NSA...
What would you do with this power? Let's Encrypt certificates are public and don't involve any knowledge of subscribers' private keys.
The value of a CA is that it's a trusted 3rd party that holds a private key used to sign public keys (certificates). Never a CA should get hold of your private keys.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would you do with this power? Let's Encrypt certificates are public and don't involve any knowledge of subscribers' private keys.
You don't need to have private keys to exploit this scenario. Let's say you own example.com, and you add a certificate by Let's Encrypt. If Let's Encrypt is a malicious actor, they could MiTM a connection to your site, and present a VALID certificate to the target user, as they hold the private keys used to sign the public certificate. The value of a CA is that it's a trusted 3rd party that holds a private key used t…
I'm not sure if you're referring to CAs' ability to issue fake certificates, or if you're suggesting that the certificate issuer can directly MITM connections.
CAs' ability to issue fake certificates is a very serious concern which has led to the Certificate Transparency system where all issued certificates must be publicly disclosed (in a system outside of the issuer's control) in order to be publicly trusted. A site doesn't have to use a certificate from a particular CA in order to be vulnerable to misissuance by that CA, as in the Iranian Comodo and DigiNotar attacks, where Gmail was briefly vulnerable to MITM attacked involving misissued certificates from these CAs even though it didn't normally use certificates from either of them at all.
CAs don't have the ability to use their signing keys directly to MITM connections involving certificates that they issued, because the signing key isn't used for any cryptographic purpose other than validating that the certificate (which refers to the site's public key) was validly issued.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A MITM attack on a static site is definitely possible, maybe even easy, but I'm not going to worry about it unless I have something important to protect. HTTPS doesn't protect the content of your site from being stolen, it protects your users from hostile third-party content masquerading as yours.
>it protects your users from hostile third-party content masquerading as yours Exactly. What does anyone lose if my anonymous untrusted blog does something untrustworthy for that one reader who has an infected router? Should I encrypt messages I write on post cards, because I'm afraid a disgruntled postal worker will write "you suck" on the bottom? The worst case scenario here is temporary vandalism.