Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

cs.uml.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 89 posts

Re: Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

#11

Post by halo »

pdubroy wrote: post #4

Johnathan Nightingale of Mozilla has a good blog post explaining the rationale behind this: http://blog.johnath.com/2008/08/05/ssl-question-corner/ An especially pertinent point from his post: "Several CAs accepted by all major browsers sell certificates for less than $20/yr, and StartSSL, in the Firefox 3 root store, offers them for free."

Doesn't change the fact that it pops up a scary unintelligible message and makes you jump through hoops whenever someone tries to visit a site with a self-signed certificate. It's very much a "break the web" situation.

As suggested by the original article, the correct behaviour would be to treat it as though there's no security whatsoever. After all, logically, how is being encrypted but unauthenticated worse than being unencrypted and unauthenticated?

Re: Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

#12

Post by wmf »

grhino wrote: post #8

What's encryption without authentication? Encryption ensures that only the entity you are sending the message to can read it. If you can't be sure of the entity you are sending the message to, then what's the point of encrypting it in the first place? Why does the article pick out Mozilla in particular? Are they suggesting that FireFox makes it overly complex to ignore the warning and continue on?

Firefox 2 behaved similar to other browsers, giving one warning dialog for self-signed certs. People are complaining because Firefox 3 changed that to an annoying 4-step process.

Re: Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

#13

Post by josefresco »

olavk wrote: post #5
axod wrote: post #3

SSL certificates for HTTPS are a big fat scam. Why do I need to pay money to get a certificate, just to provide encryption. Encryption should be separate from identity verification. Of course identity verification should be properly vetted and you should have to pay a fee, and have documents checked etc. If however, you just want to provide security for your users by encrypting http, you should not have to jump throu…

But what good is encrypted communication if you cant be sure who you are communication with?

What good is verified communication when you can buy an SSL cert with pretty much any fake information you want.

Re: Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

#14

Post by cstejerean »

rcoder wrote: post #10
cstejerean wrote: post #2

"Snooping a connection (i.e. on a wireless link) is much easier than any of the impersonation attacks that SSL authentication prevents." I wouldn't be so sure about that.

> I wouldn't be so sure about that. Umm, I would. Running Wireshark or tcpdump to sniff traffic over the wire is easy , and analysis can be done offline at the attacker's leisure. Hijacking DNS and phsishing for users' login credentials to other sites requires a lot more preparation, and in most cases, prior selection of the desired target sites.

In most cases where you can run Wireshark to sniff someone's traffic you're probably just steps away from performing a man in the middle attack.

Re: Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

#15

Post by trevelyan »

sigstoat wrote: post #9
y0ghur7_xxx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is good because that way you know that nobody in between can see your traffic. And more often than not it is enough to know that you are talking to the same site you talked to the last time (just like with SSH). The idea of "no lock icon" in case of a self signed/unknown CA certificate is a really good idea IMHO. The traffic is encrypted, but it does not give the user a false sense of security.

If you don't know who you're talking to, then there is no point in encrypting the data, because you're probably talking to the attacker. ("Man In The Middle") Now, the idea of "I'm talking to the same person I talked to last time" is useful, but if the users are all conditioned to accept random certificates without understanding, then when they go back a second time (and the attacker is waiting), they'll agree to the…

If you've ever run an e-commerce site, you'll know that payments drop off significantly when browsers start throwing up warning signs.

Re: Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

#16

Post by y0ghur7_xxx »

sigstoat wrote: post #9
y0ghur7_xxx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is good because that way you know that nobody in between can see your traffic. And more often than not it is enough to know that you are talking to the same site you talked to the last time (just like with SSH). The idea of "no lock icon" in case of a self signed/unknown CA certificate is a really good idea IMHO. The traffic is encrypted, but it does not give the user a false sense of security.

If you don't know who you're talking to, then there is no point in encrypting the data, because you're probably talking to the attacker. ("Man In The Middle") Now, the idea of "I'm talking to the same person I talked to last time" is useful, but if the users are all conditioned to accept random certificates without understanding, then when they go back a second time (and the attacker is waiting), they'll agree to the…

If you create an account on happykittens.com, you don't really care if the cert happykittens.com is sending you is signed by a trusted CA. What you care about is that the second time you visit the site, when you log in with your brand new account, that the cert the site sends you is the same you received when you created the account (the site is the same you created the account on). This has nothing to do with the fact that the cert is signed from a trusted CA or not, and thus, making it difficult for the user to accept a SS cert is not the right solution IMHO.

Re: Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

#17

Post by ajross »

pdubroy wrote: post #4

Johnathan Nightingale of Mozilla has a good blog post explaining the rationale behind this: http://blog.johnath.com/2008/08/05/ssl-question-corner/ An especially pertinent point from his post: "Several CAs accepted by all major browsers sell certificates for less than $20/yr, and StartSSL, in the Firefox 3 root store, offers them for free."

That's not the bug though. The bug is that the error message a user sees when visiting a self-signed site using HTTPS is much more scary than simply visiting that site on an unencrypted connection, even though by all reasonable standards this is a safer, more private, and more secure action.

If we're not going to warn folks about unencrypted links where every proxy in the way is a man-in-the-middle attack waiting to happen, why are we going through such contortions to warn them about the same attacks in a situation where they are much harder to accomplish?

I've never understood this warning at all.

Re: Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

#18

Post by aristus »

sh1mmer wrote: post #6

Also, you can see the "add an exception" in the screen shot. You can manually add an SSL certificate to a white list, it's just a little bit harder, with a few more steps, than the previous YES|NO dialogue. I think this a good thing. 99% of user probably don't need to or shouldn't interact with pages with self-signed certificates. That's a good thing. Self-signed certs should really only be on development pages. I'm…

In this case I disagree. The web is not all corporate, and there is a confusion between encryption and authentication.

A certificate, signed or no, is a means to establish a secure connection between Alice & Bob. This ensures no one is snooping or modifying the data passing between them. this is a good thing that should be encouraged in an age when your ISP injects ads and the government keeps tabs on what sites you visit.

A signed certificate is a means of authenticating the identity of the presenter of that certificate, to give some reassurance and trust about the other party.

These two things can and should be kept separate. What Mozilla is doing is making it much more difficult to have a secure-by-default Web.

Imagine if your mail program suddenly stopped receiving email unless each sender either paid 100 bucks per year to VeriSign, or faxed a copy of their passport to Microsoft, or you went through a scary, four-step process to "enable" them.

Re: Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

#19

Post by aristus »

grhino wrote: post #8

What's encryption without authentication? Encryption ensures that only the entity you are sending the message to can read it. If you can't be sure of the entity you are sending the message to, then what's the point of encrypting it in the first place? Why does the article pick out Mozilla in particular? Are they suggesting that FireFox makes it overly complex to ignore the warning and continue on?

Encryption without authentication is just that: encryption. The point of encryption is to make sure no one else is listening OR modifying the data in transit. Like, say, your cash-starved ISP, or the government.

Re: Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web

#20

Post by ken »

pdubroy wrote: post #4

Johnathan Nightingale of Mozilla has a good blog post explaining the rationale behind this: http://blog.johnath.com/2008/08/05/ssl-question-corner/ An especially pertinent point from his post: "Several CAs accepted by all major browsers sell certificates for less than $20/yr, and StartSSL, in the Firefox 3 root store, offers them for free."

First time I upgraded to FF3, I couldn't figure out the right combination of clicks to get to my (self-signed) site, and I just wanted to get some work done. So I gave up and used Safari instead.

It's one thing to force users to confirm something whose security can't be guaranteed. It's another to make it so hard they stop using your app. FF3 has other nice security features I can't benefit from at all if I'm not using it.

And StartSSL may be free, but it's not easier than "click the Safari icon".

Post reply on HN