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You have a moral obligation to use crypto

blog.easydns.org

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Re: You have a moral obligation to use crypto

#81

Post by Karunamon »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #69
userbinator wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you're careful to really keep your private keys private; the root of trust gets shifted from a hierarchy of corporations to individuals you know and (personally) trust. I like this "real trust" model a lot more than the current one of a central authority and "being told who to trust", and I think all the advocates of "if you want to use HTTPS you should buy a cert from a CA" are missing this point.

I assume the certs are delivered over ssl from the CA to the client requesting the webserver, is that the case?

When you hit an SSL site, the remote server (the one you're browsing) presents a number of certificates. One for the actual secure domain, and one or more for the CA that signed that certificate (sometimes more than one because the CA's have intermediate keys. A key which signed a key which signed... etc)

The CA itself is not a party to this exchange, they only provide the end product - a signed certificate.

If you trust the CA (in your browser config), you also trust by extension every certificate that CA has ever signed (barring revocation lists).

Re: You have a moral obligation to use crypto

#82

Post by maxerickson »

dfc wrote: post #53
maxerickson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was asking about the second half of the sentence. (But to answer your question in terms of what I am getting at, you would work backwards from what you were comfortable with and then tell yourself that it was your underlying belief structure, whether that were meaningfully true or not)

I see. I guess I took it for granted that everyone understood moral obligation to mean a commandment to act a certain way due to moral principles. Depending on how you define "comfortable with" we might be using different language to talk about the same thing. I am uncomfortable with immoral behavior? I do not think you are advancing moral relativism/nihilism? I do not think most people use moral reasoning to guide (…

Well, someone could be discussing in good faith, articulate a principle that they believe represents their morality, reason out a consequence of that principle and then observably act in a contradictory manner.

(now that I have written that, I guess part of what I am getting at is that the more often that actually happens, the more you have to discount the articulation of moral principles rather than discounting the people or the good faith. Personally, I'm pretty optimistic about people and pretty cynical about the things they say...)

Re: You have a moral obligation to use crypto

#83

Post by eliasmacpherson »

Karunamon wrote: post #81
eliasmacpherson wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the certs are delivered over ssl from the CA to the client requesting the webserver, is that the case?

When you hit an SSL site, the remote server (the one you're browsing) presents a number of certificates. One for the actual secure domain, and one or more for the CA that signed that certificate (sometimes more than one because the CA's have intermediate keys. A key which signed a key which signed... etc) The CA itself is not a party to this exchange, they only provide the end product - a signed certificate. If you t…

Thanks for the explanation, I was under the mistaken impression that communication took place between the CA every time a server was visited.

Re: You have a moral obligation to use crypto

#84

Post by tptacek »

oafitupa wrote: post #76
tptacek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has done more to securely encrypt Internet traffic than any other company in the world. Among other things, they are the pioneering standard-bearer for ECC forward secrecy and for certificate pinning, the two most important Internet encryption advances in the last 10 years.

Says the Google employee...

Silly anonymous HN hater, don't you know I moved on from Google? I'm an employee of NSA now.

Re: You have a moral obligation to use crypto

#85

Post by pdkl95 »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #4
Karunamon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As usual, misconfiguration causing scary warnings, useless to the end user, but the connection is still encrypted. I really wish we'd divorce the identity assurance part of PKI from the encryption part. I have no idea how it would be done, but.

HTTPS Encryption is virtually useless without the identify verification part. Anyone can run a valid HTTPS server with a self-generated public key. Anyone could then place a MITM, and without the identity bit, you're just as compromised. If we had dropped the identity bit, every ISP would be running a MITM proxy, because they want control. Already, plenty of businesses enable poor hygiene by including transparent squ…

This is claimed every time the topic is brought up, and like the self-signed certificate scare-box in firefox, it does a significant amount of harm by forcing a choice between all or nothing. Which means many times, "nothing" will be chosen.

Encryption without authentication is still incredibly useful, and something that we've NEEDED to have happen pretty much everywhere. Some of the benefits are:

1) The ccost of and attack is significantly larger, by protecting against passive eavesdropping. You can capture massive numbers of passwords trivially by simply logging and unencrypted stream, but full MitM requires more time, effort, and resources to accomplish.

2) MitM attacks can sometimes be detected, either at the time of the attack or in the future due to repeated opportunities for the attack discovered. A passive scanner is impossible to discover, in most cases.

3) Any use encourages a culture of encryption, so the people who ARE authenticating properly aren't as obvious.

4) The cost of moving from a self-signed key to one signed by a 3rd party is small ("get your cert signed"). This makes the upgrade path to full, properly authenticated crypto much smaller.

All of these benefits are worthwhile, so please, stop encouraging the use of plaintext. The proper way of handling this is not to scare people away like Firefox currently does, but to encrypt everything automagically, so it works just like unencrypted HTTP, and only show the lock icon if full authentication has happened. That is, encrypting without auth should be used, but still presented to the user as a plain, unencrypted page.

Re: You have a moral obligation to use crypto

#86

Post by krapp »

tptacek wrote: post #84
oafitupa wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says the Google employee...

Silly anonymous HN hater, don't you know I moved on from Google? I'm an employee of NSA now.

I see how you're attempting to pass off the obvious propaganda that Google and the NSA are separate entities, when Snowden's revelations clearly suggest they are one and the same.

Re: You have a moral obligation to use crypto

#87

Post by mnutt »

dTal wrote: post #79
mnutt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was familiar with the reasons why using self-signed SSL didn't buy you anything, but hadn't really put together how it would completely weaken the whole ecosystem until now. "Oh, that's just Verizon MITMing me like always..."

Self-signed certificates are perfectly useful. Weaker security is still better than no security at all. For example, even unauthenticated, SSL protects you from log analysis after the fact. MITM is not the only threat model. If it's a personal page (say, a public-facing login to your NAS) you can always check the SSL fingerprint too. You don't have to remember the whole thing, just remember a few characters and check…

Sure, but browsers are perfectly right to throw up a giant red warning that says "THIS IS NOT OK". Otherwise MITMing will become commonplace, and users won't care.

Re: You have a moral obligation to use crypto

#88

Post by dTal »

mnutt wrote: post #87
dTal wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-signed certificates are perfectly useful. Weaker security is still better than no security at all. For example, even unauthenticated, SSL protects you from log analysis after the fact. MITM is not the only threat model. If it's a personal page (say, a public-facing login to your NAS) you can always check the SSL fingerprint too. You don't have to remember the whole thing, just remember a few characters and check…

Sure, but browsers are perfectly right to throw up a giant red warning that says "THIS IS NOT OK". Otherwise MITMing will become commonplace, and users won't care.

That's all well and good - my point was that this "self-signed certs are equivalent to no security at all" meme is both common and wrong.

[EDIT] pdkl95 said what I was trying to say more eloquently and in more depth.

Re: You have a moral obligation to use crypto

#89

Post by jakejake »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #17
alcari wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding a single root to locally installed copies of a web browser is only really useful for 2 things: testing an SSL configuration for development, and deploying your own CA to all computers on an intranet to so you can MITM their traffic without throwing up warnings. For a bit of fun, compare the warnings about a self-signed certificate in Firefox with those triggered by attempting to download a self-signed certific…

So this single root ploy is what large companies do to MITM their employees at work, I assume. I'll have to investigate what you suggest I do for fun, because I haven't tinkered with these certs before. What flags do you pass to openssl? The certificates do specify the issuer though. So you could use a self run CA in the manual arrangement to verify that your connection isn't being MITM'd, assuming you don't lose con…

I know I've heard about this somewhere before, but it seems to me somewhat a hassle to setup MITM attacks if you already have admin access over all the machines. Just put a browser plugin that logs everything and lock down the machines to they can't be messed with by non-admins. Corporate employees are generally not allowed to admin their own machines or expect any privacy on them - so there's no point in hiding the fact that you log everything.

If you're just trying to do a MITM for fun, though, there's nothing magical about the CA or cert. Once you configure the browser to trust a CA, then any cert signed with it will also be trusted by the browser. So if you are also running DNS on the network then you can re-route facebook.com or any domain to point to your own proxy server and serve up your fake cert. The user will see the nice green lock and everything. You could probably even name your CA and certs so that it looked pretty much exactly like a user would see it on the real facebook.com.

The reason why this isn't happening all over the place is just because you need to already have root access to the machine to configure the trusted CAs. The ability to add a CA, I would probably consider that to be a fully owned machine.

Re: You have a moral obligation to use crypto

#90

Post by eliasmacpherson »

jakejake wrote: post #89
eliasmacpherson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this single root ploy is what large companies do to MITM their employees at work, I assume. I'll have to investigate what you suggest I do for fun, because I haven't tinkered with these certs before. What flags do you pass to openssl? The certificates do specify the issuer though. So you could use a self run CA in the manual arrangement to verify that your connection isn't being MITM'd, assuming you don't lose con…

I know I've heard about this somewhere before, but it seems to me somewhat a hassle to setup MITM attacks if you already have admin access over all the machines. Just put a browser plugin that logs everything and lock down the machines to they can't be messed with by non-admins. Corporate employees are generally not allowed to admin their own machines or expect any privacy on them - so there's no point in hiding the…

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/05/04/pinning.html

https://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=12369

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5141342

I'm pretty sure it happens, trustwave apparently issued a cert for these purposes and it's claimed other CA's have done the same. It's a hassle to do, but the goal is to detect and prevent corporate espionage. Most corporates have their own OS media - installing from outside sources without adding corporate security required software is forbidden.

I assume this is how the certs get on to the machines. A browser plugin would be more transparent, possibly defeating the purpose.

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