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Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

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Re: Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

#61

Post by geofft »

mangeletti wrote: post #45

So, one CA to rule then all? There's a scenario (simplified for illustration, but entirely possible) that's normally not a huge risk because there are many CAs, and they are private, for-profit companies that have an economic incentive to protect you and your certificate's ability to assure end users that a conversation's privacy won't be compromised. 1) browser requests site via SSL 2) MITM says, "let's chat - here'…

I'm not sure I follow that line of reasoning. Each CA is independently and completely able to issue certificates (not counting EV, but let's leave that out). There are hundreds of CAs. Depending on your trust store, some of them are literally owned by the US Department of Defense. Others are owned by the Chinese government.

How does having _fewer_ CAs make anything easier? Why is the EFF a better route than any of the various other companies that have gotten themselves in the CA program? And given that all the CAs are equivalently trusted at a technical level, why does the human trust afforded the EFF affect whether it's a better target?

Re: Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

#62

Post by acveilleux »

general_failure wrote: post #35
overshard wrote: post #11

The "How It Works" page, https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/ , has me a bit worried. Anytime I see a __magic__ solution that has you running a single command to solve all your problems I immediately become suspicious at how much thought went into the actual issue. If I'm running a single web app on a single Ubuntu server using Apache then I'm set! If I'm running multiple web apps across multiple servers using a load…

I don't get why they are releasing a command line, instead of just giving us a cert that we can install by ourselves.

The tool will gather the domains, use the CA API to validate ownership, obtain the certs (which cannot be unilaterally created since they are based on a public/private key pair) and manage their expiry.

That's a bit more then "giving us a cert"

Re: Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

#63

Post by davidgerard »

digitalsushi wrote: post #32

This certificate industry has been such a racket. It's not even tacit that there are two completely separate issues that certificates and encryption solve. They get conflated and non technical users rightly get confused about which thing is trying to solve a problem they aren't sure why they have. The certificate authorities are quite in love that the self-signed certificate errors are turning redder, bolder, and big…

I'm pissed off 'cos I'm on the board for rationalwiki.org and we have to pay a friggin' fortune to get the shiny green address bar ... because end users actually care, even as we know precisely what snake oil the whole SSL racket is. Gah.

Re: Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

#64

Post by vbezhenar »

We have DNS system in place which should be enough to establish trust between browser and SSL public key. E.g. site could store self-signed certificate fingerprint in the DNS record and browser should be fine with that. If DNS system is spoofed, user will be in bad place anyway so DNS system must be secured in any case.

Re: Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

#65

Post by dangrossman »

jadavis wrote: post #29
lowglow wrote: post #3

Free CA? This is cool. Why this wasn't done a long time ago is beyond me. (Also please support wildcard certs) An interesting thing happened at a meet-up at Square last year. Someone from google's security team came out and demonstrated what google does to notify a user that a page has been compromised or is a known malicious attack site. During the presentation she was chatting about how people don't really pay atte…

If each domain name can get a non-wildcard cert for free, quickly, why do you need wildcard certs? For multi-subdomain hosting on one server? Just wondering.

Lots of services create dynamic subdomains in the form of "username.domain.com". To offer SSL on those domains without a wildcard certificate, you'd need to obtain a new certificate and a new IPv4 address every time a user signs up. You also need to update configuration and restart the web server process.

Re: Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

#66

Post by michaelbuckbee »

digitalsushi wrote: post #32

This certificate industry has been such a racket. It's not even tacit that there are two completely separate issues that certificates and encryption solve. They get conflated and non technical users rightly get confused about which thing is trying to solve a problem they aren't sure why they have. The certificate authorities are quite in love that the self-signed certificate errors are turning redder, bolder, and big…

Here's some comparison screenshots of the "bling" that is being described (hard to even tell that some of these sites are SSL'd without getting the EV)

https://www.expeditedssl.com/pages/visual-security-browser-s...

Re: Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

#67

Post by pde3 »

tatterdemalion wrote: post #40
digitalsushi wrote: post #32

This certificate industry has been such a racket. It's not even tacit that there are two completely separate issues that certificates and encryption solve. They get conflated and non technical users rightly get confused about which thing is trying to solve a problem they aren't sure why they have. The certificate authorities are quite in love that the self-signed certificate errors are turning redder, bolder, and big…

The warning pages are really ridiculous. Why doesn't every HTTP page show a warning you have to click through? But it's not like MITM attacks are not real. CAs don't realistically do a thing about them, but it is true that you can't trust that your connection is private based on TLS alone. (unless you're doing certificate pinning or you have some other solution).

You're absolutely right. From first principles, HTTP should have a louder warning than self-signed HTTPS.

Our hope is that Let's Encrypt will reduce the barriers to CA-signed HTTPS sufficiently, that it will become realistic for browsers to show warning indicators on HTTP.

If they did that today, millions of sites would complain, "why are you forcing us to pay money to CAs, and deal with the incredible headache of cert installation and management?". With Let's Encrypt, the browsers can point to a simple, single-command solution.

Re: Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

#69

Post by schoen »

mangeletti wrote: post #45

So, one CA to rule then all? There's a scenario (simplified for illustration, but entirely possible) that's normally not a huge risk because there are many CAs, and they are private, for-profit companies that have an economic incentive to protect you and your certificate's ability to assure end users that a conversation's privacy won't be compromised. 1) browser requests site via SSL 2) MITM says, "let's chat - here'…

We will look for ways to mitigate the risk of misissuing for any reason, including because someone tries to coerce us to misissue. One approach to this that's interesting is Certificate Transparency.

http://www.certificate-transparency.org/

There's also HPKP, TACK, and DANE, plus the prospect of having more distributed cert scans producing databases of all the publicly visible certs that people are encountering on the web.

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