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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

#151

Post by anonbanker »

iancarroll wrote: post #110
diafygi wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the clarification! You might want to add that point to your technical how-it-works section[1]. I was wondering how older browsers would accept a new CA's signature. Also, I really wish AOL would have donated their root certs to y'all[2] so you didn't have to set up a whole new CA. [1]: https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/technology/ [2]: https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000618....

I don't know why AOL keeps being brought up, but it's highly unlikely they would do this. For one, it's probably used internally for smart cards/SMIME. Secondly, it'd be very hard to get AOL to spend money on doing something for free. Moving a CA to a different company is no small feat, operationally...

AOL bought Netscape, and incubated the Mozilla project while Netscape was still alive. they've spent a lot of money on doing things for free.

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

#152

Post by pbhjpbhj »

grey-area wrote: post #126
Aardwolf wrote: post #6

My website only contains publically available stuff for people to read. Is there any reason why I would want to use https for this use case? Or what does "entire web" mean?

Is there any reason why I would want to use https for this use case? Yes it can help you stop: ISPs inserting adverts into your content (this has happened) Governments censoring your content or rewriting it Governments putting people in jail for reading your publicly available (in your country) content, which is illegal in theirs People impersonating your website But if you don't want to use it, that's cool too. I su…

>Governments putting people in jail for reading your publicly available (in your country) content, which is illegal in theirs //

How does that work, surely the gov can still see people accessing the information by monitoring network traffic and the info itself is still public. HTTPS doesn't encrypt the actual request traffic does it, and in any case the gov would still see which server the traffic is going to unless you're using something like tor [and possibly still then].

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

#153

Post by kaoD »

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…

Perhaps you should understand a system before slandering it? As others have said, encryption without authentication is useless.

Running a CA has an associated cost, including maintenance, security, etc. That's what you pay for when you acquire a certificate. Whether current market prices' markup is too high would be a different question, but paying for a certificate is definitely not spending 200$ to look cool.

CAs are the best known way (at the moment) to authenticate through insecure channels (before anyone brings pìnned certs or WoT, read this comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616766)

EDIT: You can downvote all you want but I'm still right. Excuse my tone, but slandering a system without an intimate understanding of the "how"s and the "why"s (i.e. spreading FUD) hurts everyone in the long run.

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

#155

Post by blendo »

seryoiupfurds wrote: post #133
pilif wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a browser know that the the self-signed certificate that was just presented for www.mybank.com is intended to be self-signed (show no error, but also show no padlock) or whether it's the result of a MITM attack because www.mybank.com is supposed to present a properly signed certificate (show error)? How would you inform people going to www.mybank.com which is presenting a self-signed cert in a way that a) t…

If the user typed www.mybank.com, let the server redirect to https but don't show the lock icon if it's self-signed. This is no worse than an impostor that just doesn't redirect to https. If the user typed https://www.mybank.com , show the usual warning for self-signed certificates.

This is EXACTLY what I want for my intranet sites. It lets me protect my users from the wireshark in the next cubicle.

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

#156

Post by geofft »

danielweber wrote: post #119
pilif wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A self signed certificate warning means "Warning! The admin on the site you're connecting to wants this conversation to be private but it hasn't been proven that he has 200 bucks for us to say he's cool" no. It means "even though this connection is encrypted, there is no way to tell you whether you are currently talking to that site or to NSA which is forwarding all of your traffic to the site you're on". Treating…

Browsers shouldn't silently accept self-signed, but there is a class of servers where self-signed is the best we've got: connecting to embedded devices. If I want to talk to the new printer or fridge I got over the web, they have no way of establishing trust besides Tacking my first request to them.

I bought a camera the other day with the nifty feature of having an NFC tag embedded in it to guide your phone to launching (and installing, if necessary) the companion mobile app.

It occurred to me that this is a really good way of establishing a trust path: while they're only using it to guide you to the right app, they could embed a little public key in there. Then you could authenticate the new printer or fridge by physically being near it.

We'd have to extend our UIs a bit to cover these use cases (it should basically act like a trusted self-signed cert), and probably you only want to trust NFC certs for *.local.

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

#157

Post by nitrogen »

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).

Why doesn't every HTTP page show a warning you have to click through?

Back in the Netscape days, it did. People got tired of clicking OK every time they searched for something.

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

#158

Post by schoen »

mike_hearn wrote: post #23
pde3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a pre-announcement to let folks (OSes, hosting providers, other platforms) plan and do integration work. Per our own warnings, we definitely don't want this running on production machines until it launches in 2015. Our Apache code is a developer preview, we'll be working on Nginx next. ISRG will be operating a new root CA for this project. Although if you think that your choice of CA makes you more or le…

> ISRG will be operating a new root CA for this project. Are you going to be cross-signed by IdenTrust or something? If you're really going to try and create a new root CA from scratch, surely you will be impaled on the spike of low coverage for many years?

That's quite a painful spike indeed, but fortunately we'll be cross-signed by IdenTrust.

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

#159

Post by icebraining »

jerf wrote: post #149
icebraining wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, there's no reason why a fridge couldn't have a signed cert tied to some dynamic DNS (e.g. . . ).

But note that only works if the manufacturer can choose the name without an issue from the customer. For things like network appliances in larger companies that aren't going to want [generic number]manufacturer.com but want [my name].corp.[my company].com, you're stuck.

Allow the cert to be configurable, then the company can use its internal CA to give certs to all its appliances.

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

#160

Post by kaoD »

Joeri wrote: post #102
pilif wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A self signed certificate warning means "Warning! The admin on the site you're connecting to wants this conversation to be private but it hasn't been proven that he has 200 bucks for us to say he's cool" no. It means "even though this connection is encrypted, there is no way to tell you whether you are currently talking to that site or to NSA which is forwarding all of your traffic to the site you're on". Treating…

Self-signed certificates are still better than http plain text. I understand not showing the padlock icon for self-signed certificates, I don't understand why you would warn people away from them when the worst case is that they are just as unsafe as when they use plain http. IMHO this browser behavior is completely nonsensical.

No. Self-signed certificates are much worse because they bring a false sense of security.

A self-signed certificate is trivially MITMed unless you have a way to authenticate the certificate. At the moment CAs are the best known way to do that (and before anyone brings certificate pinning or WoT, they come with their own problems, please read this comment of mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616766).

EDIT: You can downvote all you want but I'm still right.

Each time anyone repeats the "self-signed certificates are still better than HTTP plain text" lie is hurting everyone in the long run.

They're much worse, both for the users and from a security perspective. Self-signed certificates are evil unless you know exactly what you're doing and are in full control of both ends of the communication (in which case just trust it yourself and ignore the warnings).

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