211–220 of 476 posts
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The NSA has no CA. The only attack they really have is brute force or server compromise - both of which undermine pinning.
NSA has NSL (national security letters with gag orders). There are CAs in the US. Mission accomplished.
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> With some browser behavior self-signed certs could make some users safer against some threats How exactly? Did you read my linked comment? As far as I can tell, self-signed certs are always a no-no. As soon as one is compromised and has to be revoked the whole system breaks apart. The only situation where a self-signed certificate makes sense is when you control both ends of the communication and can revoke the cer…
Well, the best example I know of is proposals to do opportunistic upgrades from HTTP to HTTPS, for example via a browser header in the HTTP reply. If the browser performs the opportunistic upgrade, and negotiates an HTTPS connection behind the scenes, and doesn't tell the user that the connection was served over HTTPS , then accepting a self-signed cert invisibly in this context makes the user no worse off than not p…
Keys would be exchanged via Diffie-Hellman as usual, but a certificate wouldn't be involved since it's useless anyways (you can't certify anything in such a scheme, why bother at all?) and thus would be vulnerable to active attacks.
Certificates imply long-term authentication. It's an important nuance since they are long-lived by definition, so they have to be trusted and revoked as needed, in which case we're still facing the problem I mentioned earlier.
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I don't see how this actually keeps the CA PKI from being a scam. While I personally trust the EFF & Mozilla right now, as long as I can't meaningfully revoke that trust, it's not really trust and the system is still broken.
You can revoke your trust in any CA at any time, you don't even need to see any errors! Just click the little padlock each time you visit a secure website and see if the CA is in your good books. If it's not, pretend the padlock isn't there! OK, that's a little awkward. A browser extension could automate this. But in practice, nobody wants to do this, because hardly anyone has opinions on particular CAs. It's a sort…
Incidentally, I can also add my own CA.
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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.
But your users won't notice the difference, because they are used to see the certificate warning on his browser.
Kudos to the EFF for making an easy-to-use tool to generate TLS certs! Kudos also for creating the second CA to issue free certificates (the first being StartSSL). The next step needs to be to man-in-the-middle (MITM) proof these certs. We still have to address that problem. We'll be talking about how the blockchain can be used to solve this problem tonight at the SF Bitcoin Meetup, if that interests you, you're welc…
This new SSL scheme is mostly security theater. There's no particular reason to encrypt traffic to most web pages. Anyone with access to the connection can tell what site you're talking to. If it's public static content, what is SSL protecting? Unless there's a login mechanism and non-public pages, SSL isn't protecting much.
The downside of SSL everywhere is weak SSL everywhere. Cloudflare sells security theater encryption now. All their offerings involve Cloudflare acting as a man-in-the-middle, with everything decrypted at Cloudflare. (Cloudflare's CEO is fighting interception demands in court and in the press, which indicates they get such requests. Cloudflare is honest about what they're doing; the certificates they use say "Cloudflare, Inc.", so they identify themselves as a man-in-the-middle. They're not bad guys.)
If you try to encrypt everything, the high-volume cacheable stuff that doesn't need security but does need a big content delivery network (think Flickr) has to be encrypted. So the content-delivery network needs to impersonate the end site and becomes a point of attack. There are known attacks on CDNs; anybody using multi-domain SSL certs with unrelated domains (36,000 Cloudflare sites alone) is vulnerable if any site on the cert can be broken into. If the site's logins go through the same mechanism, security is weaker than if only the important pages were encrypted.
You're better off having a small secure site like "secure.example.com" for checkout and payment, preferably with an Extended Validation SSL certificate, a unique IP address, and a dedicated server. There's no reason to encrypt your public product catalog pages. Leave them on "example.com" unencrypted.
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Can't you just delete the CA from the browser? On Firefox it's preferences -> advanced -> certificates -> view certificates.
I'm curious as to whether Firefox's sync functionality propagates CA overrides across machines. If not then this is something you'd have to repeat over for every machine you use, making it effectively too tedious to be practical.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583935
But syncing which certificates to delete is probably a much harder sell.
At least there's a way to do programmatically:
apt-get install libnss3-tools
certutil -d /home/$USER/.mozilla/firefox/$FIREFOX_PROFILE -D -n $TARGET_CA_NAMEEarlier 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.
The EFF has a bad track record in this area. The last time they tried something to identify web sites, it was TRUSTe, a nonprofit set up by the EFF and headed by EFF's director. Then TRUSTe was spun off as a for-profit private company, reduced their standards, stopped publishing enforcement actions, and became a scam operation. The Federal Trade Commission just fined them: "TRUSTe Settles FTC Charges it Deceived Cons…
Of course this is true in theory, but in practice, both clients and customers get 'warm fuzzies' from seeing that green lock in the URL window.
It let's them 'know' that the company they are dealing with is at least somewhat reputable. Whether this is true or not doesn't matter; it is the perception many people have, and it does affect sales numbers in the real world.