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

Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet

blog.brocas.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 91 posts

Re: Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet

#21

Post by venturecruelty »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #5

Has anyone considered the possibility that a CA such as Let's Encrypt could be compromised or even run entirely by intelligence operatives? Of course, there are many other CAs that could be compromised and making money off of customers on top of that. But who knows... What could defend against this possibility? Multiple signatures on a certificate?

I mean, it doesn't help that the browser duopoly is making it harder and harder to use self-signed certificates these days. Why, if I were more paranoid, I might come to a similar conclusion.

Re: Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet

#22

Post by kragen »

stavros wrote: post #8

Let's Encrypt did more for privacy than any other organization. Before Let's Encrypt, we'd usually deploy TLS certificates, but as somewhat of an afterthought, and leaving HTTP accessible. They were a pain to (very manually) rotate once a year, too. It's hard to overstate just how much LE changed things. They made TLS the default, so much that you didn't have to keep unencrypted HTTP around any more. Kudos.

I think it was Snowden who made TLS the default. Let's Encrypt did great work, but basically having the NSA's spying made common knowledge (including revealing some things that were worse than we expected, like stealing the traffic between Google's data centers) created a consensus that unencrypted HTTP had to go, despite the objections of people like Roy Fielding.

Re: Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet

#23

Post by kragen »

gerdesj wrote: post #6

I remember deploying SSL on NetWare in the late 1990s and being given ... something that the US allowed to be exported as a munition! I don't recall the exact details but it was basically buggered - short key length. Long enough to challenge a 80386 Beowulf cluster but no match for whatever was humming away in a very well funded machine room. You could still play with all the other exciting dials and knobs, SANs and…

Right, 40-bit export-grade SSL.

Re: Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet

#24

Post by kragen »

dbt00 wrote: post #7
wakawaka28 wrote: post #5

Has anyone considered the possibility that a CA such as Let's Encrypt could be compromised or even run entirely by intelligence operatives? Of course, there are many other CAs that could be compromised and making money off of customers on top of that. But who knows... What could defend against this possibility? Multiple signatures on a certificate?

A signature on a certificate doesn't allow CA to snoop. They need access to the private key for that, which ACME (and other certificate signing protocols in general) doesn't share with the CA.

Even access to the private key doesn't permit a passive adversary to snoop on traffic that's using a ciphersuite that provides perfect forward secrecy, because the private key is only used to authenticate the session key negotiation protocol, which generates a session key that cannot be computed from the captured session traffic. Most SSL and TLS ciphersuites provide PFS nowadays.

An active adversary engaging in a man-in-the-middle attack on HTTPS can do it with the private key, as you suggest, but they can also do it with a completely separate private key that is signed by any CA the browser trusts. There are firewall vendors that openly do this to every single HTTPS connection through the firewall.

HPKP was a defense against this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning) but HPKP caused other, worse problems, and was deprecated in 02017 and later removed. CT logging is another, possibly weaker defense. (It only works for CAs that participate in CT, and it only detects attacks after the fact; it doesn't make them impossible.)

Re: Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet

#26

Post by pastel8739 »

abhashanand1501 wrote: post #25

Can someone explain why letsencrypt certificates have to be 90 days expiry? I know there is automation available, but what is the rationale for 90 days?

I’ve heard one rationale that it is short enough to force you to set up the automation, but don’t know if this was actually a consideration or not

Re: Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet

#27

Post by cortesoft »

abhashanand1501 wrote: post #25

Can someone explain why letsencrypt certificates have to be 90 days expiry? I know there is automation available, but what is the rationale for 90 days?

You can just read their explanation: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/11/09/why-90-days

Tl;dr is to limit damage from leaked certs and to encourage automation.

Re: Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet

#28

Post by Lammy »

kragen wrote: post #22
stavros wrote: post #8

Let's Encrypt did more for privacy than any other organization. Before Let's Encrypt, we'd usually deploy TLS certificates, but as somewhat of an afterthought, and leaving HTTP accessible. They were a pain to (very manually) rotate once a year, too. It's hard to overstate just how much LE changed things. They made TLS the default, so much that you didn't have to keep unencrypted HTTP around any more. Kudos.

I think it was Snowden who made TLS the default. Let's Encrypt did great work, but basically having the NSA's spying made common knowledge (including revealing some things that were worse than we expected, like stealing the traffic between Google's data centers) created a consensus that unencrypted HTTP had to go, despite the objections of people like Roy Fielding.

Ironically, the inability to cache TLS on the edge of my network makes the Internet more surveillable since everything has to pass through the Room 641As of the world and subjects us all to more network behavior analysis. The TLS-everything world leaks so much more metadata. It's more secure but less private.

Re: Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet

#29

Post by ChrisArchitect »

cortesoft wrote: post #27
abhashanand1501 wrote: post #25

Can someone explain why letsencrypt certificates have to be 90 days expiry? I know there is automation available, but what is the rationale for 90 days?

You can just read their explanation: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/11/09/why-90-days Tl;dr is to limit damage from leaked certs and to encourage automation.

Related recently:

Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117126

Re: Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet

#30

Post by kragen »

Lammy wrote: post #28
kragen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was Snowden who made TLS the default. Let's Encrypt did great work, but basically having the NSA's spying made common knowledge (including revealing some things that were worse than we expected, like stealing the traffic between Google's data centers) created a consensus that unencrypted HTTP had to go, despite the objections of people like Roy Fielding.

Ironically, the inability to cache TLS on the edge of my network makes the Internet more surveillable since everything has to pass through the Room 641As of the world and subjects us all to more network behavior analysis. The TLS-everything world leaks so much more metadata. It's more secure but less private .

Yes, that's a real problem. Probably moving to a content-centric networking or named-data networking system would help with it, while also creating difficulties for censorship, and IPFS and Filecoin seem to be deploying such a thing in real life as an overlay network over the internet.
Post reply on HN