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Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

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Re: Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

#221

Post by throw0101b »

immibis wrote: post #12
1a527dd5 wrote: post #9

I don't understand the tone of aggression against ACME and their plethora of clients. I know it isn't a skill issue because of who the author is. So I can only imagine it is some sort of personal opinion that they dislike ACME as a concept or the tooling around ACME in general. We've been using LE for a while (since 2019 I think) for handful of sites, and the best nonsense client _for us_ was https://github.com/do-kn…

Some people don't want to be forced to run a bunch of stuff they don't understand on the server, and I agree with them. Sadly, security is a cat and mouse game, which means it's always evolving and you're forced to keep up - and it's inherent by the nature of the field, so we can't really blame anyone (unlike, say, being forced to integrate with the latest Google services to be allowed on the Play Store). At least yo…

> Some people don't want to be forced to run a bunch of stuff they don't understand on the server, and I agree with them.

There are a number of shell-based ACME clients whose prerequisites are: OpenSSL and cURL. You're probably already relying on OpenSSL and cURL for a bunch of things already.

If you can read shell code you can step through the logic and understand what they're doing. Some of them (e.g., acme.sh) often run as a service user (e.g., default install from FreeBSD ports) so the code runs unprivileged: just add a sudo (or doas) config to allow it to restart Apache/nginx.

Re: Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

#222

Post by schoen »

jeroenhd wrote: post #90
mschuster91 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the author's tone makes it sound like she hates the protocol and all the extra work she needs to do to make the Let's Encrypt setup work. The problem is, SSL is a fucking hot, ossified mess . Many of the noted core issues, especially the weirdnesses around encoding and bitfields, are due to historical baggage of ASN.1/X.509. It's not fun to deal with it, at all... the math alone is bad enough, but the old abstr…

There's no easy way to "just" transmit data in a foolproof manner. You practically need to support CSRs as a CA anyway, so you might as well use the existing ASN.1+X509 system to transmit data. ASN.1 and X509 aren't all that bad. It's a comprehensively documented binary format that's efficient and used everywhere, even if it's hidden away in binary protocols you don't look at every day. Unlike what most people seem t…

> Unlike what most people seem to think, ACME isn't something invented just for Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt was certainly the first high-profile CA to implement the protocol, but various CAs (free and paid) have their own ACME servers and have had them for ages now. It's a generic protocol for certificate authorities to securely do domain validation and certificate provisioning that Let's Encrypt implemented first.

This depends on whether you're speaking as a matter of history. ACME was originally invented and implemented by the Let's Encrypt team, but in the hope that it could become an open standard that would be used by other CAs. That hope was eventually borne out.

Re: Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

#223

Post by aaronmdjones »

anonymousiam wrote: post #163

"Skip the first 00 for some inexplicable reason" is something that caught me a few months ago. I was comparing keys in a script and they did not match because of the leading 00. Does anyone know why they're there?

If the leading bit is set, it could be interpreted as a signed negative number. Prepending 00 guarantees that this doesn't happen.

Re: Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

#224

Post by schoen »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #53
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? The days of MITM boxes injecting content into HTTP traffic are basically over, and frankly they never were a thing in my part of the world. I see no other reason to serve content over HTTPS.

> Why? The days of MITM boxes injecting content into HTTP traffic are basically over The reason you don't see many MITM boxes injecting content into HTTP anymore is because of widespread HTTPS adoption and browsers taking steps to distrust HTTP, making MITM injection a near-useless tactic. (This rhymes with the observation that some people now perceive Y2K as overhyped fear-mongering that amounted to nothing, without…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

Re: Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

#225

Post by throw0101b »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #135
g-b-r wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For god's sake, however complex ACME might be it's better than not supporting TLS

There's no good reason to serve a blog over TLS. You're not handling sensitive data, so unencrypted is just fine.

> You're not handling sensitive data, so unencrypted is just fine.

Except when an adversary MITMs your site and injects an attack to one of your readers:

* https://www.infoworld.com/article/2188091/uk-spy-agency-uses...

Further: tapping glass is a thing, and if the only traffic that is encrypted is the "important" or "sensitive" stuff, then it sticks out in the flow, and so attackers know to focus just on that. If all traffic is encrypted, then it's much harder for attackers to figure out what is important and what is not.

So by encrypting your "unimportant" data you add more noise that has to be sifted through.

Re: Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

#226

Post by mschuster91 »

schoen wrote: post #220
mschuster91 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the author's tone makes it sound like she hates the protocol and all the extra work she needs to do to make the Let's Encrypt setup work. The problem is, SSL is a fucking hot, ossified mess . Many of the noted core issues, especially the weirdnesses around encoding and bitfields, are due to historical baggage of ASN.1/X.509. It's not fun to deal with it, at all... the math alone is bad enough, but the old abstr…

Yes, we actually considered the "have the protocol transmit all of the required math values in a decent form and get an x.509 cert back" version, but some people who were interested in using Let's Encrypt were apparently very keen on being able to use an existing external CSR. So that became mandatory in order not to have two totally separate code paths for X.509-based requests and non-X.509-based requests. An argume…

Yikes. Guessed as much. Thanks for your explanation.

As for oooold devices - doesn't LetsEncrypt demand key lengths and hash algorithms nowadays that simply weren't implemented back then?

Re: Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

#227

Post by renewiltord »

dwedge wrote: post #196

I really don't understand why this blog gets so much traction here. Ranting against rss scrapes, FUD about some atop vulnerability that turned out to be nothing, and thinking you have to pay for acme certs and caring about the way it's parsed?

Community favourite. Once you hit a critical mass with a community you will always be read by them.

Re: Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

#228

Post by School-Cotton »

kens wrote: post #166
matja wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't JSON parsers technically not following the standard if they don't reliably store a number that is not representable by a IEEE754 double precision float? It's a shame JSON parsers usually default to performance rather than correctness, by using bignums for numbers.

> Aren't JSON parsers technically not following the standard if they don't reliably store a number that is not representable by a IEEE754 double precision float? That sentence has four negations and I honestly can't figure out what it means.

“The standard technically requires that JSON parsers reliably store numbers, even those that are not representable by an IEEE double”.

(It seems this claim is not true, but at least that’s what the sentence means.)

Re: Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

#229

Post by viraptor »

I understand the issues listed, but some assumptions at the beginning are not really problems in practice. Or at least not of your alternative is a custom implementation.

> They haven't earned the right to run with privileges for my private keys and/or ability to frob the web server (as root!)

None of that is needed. You can setup the update system in isolation, redirect the required paths and copy the keys manually. None of that needs to run as root either if you can set the permissions correctly or delegate actions to other processes.

Re: Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site

#230

Post by dmitrygr »

fireflash38 wrote: post #209
mr_toad wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone wants to deal with maintaining Python and untold dependencies on their web server. A C++ binary often has no additional dependencies, and even if it does they’ll be dealt with by the OS package manager.

Docker/podman?

Not everyone wants to spin up a multi-GB container for when a 80KB C++ binary would do...
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