Live data from Hacker News

Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates

chromium.googlesource.com

241–250 of 375 posts

Re: Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Responsibilities have changed a bit. If you're going to host a website you are going to have to put a modicum of effort into ensuring that you are not harming others by doing so.

>are not harming others How is HTTP harmful when you visit my website about amateur radio? An expired cert is no more harmful than bare http in this non-commercial non-institional personal context. It's the one being discussed in this sub-thread in case you missed it and assumed the normal HN business context. The burden is real and completely unecessary for personal websites. This makes the web more commercial by im…

There are injection tools that don't seek to steal data, but to weaponize your client.

Re: Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a glaring security hole, IMHO. I create such devices and the only way I know is self-signed certs, but the browsers complain a lot about that. Ideally there’d be a way to sign .local domains with browsers handling it while letting people know to verify the identity of their local devices/services and that the identity isn’t verified by https like most sites. The issue lies between the browsers and https system.…

Why do you need to use self-signed certs? (As contrasted with CA-signed certs that happen to be signed by a CA that you own and trust as suggested by arwineap?) It took my a little over an hour one evening to figure out how to create my own CA, trust it, and sign certs for all my local devices (except my UniFi cloud controller which I admit I gave up on due to time).

A lot of the devices mentioned ("routers, printers, and self-hosted IoT devices") don't give ways to change the certificate. Besides, not every individual or company wants to or is knowledgeable enough to manage their own CA. For the audience in HN it might be an hour one evening, to others the instructions read like black magic.

Re: Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need to use self-signed certs? (As contrasted with CA-signed certs that happen to be signed by a CA that you own and trust as suggested by arwineap?) It took my a little over an hour one evening to figure out how to create my own CA, trust it, and sign certs for all my local devices (except my UniFi cloud controller which I admit I gave up on due to time).

Because 99.99%+ of users don't have the technical skill to do this, but still need to be able to access local devices and it would sure be good if they could do so in a secure manner?

So the answer is to subvert the global certificate infrastructure that protects web traffic? No, it isn’t. Your IoT device has no security at all if a non-technical user is setting it up or if it doesn’t have a way of accepting a user configured certificate, and you shouldn’t pretend otherwise by dressing it up in bad certificates and worthless encrypted tunnels.

Just use HTTP.

Re: Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates

#244
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>are not harming others How is HTTP harmful when you visit my website about amateur radio? An expired cert is no more harmful than bare http in this non-commercial non-institional personal context. It's the one being discussed in this sub-thread in case you missed it and assumed the normal HN business context. The burden is real and completely unecessary for personal websites. This makes the web more commercial by im…

> How is HTTP harmful when you visit my website about amateur radio? "Unharmful" HTTP sites are used to silently hack people's computers and keep them under observation for months. Every unsecured site contributes their small piece to keep the web unsafe for people who needs it to be safe. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2020/06/moroccan-...

This is exactly the same as blaming getting shot at a neighbor's BBQ on the neighbor for not hiring private security to deal with the government army specifically attacking you.

If your threat model includes nation state attacks you're gonna have problems no matter what. Change your personal behavior accordingly. Don't tell everyone else they need to wear bullet proof vests around the house and hire corporate security goons. They don't and doing so is burdensome.

Re: Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates

#245
post #57

With the tightening of certificate trust, demise of self-signed certificates, etc., is there any remaining way to establish a consumer-oriented HTTPS server on a local network? Thinking of things like routers, printers, and self-hosted IoT devices here. Some of the label printers we support at work have simply atrocious workarounds to get them to work, and I'm wondering if it's the manufacturer's fault or if that use…

The answer to that may be to stop using the web browser to do damn near everything. Your computer will load an app, distributed by a trusted app store or downloaded directly from the device, that talks only to the device on the local network, and to a whitelist of allowed internet hosts, and nothing else. The app will have a client certificate so the device won't blindly trust the computer either. Firefox will only communicate over the local network in a limited way, enough to download the app from the device or get a link to the manufacturer's app store profile. Or that discovery can become part of the operating system and browsers will stop talking over the local network at all.

Re: Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a glaring security hole, IMHO. I create such devices and the only way I know is self-signed certs, but the browsers complain a lot about that. Ideally there’d be a way to sign .local domains with browsers handling it while letting people know to verify the identity of their local devices/services and that the identity isn’t verified by https like most sites. The issue lies between the browsers and https system.…

It handles it by asking "Do you want to trust this new server?" Asking the end user to accept downgraded security is a huge security antipattern. Also, if I’m operating an evil wifi AP at a coffee shop and I intercept your web request for bankofamerica.com with a redirect to bankofamerica.local, would HSTS prevent the redirect? Or could I then serve you a bad cert and trick you into accepting it? Also, what sokoloff…

If the browser correctly explained what you were doing, and warned you that this is an attack unless you are in control of the entire network and the machines on it, I don't see the problem.

Re: Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need to use self-signed certs? (As contrasted with CA-signed certs that happen to be signed by a CA that you own and trust as suggested by arwineap?) It took my a little over an hour one evening to figure out how to create my own CA, trust it, and sign certs for all my local devices (except my UniFi cloud controller which I admit I gave up on due to time).

A lot of the devices mentioned ("routers, printers, and self-hosted IoT devices") don't give ways to change the certificate. Besides, not every individual or company wants to or is knowledgeable enough to manage their own CA. For the audience in HN it might be an hour one evening, to others the instructions read like black magic.

Routing is scary magic. DNS is scary magic. Wifi is scary magic. Everything in computing is scary magic until someone writes an app with good UX for it. It's not a fundamental problem.

Re: Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates

#248
post #165
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lastly, with asking consumers to install a CA certificate, I ask for a significantly more powerful permission than if I could just have them trust my certificate. CA certificates can be constrained. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5280#section-4.2.1.10

Are common certificate validation libraries honoring these constraints? When I tried to use this many moons ago, most things ignored the constraints; although I could mark the extension critical, and then some (but not all, yay) of the things that didn't understand would refuse the CA.

IDK NSS seems to have code to verify it:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/security/nss/li...

As does webpki:

https://github.com/briansmith/webpki/blob/482627c40dad2148da...

But haven't tested it (or checked other libraries).

Re: Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates

#249
post #57

With the tightening of certificate trust, demise of self-signed certificates, etc., is there any remaining way to establish a consumer-oriented HTTPS server on a local network? Thinking of things like routers, printers, and self-hosted IoT devices here. Some of the label printers we support at work have simply atrocious workarounds to get them to work, and I'm wondering if it's the manufacturer's fault or if that use…

Unfortunately the answer is no.

Re: Chromium and Mozilla to enforce 1 year validity for TLS certificates

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It handles it by asking "Do you want to trust this new server?" Asking the end user to accept downgraded security is a huge security antipattern. Also, if I’m operating an evil wifi AP at a coffee shop and I intercept your web request for bankofamerica.com with a redirect to bankofamerica.local, would HSTS prevent the redirect? Or could I then serve you a bad cert and trick you into accepting it? Also, what sokoloff…

If the browser correctly explained what you were doing, and warned you that this is an attack unless you are in control of the entire network and the machines on it, I don't see the problem.

What would it say?

“You’re connecting to an IoT device that has a worthless certificate. Would you like me to open up a completely pointless AES256 session with it and pretend that you have a secure connection?”

Just use HTTP.

Post reply on HN