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

rachelbythebay.com

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

#291

Post by mastazi »

agarren wrote: post #271
mastazi wrote: post #257

> About six months ago, I realized that it was probably time to get away from Gandi as a registrar and also SSL provider (reseller). I've recently heard similar takes about Gandi but I am out of the loop, can someone explain the controversy? Currently using it for one of my domains and I'd like to know more. EDIT: tried googling but results are about people whose name is either Gandi or Ghandi, could not find much ab…

I’m seeing a lot about price hikes, new service charges, and bad customer service since the acquisition. I noticed the price hike with one of my domains through them, I paid it but was close to reconsidering. Thinking I’ll try transferring it now. https://techrights.org/n/2023/12/14/_Video_Lessons_to_be_Lea... https://blog.cogitactive.com/website/gandi-outrageous-price/

I see, I hadn't noticed because back when I got my domain I paid for a multi-year offer. Thanks for that, when my paid-for period ends I will look into alternatives.

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

#292

Post by int_19h »

deepsun wrote: post #287
tsimionescu wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a just-so story. Your explanation could make some sense if we were comparing {"e" : "AQAB"} to {"e" : 65537}, but there is no reason why that should be the alternative. The JSON {"e" : "65537"} will be read precisely the same way by any JSON parser out there. Converting the string "65537" to the number 65537 is exactly as easy (or hard), but certainly unambiguous, as converting the string "AQAB" to th…

Some parsers, like PHP, may treat 65537 and "65537" the same. Room for vulnerability.

Why would they do so? It's semantically distinct JSON, even JS itself treats it differently?

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

#293

Post by red_admiral »

It bugs me that we're still on RSA/4096. Ed25519 has fewer parameters to mess around with (no custom exponent or modulus), keys and signatures are shorter and have a well-defined forman (just binary data) and there's no network byte order confusion.

Meanwhile, ECDSA is so complex to write that most people will get it wrong and end up with a security hole that makes the NSA happy.

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

#294

Post by mort96 »

agarren wrote: post #273
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

Why? I can understand the argument that you don’t want an ISP or a middlebox injecting ads or scripts (valid I think even if I’ve never encountered it to my knowledge), but otherwise you’re publishing content intended for the world. There’s presumably nothing especially sensitive that you need to hide on the wire.

> (valid I think even if I’ve never encountered it to my knowledge)

Visitors to your website may encounter it. Do you not care that your visitors may be seeing ads?

You're also leaking what your visitors are reading to their ISPs and governments. Maybe you don't consider anything you write about to be remotely sensitive, but how critically do you examine that with every new piece you write?

If you wrote something which could be sensitive to readers in some parts of the world (something about circumventing censorship, something critical of some religion, something involving abortion or other forms of healthcare that some governments are cracking down on), do you then add SSL at that point? Or do you refrain from publishing it?

Personally, I like the freedom to just not think about these things. I can write about whatever I want, however controversial it might be in some regions, no matter how dangerous it is for some people to be found reading about it, and be confident that my readers can expect at least a baseline of safety because my blog, like pretty much every other in the world today, uses cryptography to ensure that governments and ISPs can't use deep packet inspection to scan the words they read or use MITM to inject things into my blog. Does it really matter? Well probably not for my site specifically, but across all the blogs and websites in the world and all the visitors in the world, that's a whole lot of "probably not"s which all combine together into a huge "almost definitely".

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

#295

Post by red_admiral »

kangalioo wrote: post #139
eadmund wrote: post #61

> So, yes, instead of saying that "e" equals "65537", you're saying that "e" equals "AQAB". Aren't you glad you did those extra steps? Oh JSON. For those unfamiliar with the reason here, it’s that JSON parsers cannot be relied upon to treat numbers properly. Is 4723476276172647362476274672164762476438 a valid JSON number? Yes, of course it is. What will a JSON parser due with it? Silently truncate it to a 64-bit or 6…

But what's wrong with sending the number as a string? `"65537"` instead of `"AQAB"`

This sounds like an XY problem to me. There is already an alternative that is at least as secure and only requires a single base-64 string: Ed25519.

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

#296

Post by red_admiral »

deepsun wrote: post #288
kangalioo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's wrong with sending the number as a string? `"65537"` instead of `"AQAB"`

PHP (at least old versions I worked with) treats "65537" and 65537 similarly.

That sounds horrible if you want to transmit a base64 string where the length is a multiple of 3 and for some cursed reason there's no letters or special characters involved. If "7777777777777777" is your encoded string because you're sending a string of periods encoded in BCD, you're going to have a fun time. Perhaps that's karma for doing something braindead in the first place though.

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

#297

Post by hiciu »

int_19h wrote: post #292
deepsun wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some parsers, like PHP, may treat 65537 and "65537" the same. Room for vulnerability.

Why would they do so? It's semantically distinct JSON, even JS itself treats it differently?

It's PHP. Handling numbers in PHP is complicated enough that a reasonable person would not trust it by default.

https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.numeric-strings...

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

#298

Post by red_admiral »

TZubiri wrote: post #219
eadmund wrote: post #61

> So, yes, instead of saying that "e" equals "65537", you're saying that "e" equals "AQAB". Aren't you glad you did those extra steps? Oh JSON. For those unfamiliar with the reason here, it’s that JSON parsers cannot be relied upon to treat numbers properly. Is 4723476276172647362476274672164762476438 a valid JSON number? Yes, of course it is. What will a JSON parser due with it? Silently truncate it to a 64-bit or 6…

It feels like malpractice to use json in encryption

Sadly JWT and friends are "standard". In theory the representation and the data are independent and you can marshal and unmarshal correctly.

In practice, "alg:none" is a headache and everyone involved should be ashamed.

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

#300

Post by GoblinSlayer »

foobiekr wrote: post #184
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The reason is to prevent your site from becoming a watering hole where malicious actors use it to inject malware into the browsers of your users. TLS isn't for you, it's for your readers.

Ads will inject it anyway.
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