Live data from Hacker News

Bing now supports https

bing.com

41–48 of 48 posts

Re: Bing now supports https

#41
post #19

Issuer: "Microsoft Internet Authority" Just like with Google: Google Internet Authority. Interesting to see big companies not trusting intermediate CA's anymore that they go through the length of becoming a CA themselves. However it could also be a cost effective strategy.

With the amount of subdomains they use, and seeing as they each have a browser with significant market share, it's a no-brainer. I'm frankly surprised it took so long for them to bring such an essential security task in-house.

Also, not just for HTTP either since they can sign their own software binaries with it too.

Probably cheaper for them to be their own CA long term.

Re: Bing now supports https

#42
post #30

no document.referrer. So this is untrackable. I think it's a shame, search engines should pass a referrer and hide searched term for privacy.

I thought this was inherent in following a link from a https resource to a http resource with a different authority, that the browser would never expose the secure URL (via header or script state) to the insecure content.

This is correct. Browsers will not send the referrer header when moving from HTTPS to HTTP URIs. This can easily be solved by just converting your website to HTTPS only at which point search engines will index your HTTPS URLs and you will begin to receive referrer headers once again.

Re: Bing now supports https

#43
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the amount of subdomains they use, and seeing as they each have a browser with significant market share, it's a no-brainer. I'm frankly surprised it took so long for them to bring such an essential security task in-house.

Wildcard certificates.

Wildcards are not as useful to massive organisations as you would think. The wouldn't want to have a single public/private pair (that is essentally what a certificate is: the public key to your private one, signed by a 3rd party key that the 2nd party has in its trust list) for .microsoft.com (nor would Google for .google.com) as a single all-powerful key could be far more hassle should it get into the hands of an incompetent or malicious individual/team. If they had to revoke the certificate for *.microsoft.com then there would be a hell of a lot of administration work to be done to reconfigure each part of their infrastructure and renegotiate relevant internal trust relationships between parts of the that infrastructure using the new keys. While having different keys for everything is a burden when all is going well, the burden is worth taking on the offchance that sometihng somewhere does go badly wrong: the damage caused by any given problem can be limited.

We have wildcard certs for each of our properties, but the resources using those certificates are many orders of magnitude less numbersome than the resources covered by the name of a multinational monster. And even though we use a wildcard for internal resources we get specific keys generated and signed for client specific stuff (if we host any service on .. for instance) just as we have different SSH keys and such for accessing information sources they provide for integration purposes: not having the one all powerful key limits the potential damage (and work involved) should any partticualr key/sub-key become compromised. If out internal key were to be stolen by a malicious entity or accidentally made public by a mistake on our part the no client specific resources would be affected (of course to ensure this separation you need to distribute access to the private keys effectively so that they can't all get compromised in a single event.

Re: Bing now supports https

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was inherent in following a link from a https resource to a http resource with a different authority, that the browser would never expose the secure URL (via header or script state) to the insecure content.

This is correct. Browsers will not send the referrer header when moving from HTTPS to HTTP URIs. This can easily be solved by just converting your website to HTTPS only at which point search engines will index your HTTPS URLs and you will begin to receive referrer headers once again.

Though Google strips the search terms even on https to https (don't know about others).

Re: Bing now supports https

#45
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wildcard certificates.

Wildcards are not as useful to massive organisations as you would think. The wouldn't want to have a single public/private pair (that is essentally what a certificate is: the public key to your private one, signed by a 3rd party key that the 2nd party has in its trust list) for .microsoft.com (nor would Google for .google.com) as a single all-powerful key could be far more hassle should it get into the hands of an in…

I see, hmm yeah indeed it'd be much more desirable to have an own CA if you have such huge infrastructure. They could even issue a new pub/private keypair per server for compartmentalization. Interesting idea.

Re: Bing now supports https

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so i'm clear, your argument is essentially: we should be more impressed more because they designed it in a way that made it difficult for them to do this?

There's no way to design a multi-million-user search engine in a way that makes it easy to design, test, and deploy major changes.

Where are the DuckDuckGo guys with a counterexample when you need them...

Re: Bing now supports https

#47
post #30

no document.referrer. So this is untrackable. I think it's a shame, search engines should pass a referrer and hide searched term for privacy.

I thought this was inherent in following a link from a https resource to a http resource with a different authority, that the browser would never expose the secure URL (via header or script state) to the insecure content.

The goal is to avoid leaking information on the url that might be sensitive. The fact that the user is coming from bing is not sensitive, and this might be important for webmasters. The query might be sensitive and thus should be stripped.

Re: Bing now supports https

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so i'm clear, your argument is essentially: we should be more impressed more because they designed it in a way that made it difficult for them to do this?

There's no way to design a multi-million-user search engine in a way that makes it easy to design, test, and deploy major changes.

I know empirically this is false.
Post reply on HN