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Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

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Re: Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

#41

Post by akerl_ »

bkeroack wrote: post #38
jsmeaton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree for a number of simple reasons. - Cost. You now require every domain owner to also pay for certificates (or get a free one, but the process is roughly the same). - Limited choices. The keys to the kingdom are owned by a few corporate interests. - Encrypted browsing is simply unnecessary for certain classes of sites (non-logon, informational sites). - It increases the barrier for entry to put a basic websit…

> Cost The certificate issue is a browser problem. Self-issued certificates are trivial to produce, and in the era of mandatory TLS they probably should not produce the huge scary browser warnings we see today. I'm not a UI expert, but I could envision a "medium severity" browser warning that states the connection is encrypted but the certificate can't be verified. I don't see the logic behind abandoning encryption e…

Your local network may be trusted, but self-issued certificates are effectively worthless to regular internet users, because they make MITM attacks trivial. This is the reason they have huge scary warnings.

Encryption without authentication and trust defeats passive snooping but does absolutely nothing to protect against MITM, which is a real and prevalent threat.

Setting HTTP/2 to encrypt everything but removing the big warnings that appear when trusted authenticity cannot be established would be a net security downgrade, because the lay user will trust their connection when they ought not.

Re: Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

#42

Post by lmm »

akerl_ wrote: post #41
bkeroack wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cost The certificate issue is a browser problem. Self-issued certificates are trivial to produce, and in the era of mandatory TLS they probably should not produce the huge scary browser warnings we see today. I'm not a UI expert, but I could envision a "medium severity" browser warning that states the connection is encrypted but the certificate can't be verified. I don't see the logic behind abandoning encryption e…

Your local network may be trusted, but self-issued certificates are effectively worthless to regular internet users, because they make MITM attacks trivial. This is the reason they have huge scary warnings. Encryption without authentication and trust defeats passive snooping but does absolutely nothing to protect against MITM, which is a real and prevalent threat. Setting HTTP/2 to encrypt everything but removing the…

> Encryption without authentication and trust defeats passive snooping but does absolutely nothing to protect against MITM, which is a real and prevalent threat.

Sure. But non-encryption leaves you vulnerable to both passive snooping and MITM.

> Setting HTTP/2 to encrypt everything but removing the big warnings that appear when trusted authenticity cannot be established would be a net security downgrade, because the lay user will trust their connection when they ought not.

How about only showing the padlock for certificated sites, and requiring a certificate when a secure request is made (http2s:// ?), but allowing encryption with a self-signed certificate for "insecure" URLs (http2://) and just not showing the padlock?

Re: Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

#43

Post by rakoo »

jsmeaton wrote: post #33
bkeroack wrote: post #30

Forget the hand-waving and excuses, TLS needs to be mandatory, period. This alone would make me forgive just about any other problem with HTTP/2.

I disagree for a number of simple reasons. - Cost. You now require every domain owner to also pay for certificates (or get a free one, but the process is roughly the same). - Limited choices. The keys to the kingdom are owned by a few corporate interests. - Encrypted browsing is simply unnecessary for certain classes of sites (non-logon, informational sites). - It increases the barrier for entry to put a basic websit…

You're conflating TLS and the current CA model. I'm all for TLS-everywhere and ditching the CA model (no, there are no easy alternative to the model we have come to build and accept, it will have to be gradually evicted)

Here's how the security warnings are in current browsers:

- HTTP: no warning

- untrusted HTTPS: warning

- trusted HTTPS: no warning

This is dumb. We explicitely say that an untrusted HTTPS is worse than raw HTTP, even though it preserves more privacy at a very little cost. We should alternate the two first levels.

Re: Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

#44

Post by rakoo »

Touche wrote: post #31
bkeroack wrote: post #30

Forget the hand-waving and excuses, TLS needs to be mandatory, period. This alone would make me forgive just about any other problem with HTTP/2.

Disagree, purely informational websites have no need for TLS.

On the other hand, what's the problem in using TLS for cases you don't think it useful ? I can see a few reasons here, but I don't see any of them being enough not to use TLS everywhere:

- TLS is expensive: my gut says it's wrong, but I'd love to see some numbers. Ilya Grigorik [0] has done some experiments here, and I don't see TLS as really bad

- TLS is complicated: true, and we have to rely on tried and tested implementations. I'd say you'd need to do it whatever security we use (and we want security, right?)

- TLS requires certificates from the flawed CA infrastructure we have: wrong, public-key authentication isn't even the only authentication scheme possible with TLS, it's just the first one we think about (and also the most tested one).

Do you have other counter-arguments ?

[0] https://www.igvita.com/2013/12/16/optimizing-nginx-tls-time-...

Re: Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

#45

Post by bkeroack »

lmm wrote: post #42
akerl_ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your local network may be trusted, but self-issued certificates are effectively worthless to regular internet users, because they make MITM attacks trivial. This is the reason they have huge scary warnings. Encryption without authentication and trust defeats passive snooping but does absolutely nothing to protect against MITM, which is a real and prevalent threat. Setting HTTP/2 to encrypt everything but removing the…

> Encryption without authentication and trust defeats passive snooping but does absolutely nothing to protect against MITM, which is a real and prevalent threat. Sure. But non-encryption leaves you vulnerable to both passive snooping and MITM. > Setting HTTP/2 to encrypt everything but removing the big warnings that appear when trusted authenticity cannot be established would be a net security downgrade, because the…

Exactly. An analogy is with password salting: you don't salt passwords because it makes the hashes unbreakable, you do it to increase the amount of work attackers have to do to successfully recover the passwords.

Even without verified certificates, mandatory TLS would require a MITM attacker to be present at the time of the connection (not passively record traffic and attack later) for every connection they wanted to snoop on. For a stateless protocol like HTTP, that's a massive amount of work to do if you want to snoop on any large scale. The increase in work required is probably even greater (relatively) than the increase achieved in the example of password salting (which is considered a security no-brainer)!

Re: Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

#46

Post by Touche »

rakoo wrote: post #44
Touche wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree, purely informational websites have no need for TLS.

On the other hand, what's the problem in using TLS for cases you don't think it useful ? I can see a few reasons here, but I don't see any of them being enough not to use TLS everywhere: - TLS is expensive: my gut says it's wrong, but I'd love to see some numbers. Ilya Grigorik [0] has done some experiments here, and I don't see TLS as really bad - TLS is complicated: true, and we have to rely on tried and tested imp…

Those two reasons are enough to me. The web is supposed to be for everyone. A small restaurant that just has directions and a menu on their website shouldn't have to deal with the headache of setting up HTTPS.

Re: Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

#47

Post by Touche »

bretthoerner wrote: post #36
Touche wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree, purely informational websites have no need for TLS.

1) There are regimes that would lock you up (or worse) for looking at some "purely informational" sites. 2) Defaults matter and developers make mistakes. Without required TLS many sites that should be encrypted won't be (they forgot, the site grew into something it didn't used to be, they had no idea what TLS was, etc)

Ruining the web in order to prevent any possibility of bad things happening is something I'm firmly against. I have several small blogs and websites that I absolutely would not bother with if I had to pay for and set up https on each.

Re: Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

#48

Post by jsmeaton »

bkeroack wrote: post #38
jsmeaton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree for a number of simple reasons. - Cost. You now require every domain owner to also pay for certificates (or get a free one, but the process is roughly the same). - Limited choices. The keys to the kingdom are owned by a few corporate interests. - Encrypted browsing is simply unnecessary for certain classes of sites (non-logon, informational sites). - It increases the barrier for entry to put a basic websit…

> Cost The certificate issue is a browser problem. Self-issued certificates are trivial to produce, and in the era of mandatory TLS they probably should not produce the huge scary browser warnings we see today. I'm not a UI expert, but I could envision a "medium severity" browser warning that states the connection is encrypted but the certificate can't be verified. I don't see the logic behind abandoning encryption e…

>why would you care if the certificates are self-signed? You are arguing instead to not use encryption at all! Do you see how backward this is?

(I've chopped your quote a bit so that it applies to the internet in general rather than just a trusted network, which is what I think you're arguing for. Correct me if I'm wrong).

I do see how backward it is, but I don't think we have good enough solutions in place to protect against impersonated TLS. Users currently expect "safe and secure" from HTTPS, which is why there was a push to throw big scary warnings for non-authenticated TLS. Perhaps this is a UI problem, but until users are safely able to identify the difference between trusted connection and secure connection, I don't think we're ready for TLS everywhere without authentication.

If it is a problem that can be solved, it can be solved now.

I'm more concerned that my dad will have his banking session impersonated rather than his general browsing sessions snooped on after the fact. I would prefer that neither was possible, but I'm not aware of any good solution.

Re: Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

#49

Post by jsmeaton »

jsmeaton wrote: post #48
bkeroack wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cost The certificate issue is a browser problem. Self-issued certificates are trivial to produce, and in the era of mandatory TLS they probably should not produce the huge scary browser warnings we see today. I'm not a UI expert, but I could envision a "medium severity" browser warning that states the connection is encrypted but the certificate can't be verified. I don't see the logic behind abandoning encryption e…

>why would you care if the certificates are self-signed? You are arguing instead to not use encryption at all! Do you see how backward this is? (I've chopped your quote a bit so that it applies to the internet in general rather than just a trusted network, which is what I think you're arguing for. Correct me if I'm wrong). I do see how backward it is, but I don't think we have good enough solutions in place to protec…

Actually, I think I've changed my mind after writing this. There can be two and only two states. HTTPS with authentication, and HTTPS without authentication. Authenticated can have the little lock symbol, non-authenticated would just look like regular HTTP does now. Then we just need to make the process of self-signed certificates easier to create and manage.

Re: Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

#50

Post by x1798DE »

Touche wrote: post #46
rakoo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, what's the problem in using TLS for cases you don't think it useful ? I can see a few reasons here, but I don't see any of them being enough not to use TLS everywhere: - TLS is expensive: my gut says it's wrong, but I'd love to see some numbers. Ilya Grigorik [0] has done some experiments here, and I don't see TLS as really bad - TLS is complicated: true, and we have to rely on tried and tested imp…

Those two reasons are enough to me. The web is supposed to be for everyone. A small restaurant that just has directions and a menu on their website shouldn't have to deal with the headache of setting up HTTPS.

If all HTTP connections enforced TLS, how would there be any extra burden?
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