71–80 of 437 posts
At some stage you need to update your TXT records, and if you register a wildcard domain you have to do it twice for the same request! And you have to propagate these TXT records twice to all your DNS servers, and wait for some third party like google dns to request the TXT record. And it all has to be done within a minute in order to not time out. DNS servers are not made to change records from one second to another…
> 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's a shame JSON parsers usually default to performance rather than correctness, by using bignums for numbers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand the tone of aggression against ACME and their plethora of clients. > ACME idea good, ACME implementation bad. Maybe I'm misreading but it sounds like you're on a similar page to the author. As they said at the top of the article: > Many of the existing clients are also scary code, and I was not about to run any of them on my machines. They haven't earned the right to run with privileges for my pr…
Im not a container guru by any means (at least not yet?) but would docker not suffice these concerns?
Which I do understand. Although I use Docker, I mainly use it personally for things I don’t want to spend much time on. I don’t really like it over other alternatives, but it makes standing up a lab service stupidly easy.
Things change over time. Part of not wanting to let go is the sunk cost fallacy. Part of it is being suspicious of being (more) dependent on someone else (than you are already dependent on a different someone else). (As an aside, the n-gate guy who ranted against HTTPS in general and thought static content should just be HTTP also thought like that. Unfortunately, as I'm at a sketchy cafe using their wifi, his page c…
> thought static content should just be HTTP Yep, I've seen that argument so many times and it should never make sense to anyone that understands MITM. The only way it could possibly work is if the static content were signed somehow, but then you need another protocol the browser and you need a way to exchange keys securely, for example like signed RPMs. It would be less expensive as the encryption happens once, but…
At some stage you need to update your TXT records, and if you register a wildcard domain you have to do it twice for the same request! And you have to propagate these TXT records twice to all your DNS servers, and wait for some third party like google dns to request the TXT record. And it all has to be done within a minute in order to not time out. DNS servers are not made to change records from one second to another…
JOSE/JWK is indeed some galactically overengineered piece of spec, but the rest seems.. fine? There are private keys and hash functions involved. But base64url and json aren't the worst web crimes to have been inflicted upon us. It's not _that_ bad, is it?
But "the rest" of ACME also include X.509 certificates and PKCS#10 Certificate Signing Requests, which are in turn based on ASN.1 (you're fortunate enough you only need DER encoding) and RSA parameters. ASN.1 and X.509 are devilishly complex if you don't let openssl do everything for you and even if you do. The first few paragraphs are all about making the correct CSR and dealing with RSA, and encoding bigints the right way (which is slightly different between DER and JWK to make things more fun).
Besides that I don't know much about the ACME spec, but the post mentions a couple of other things :
So far, we have (at least): RSA keys, SHA256 digests, RSA signing, base64 but not really base64, string concatenation, JSON inside JSON, Location headers used as identities instead of a target with a 301 response, HEAD requests to get a single value buried as a header, making one request (nonce) to make ANY OTHER request, and there's more to come.
This does sound quite complex. I'm just not sure how much simpler ACME could be. Overturning the clusterfuck that is ASN.1, X.509 and the various PKCS#* standards has been a lost cause for decades now. JOSE is something I would rather do without, but if you're writing an IETF RFC, you're only other option is CMS[1], which is even worse. You can try to offer a new signature format, but that would be shut down for being "simpler and cleaner than JOSE, but JOSE just has some warts that need to be fixed or avoided"[2].
I think the things you're left with that could have been simplified and accepted as a standard are the APIs themselves, like getting a nonce with a HEAD request and storing identifiers in a Location header. Perhaps you could have removed signatures (and then JOSE) completely and rely on client IDs and secrets since we're already running over TLS, but I'm not familiar enough with the protocol to know what would be the impact. If you really didn't need any PKI for the protocol itself here, then this is a magnificent edifice of overengineering indeed.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5652 [2] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cfrg/4YQH6Yj3c92VUxqo-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand the tone of aggression against ACME and their plethora of clients. > ACME idea good, ACME implementation bad. Maybe I'm misreading but it sounds like you're on a similar page to the author. As they said at the top of the article: > Many of the existing clients are also scary code, and I was not about to run any of them on my machines. They haven't earned the right to run with privileges for my pr…
Im not a container guru by any means (at least not yet?) but would docker not suffice these concerns?
To implement that many clients run as a root. Even if that root is in a docket container, this is needlessly elevated privileges especially given the complexity (again, needless) of many clients.
The sad part is that it is trivial to run most of the clients with an account with no privileges that can access very few files and use a unix socket to tell the web server to reload the certificate. But this is not done.
And then ideally at this point the web servers should if not implement then at least facilitate ACME protocol implementations, like, for example, redirect traffic requests from acme servers to another port with one-liner in config. But this is not the case.
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Pork bun is my favorite.
It seems to be what Rachel decided on. Must be other good ones? Somewhat prefer something in the UK (but have been using Gandi so its not essential).
INWX in Germany also seems well regarded but I haven't used them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand the tone of aggression against ACME and their plethora of clients. > ACME idea good, ACME implementation bad. Maybe I'm misreading but it sounds like you're on a similar page to the author. As they said at the top of the article: > Many of the existing clients are also scary code, and I was not about to run any of them on my machines. They haven't earned the right to run with privileges for my pr…
Im not a container guru by any means (at least not yet?) but would docker not suffice these concerns?
The steps described in the article sound familiar to the process done in the early 2000's, but I'm not sure why you'd want to make it hard for yourself now.
I use certbot with "--preferred-challenges dns-01" and "--manual-auth-hook" / "--manual-cleanup-hook" to dynamically create DNS records, rather than needing to modify the webserver config (and the security/access risks that comes with). It just needs putting the cert/key in the right place and reloading the webserver/loadbalancer.