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> The prat Please don't use epithets like this on HN, regardless of whether they're in the discussion here. The first words in the “In Comments” section of the guidelines are “Be Kind”. Please take care to do that in all comments on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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It is, if your objective is to closely centralize the web. If you make https mandatory, via scare tactics, only people with certificates will have websites. If you make ephemeral certificates mandatory by taking advantage of a monopoly, then only big SSL providers who can afford it will survive. Then, when you have only two or three big SSL providers, it's way easier to shut someone off by denying them a certificate,…
Meanwhile, in the real world: - We went from the vast majority of traffic being unencrypted, allowing any passive attacker (from nation state to script kiddie sitting in the coffee shop) to snoop and any active attacker to trivially tamper with it, to all but a vanishing minority of connections being strongly encrypted. The scare tactics used to sell VPNs in YouTube ads used to all be true, and no longer are, due to…
More than one thing can be true at the same time.
Yes, vastly increasing the traffic that is encrypted is a great thing for many reasons.
Simultaneously, it is also true that if a public CA-issued (as opposed to unknown me self signing) certificate is effectively required, that sure provides a handy hammer to shut something down. History tells us that whenever such handy hammers get built, they inevitably get abused.
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> The prat Please don't use epithets like this on HN, regardless of whether they're in the discussion here. The first words in the “In Comments” section of the guidelines are “Be Kind”. Please take care to do that in all comments on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Respectfully, you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Because those ephemeral LE certificates are such a great idea...
It is, if your objective is to closely centralize the web. If you make https mandatory, via scare tactics, only people with certificates will have websites. If you make ephemeral certificates mandatory by taking advantage of a monopoly, then only big SSL providers who can afford it will survive. Then, when you have only two or three big SSL providers, it's way easier to shut someone off by denying them a certificate,…
I don‘t see any disadvantages over automatically issued certificates.
Kind reminder you soon won't be able to install anything from f-droid anyway, without Google's signature, due to the new restrictions on "side loading".
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> - We went from the vast majority of traffic being unencrypted, allowing any passive attacker (from nation state to script kiddie sitting in the coffee shop) to snoop and any active attacker to trivially tamper with it, to all but a vanishing minority of connections being strongly encrypted. I still don't understand why this is so terrible. Public wifi networks were certainly a real problem, but that's not where the…
> If you're on a traditional home internet connection, who exactly can tamper with your traffic? Your ISP can, and that's not great, but it doesn't strike me as blaring siren levels of terrible, either. This characterization in on the same level of sophistication as "the Internet is just a series of pipes". Every transit station has the opportunity to read or even tamper with the bytes on an unencrypted http connecti…
In practice this means you have to consider the possibility that anyone on the entire internet can inspect your traffic. Traffic from your home in Seattle to Google's west coast data center? For all you know it could be going via Moscow.
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EV certs didn't actually afford the guarantees people hoped and expected. I could simply spend a few hundred dollars to register "Stripe, LLC" or "Microsoft, Inc." in my local jurisdiction, and then get an EV cert with that name on it. Browser vendors removed the extra UI around EV certs not because certs in general are easier to get, but because the identity "guarantee" afforded to EV certs was fairly easy to spoof.…
Again, this is an incredibly naive and uninformed take. Yes. You can spend hundreds of dollars to make one attempt at malicious activity, and yeah, that could also be fixed by tweaking EV requirements. (More than likely by putting a country flag on the EV banner.) One person as an example managing to get a problematic EV cert is not a sign of a broken system, it's a sign of a working system that only a few edge case…
Wrong. Company names are not guaranteed to be unique per-country.
The main issue you are missing is that putting undeserved trust in things like DV / EV flags greatly increase the value of such attacks. If users are trained to blindly trust that shiny green bar, the odd attacker will be able to walk away with an absolute fortune. Nobody will be suspicious about that page, because Green Bar. Why is the "bank" asking odd questions? Who cares, it had a Green Bar, so it must be legitimate.
Why bother with hundreds of small attacks when one big one will make you rich?
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Yup. If your primary goal was fast, efficient certificate revocation, then having certs that still take 90 days to expire rather than 2 years is not the solution you'd come up with. CRLite updates every 12 hours .
If you have short validity times for certificates it also means you have shorter CRL.
It'll rapidly shrink over time as certs expire, but you still have to deal with that initial massive set.
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This is what multi perspective helps with. It doesn’t mitigate every single attack. But think about what DANE is for a second. If a bad actor is MITMing your connection to some endpoint, they certainly can MITM your DNS queries too.
Multi-perspective helps prevent MITM, it doesn't provide any better security than your domain and DNS provider's security. It's just another layer to patch over the bad idea of CAs in the first place.
DANE isn't going to be of any value when an attacker is sitting between the end user and their ISP - which was already the requirement for compromising the TLS connection in the first place - as they could just strip DNSSEC and fake the DANE records.