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HTTPS by default

security.googleblog.com

1–10 of 268 posts

Re: HTTPS by default

#3
Doesn't it already do this? I keep a domain or two on HTTP to force network-level auth flows (which don't always fire correctly when hitting HTTPS) and I've gotten warnings from Chrome about those sites every time for years... Only if I've been to the site recently does the warning not show up.

Re: HTTPS by default

#6

> HTTPS adoption expressed as a percentage of main frame page loads Why is Linux adoption at 80% when MacOS/Android/Windows are at 95%? Quite unexpected.

Tendency of Linux users to have local resources that lack TLS? phpmyadmin, netdata, duckdb ui, git-webui, whatever.

Re: HTTPS by default

#7
I have had HTTPS-by-default for years and I can say that we're past the point where there's noticeable year-to-year change for which sites aren't HTTPS. It's almost always old stuff that pre-dates Let's Encrypt (and presumably just nobody ever added HTTPS). The news site which stopped updating in 2007, the blog somebody last posted to in 2011, that sort of thing.

I think it's important to emphasise that although Tim's toy hypermedia system (the "World Wide Web") didn't come with baked in security, ordinary users have never really understood that. It seems to them as though http://foo.example/ must be guaranteed to be foo.example, just making that true by upgrading to HTTPS is way easier than somehow teaching billions of people that it wasn't true and then what they ought to do about that.

I am reminded of the UK's APP scams. "Authorized Push Payment" was a situation where ordinary people think they're paying say, "Big Law Firm" but actually a scammer persuaded them to give money to an account they control because historically the UK's payment systems didn't care about names, so to it a payment to "Big Law Firm" acct #123456789 is the same as a payment to "Jane Smith" acct #123456789 even though you'd never get a bank to open you an account in the name of "Big Law Firm" without documents the scammer doesn't have. To fix this, today's UK payment systems treat the name as a required match not merely for your records, so when you say "Big Law Firm" and try to pay Jane's account because you've been scammed, the software says "Wrong, are you being defrauded?" and so you're safe 'cos you have no reason to fill out "Jane Smith" as that's not who you're intending to give money to.

We could have tried to teach all the tens of millions of UK residents that the name was ignored and so they need other safeguards, but that's not practical. Upgrading payment systems to check the name was difficult but possible.

Re: HTTPS by default

#8
post #3

Doesn't it already do this? I keep a domain or two on HTTP to force network-level auth flows (which don't always fire correctly when hitting HTTPS) and I've gotten warnings from Chrome about those sites every time for years... Only if I've been to the site recently does the warning not show up.

Right now it only shows a little bubble in the URL bar saying "Not Secure", I think. (So, that is a "warning", in a sense.) TFA is saying there will now be an interstitial if you attempt an HTTP connection.

HSTS might also interact with this, but I'd expect an HSTS site to just cause Chrome to go for HTTPS (and then that connection would either succeed or fail).

> to force network-level auth flows (which don't always fire correctly when hitting HTTPS)

The whole point of HTTPS is basically that these shouldn't work, essentially. Vendors need to stop implementing weird network-level auths by MitM'ing the connection, and DHCP has an option to signal to someone joining a network that they need to go to a URL to do authentication. These MitM-ers are a scourge, and often cause a litany of poor behavior in applications…

Re: HTTPS by default

#9

> HTTPS adoption expressed as a percentage of main frame page loads Why is Linux adoption at 80% when MacOS/Android/Windows are at 95%? Quite unexpected.

This is addressed in the article.

> If you exclude navigations to private sites, then the distribution becomes much tighter across platforms. In particular, Linux jumps from 84% HTTPS to nearly 97% HTTPS when limiting the analysis to public sites only.

Sounds like it's just because a large chunk of Linux usage is for web interfaces on the local machine or network, rather than everyday web browsing.

Re: HTTPS by default

#10

> HTTPS adoption expressed as a percentage of main frame page loads Why is Linux adoption at 80% when MacOS/Android/Windows are at 95%? Quite unexpected.

They mention it later in the article; if they drop connections to internal networks from the graph, Linux shoots up all the way to 97%.

The answer is probably that people that run Linux are far more likely to run a homelab intranet that isn't secured by HTTPS, because internal IP addresses and hostnames are a hassle to get certificates for. (Not to mention that it's slightly pointless on most intranets to use HTTPS.)

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