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Comment by klync | Hacker News Reader

I've used a self-signed cert for years, and eventually I got over being annoyed at browsers for lying to users and telling me that the cert was not to be trusted. The fact is, as I'm sure most at HN know, that SSL tries to solve two problems - identity and encryption. We definitely need a better way to validate a site's identity. I hope this study provides a kick in the pants toward that end.

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It's a tradeoff I guess, at the low end people don't want to provide documents, wait and pay a decent amount to get their identity verified.

Maybe it would be best to separate them, you can self sign or equivalent for encryption and the identity system can be separate.

There is little point in encrypting traffic if you can't differentiate between a man in the middle and your desired endpoint.

EX: Conceder I open encrypted connection to amazone.com which pretends to be amazon.com they open an encrypted connection to amazon.com. Amazone can now pretend to be Amazon and read all my encrypted traffic.

Consider someone sniffing wifi. I'm worried about eavesdropping much more often than man in the middle, and nontrusted SSL could provide that if browsers would stop freaking out and just go without a padlock.

Users can differentiate between "amazon.com" and "amazone.com" via the browser's location bar. There's nothing stopping the owner of "amazone.com" from getting an SSL cert signed by a "trusted authority", so SSL does not help in this respect. My opinion is that conflating identity with encryption is a fundamental problem.

Some users can differentiate... assuming they notice.

The issue is in the real world building a system to handle both typos and hostel networks requires some form of authentication.

You need some amount of identity checking, to tell you that the https://uncesnsored.citadel.org/ you're talking to today is the same one you were talking to yesterday and last week. SSH handles this by remembering the key used on the first connection; Perspectives goes one better and checks from multiple parts of the network.

Tying these online identities to physical-world identities is what can be separate.

Why do you think browsers were "lying" when they said the certificate wasn't to be trusted? Without any kind of "trusted third party" involved there is no reason at all to trust your self signed certificate.

Fair question. I just checked what exactly the warning message says in IE, and it's actually a pretty fair warning message. Firefox, on the other hand, has a pretty scary "This connection is untrusted" page with a pretty confusing explanation of the alleged problem. I don't know if this still happens, but I remember a couple years ago, it was impossible to get IE or Firefox to actually save the cert or remember your preference to bypass the warning, so you would get the warning each time you had a new browser session and tried to connect to the server, no matter what.

The fact is, my real-life identity was never verified as the owner of the domain by a "trusted" third party. However, the encryption key comes from the same server serving the content, so what, really, is not to be trusted? I.e. the cert applies to "domain.com" and is being used on "domain.com". There is no risk of MITM attack, only that "domain.com" is not what you think it is.

Well, anyone can supply a key - the problem is that the client could be talking to anyone.

> There is no risk of MITM attack, only that "domain.com" is not what you think it is.

That very well could be a MITM attack

OTOH, Firefox - and other browsers - make a self-signed or expired SSL certificate look extremely scary, while a totally unencrypted connection is fine. I understand the reason, but it´s still odd...

I would say that it is scarier - with a self signed cert you have someone claiming an identity without providing any independent confirmation, while providing an encrypted channel for that communication so that it "seems" safe.

Why tie identity to encryption? Just have a self signed certificate not show a lock icon, or some new icon that represents encryption but not independently confirmed identity.

Because the value of encryption is significantly reduced if you don't know who you are talking to. How do you know you're not talking to a man in the middle?

You don't. I agree that self-signed certificates are mostly useless (although stuff like the perspectives extension to Firefox might help in verification, and at least you can be sure that you are still talking to the same server), but that does not it's worse than a plain HTTP connection.

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