Disabling cert checks: we have not learned much
daniel.haxx.se
daniel.haxx.se
Sometimes I care only about my traffic being encrypted, and resent having to jump through hoops to ignore the name mismatch. Sometimes I care only about assurances that the name is correct, and don't care about having the traffic encrypted.
If that's not in your threat model, and you want encryption for another purpose, then I could understand that, but currently, protecting the endpoints against malicious attackers in the middle is the big value of TLS.
Why do you care about encryption without authentication? Without TOFU, PKI or a preshared key what is the value?
> Sometimes I care only about assurances that the name is correct, and don't care about having the traffic encrypted.
So signing?
At least with HTTPS over the local network, it can frustrate attempts to break into it. That said we are sure to call it “https-insecure”.
There are options for this, that needn't cost.
In a company with controlled workstations, have your own CA and push the trust of that through GP or in your standard OS build, point whatever domain you like (“real” or just a local-only DNS entry) at your host and sign a cert for that with the internal CA. Generating keys & certs for each workstation can be automated. You could sign a wildcard subdomain and key+cert for each machine or person, .pc101.devteam.internal/.johndoe.devteam.internal, so each user can setup multiple dev/test services on their box without requiring support from the infrastructure team.
Or get a wildcard from LE or similar for some [sub]domain, point *.[sub.]domain to 127.0.0.1 and let everyone have the keys for that. You need to renew every 3 months or less and redistribute the cert, but that isn't massive hardship and can be automated. Also make sure this is only for dev/test though, not internal tooling that might handle read data/controls, or having multiple (potentially many) people with access to the private key is a massive security issue.
Using proper names & certs and not encouraging disabling checks for local dev/test, reduces the risk of code that doesn't do proper verification getting let out into the wild later when someone forgets to switch checks back on.
> In a company with controlled workstations, have your own CA and push the trust of that through GP or in your standard OS build
I'd be surprised if this did not cost when done properly. Securing a (even internal) CA is a whole thing that is not trivial.
If you are already maintaining a CA for any other reasons then use that or the same process to maintain another, otherwise the second option is probably the path of least extra work/cost.
A key reason for maintaining secure connections for everything in local dev environments is to practise for best practice: keeping your dev environments close to production configuration without doing that by lowering production's level of doing-stuff-right accidentally (or intentionally) through insecure settings (like not verifying certificates) leaking out of dev into other environments.
At least this thread isn't full of people complaining that UAs (and related libraries) should still just trust self-signed certs, and not accepting any explanation of why that is a bad idea, which used to be the norm…
Correct. Can you point out on the dolly where I said otherwise?
> The only even remotely reasonable threat … But aside from that?
You either didn't read what I said properly, or are deliberately misreading it.
I didn't suggest using TLS properly in dev was for specific threat protection in dev environments, but for stopping dumbed down things in dev accidentally getting out into prod, and that it is “practise for best practice in production”.
Unless of course someone has (or thinks they have!) reason to breach commonly accepted good practise and have real data in dev, in which case dev is a de-facto production environment from a security standpoint.
> "best practice" (whatever that term actually means)
It is a well understood term. I'll not spend my time explaining it as you'll easily find that information elsewhere if you care to.
A lack of CRL doesn’t make TLS insecure.
A root doesn’t produce “self-signed certificates”. That especially doesn’t make any sense. What do you think the “self” references in “self-signed” certificate?
Add the root to your trust store, if you trust it, and you’re done.
What’s more concerning is someone working on (assumingly) secure, sensitive, air-gapped networks knows this little about TLS?
Now, obviously, you couldn't actually use that certificate publicly. If you were to try to MitM someone, their client wouldn't accept the certificate because your root CA's certificate won't be in their trusted list.
But add that root CA to your own system, and it'll work fine.