As is already described by the comment thread we're replying in, "internal use" and "HTTPS" are very compatible. Corporations can run an internal CA, sign whatever internal certs they want, and trust that CA on their devices.
Not to mention the massive undertaking that even just maintaining a multi-platform chromium fork is.
In the hackiest of setups, it's a few commands to generate a CA and issue a wildcard certificate for everything. Then a single line in the bootstrap script or documentation for new devices to trust the CA and you're done.
Going a few steps further, setting up something like Hashicorp Vault is not hard and regardless of org size; you need to do secret distribution somehow.
My dad still calls my terminals a "DOS window" and doesn't understand why I don't use GUIs like a normal person. He has his own business. He absolutely cannot just roll out a CA for secure comms with his local printer or whatever. He literally calls me to help with buying a PDF reader
Myself, I'm employed at a small business and we're all as tech savvy as it gets. It took me several days to set it up on secure hardware (smartcard, figuring out compatibility and broken documentation), making sure I understand what all the options do and that it's secure for years to come and whatnot, working out what the procedure for issuing should be, etc. Eventually got it done, handed it over to the higher-up who gets to issue certs, distribute the CA cert to everyone... it's never used. We have a wiki page with TLS and SSH fingerprints
This is fair. I assumed all small businesses would be tech startups, haha.
Perhaps spend some time outside your bubble? I’ve read many of your comments and you just do seem to be caught in your own little world. “Out of touch” is apt and you should probably reflect on that at length.
If we’re talking about businesses hosting services on some intranet and concerned about TLS, then yes, I assume it’s either a tech company or they have at least one competent engineer to host these things. Why else would the question be relevant?
> “Out of touch” is apt and you should probably reflect on that at length.
That’s a very weird personal comment based on a few comments on a website that’s inside a tech savvy bubble. Most people here work in IT, so I talk as if most people here work in IT. If you’re a mechanic at a garage or a lawyer at a law firm, I wouldn’t tell you rolling your own CA is easy and just a few commands.
Individuals are in the same boat: if you're running your own custom services at your house, you've self-identified as being in the amazingly small fraction of the population with both the technical literacy and desire to do so. Either set up LetsEncrypt or run your own ACME service; the CAB is making clear here and in prior changes that they're not letting the 1% hold back the security bar for everybody else.
The nightmare only intensifies for small businesses that allow their users to bring their own devices (yes, yes, sacrilege but that is how small businesses operate).
Not everything is a massive enterprise with an army of IT support personnel.
Or cheat and use tailscale to do the whole thing.
Traefik (by default) will attempt certificate renewal 30 days before expiry. Perhaps the defaults will change if the lifetime becomes 45 days. I don't think it's possible to override this value, without adjusting the certificate expiry days, but I've never felt the need to adjust it.
A static page that hosts documentation on an internal network does not need encryption.
The added overhead of certificate maintenance (and investigating when it does and will break) is simply not worth the added cost.
Of course the workaround most shops do nowadays is just hide the HTTP servers behind a load balancer doing SSL termination with a wildcard cert. An added layer of complexity (and now single point of failure) just to appease the WebPKI crybabies.
Someone that has seized control of your core network such that they were capable of modifying traffic, is not going to waste precious time or access modifying the flags of ls on your man page server. They will focus on more valuable things.
Just because something is possible in theory doesn't make it likely or worth the time invested.
You can put 8 locks on the door to your house but most people suffice with just one.
Someone could remove a piece of mail from your unlocked rural mailbox, modify it and put it back. Do you trust the mail carrier as much as the security of your internal network?
But it's not really a concern worth investing resources into for most.
Ah, the "both me and my attackers agree on what's important" fallacy.
What if they modify the man page response to include drive-by malware?
Just about every web server these days supports ACME -- some natively, some via scripts, and you can set up your own internal CA using something like step-ca that speaks ACME if you don't want your certs going out to the transparency log.
The last few companies I've worked at had no http behind the scenes -- everything, including service-to-service communications was handled via https. It's a hard requirement for just about everything financial, healthcare, and sensitive these days.
[proceeds to describe a bunch of new infrastructure and automation you need to setup and monitor]
So when ACME breaks - which it will, because it's not foolproof - the server securely hosting the cafeteria menus is now inaccessible, instead of being susceptible to interception or modification in transit. Because the guy that has owned your core switches is most concerned that everyone will be eating taco salad every day.
https://www.digicert.com/blog/https-only-features-in-browser...