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Comment by Nux | Hacker News Reader

The CA system is fscked beyond repair (it always has been). We need an alternative now.

Supporting http://tack.io/ is imo the most painless solution for what we have right now.

It looks like it's still in the development phase? I'd like to start recommending it to clients, and then testing it on client sites, but right now I can't.

EDIT: Oh, apparently plug ins for nginx and apache are now available. Sweeeeet.

EDIT: Although I'm a bit nervous about turning it on. Several weeks ago I couldn't get to one of my websites where I had turned on HSTS for about an hour from Chrome, and I got absolutely no feedback from Chrome about what the problem was.

Was HSTS the problem? Or did it end up being something else?

I still don't know, which is why it is such a nagging problem in my gut.

Chrome acted like it was HSTS, because it refused to let me connect at all, not even with a "it's okay to connect for now." And it went away by itself after about 30-60 minutes.

I'm sure I could have wiped out some Chrome settings to fix this, but this site is also used by our customers, and I really really wanted to understand what it was. Fortunately I was the only person who has ever ran into it so far.

Is there an HSTS user group I could ask about this?

You could always ask agl, he might have some suggestions.

What I've seen in the past is that Chrome occasionally gets over aggressive in caching (in an attempt to be "fast" I guess). Clearing all the caches out, flushing DNS etc. usually fixes it for me.

Judging by how Google says they stumbled over this, "Chrome detected and blocked an unauthorized digital certificate", it seems that's roughly what they're doing. I wonder how many sites it's able to do this for.

(but yes, that is definitely a good solution)

You can see the pins list at

https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/base/tr...

Those are the sites that they're currently able to do it for. :-)

If anyone reading wants to have your own site added to the HSTS preload (or perhaps cert pin) lists, I think the Chromium developers are interested in hearing from you. I know they'll add HSTS preloads for any site, but I don't know for sure whether there's a size or popularity threshold of some sort for a cert pin.

Chrome (the browser) is super-paranoid about other people replacing google.com certificates. It knows exactly what they should be and anything else is cause for alarm. 'tptacek talks about it from time to time.

Indeed. Chrome has baked-in public key pinning for their services.

http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/05/04/pinning.html

The best thing right now is cert pinning in Chrome. Unfortunately it's only in Chrome, and is a manual process on Google's part, so it really isn't applicable to a lot of people.

Gah, I hate the edit timeout, I meant key pinning. (the key is actually what gets hashed and pinned, not the cert, since certs get reissued all the time for administrative reasons)

Do you know of any alternatives being worked on? No snark intended, I am genuinely curious about the current state of affairs.

Some developments in this area are:

* Convergence.io

* DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) + DNSSEC

* Tack.io

For various reasons listed in [1] Convergence is not likely to be implemented (by default) in major browsers.

On DANE + DNSSEC, where the cert is authenticated via the information published in your DNS, Moxie Marlinspike has said it better then I can:

    "CAs are sketchy, but this is a whole new world of sketchiness. Think,
    sketchasaurus. Registrars were never built or selected with security in mind,
    and most of them don’t have a very good track record in this area. Shouldn’t it
    be laughable that the current first step in deploying DNSSEC is to create an
    account with GoDaddy?"[2]

The 2011 BlackHat video[3] and blog post[2] by Moxie Marlinspike are great sources of information.

IMO, Tack.io is the most viable solution. It's compatible with the current model but removes the thread of one CA being able to compromise all domains.

[1] http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/09/07/convergence.html

[2] http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/ssl-and-the-future-of-authe...

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA

Registrar's are trusted. They can change the DNS records for your domain to point at their servers, allowing them to intercept email. That's sufficient to allow them to get certificates issued for your domain through some providers.

For domain validated certs, certainly.

The issue is that it doesn't solve anything. We merely shift (more) responsibility to registrars and NICs. You can change (untrust) registrars I suppose but if you have a .com you'll have to trust Verisign _forever_. Well, at least as long as they operate the .com tld. So if Verisign loses your trust, there is even less you can do than today.

Check out http://tack.io/ and http://convergence.io/

You could also listen to this if that's your preferred way of learning things:

https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/moxie-marlinspike-tack-co...

Last time Convergence was crapping out when using private (or otherwise unreachable) IPs - kind of makes sense, but still dissapointing. Will check out tack.io and CurveCP, cheers for the suggestions.

There's also CurveCP (http://curvecp.org/) which is a more radical alternative (replaces TCP and relies on DNSCurve, a DNS replacement) but has good security built in by default and some interesting features (remote users are identified by their public key so they can reconnect from different IP addresses and the stream keeps going without a reconnect).

It seems like a much harder thing to get adoption going for but it has good thought behind it and can exist in parallel with the rest of the TCP/IP world. I would love to see it get to a place where you can just download it from Debian or Homebrew...

I've been using CurveCP for over a year privately and love it. I'll probably expand to production, starting with CurveHTTP, with the next release of NaCl. Not sure if that makes me the chicken or the egg.

There's DANE [1], which uses DNSSEC to authenticate TLS certificates. Chrome supports (or at least supported) something very similar but Chome-specific [2]. The code to support DANE in Chrome apparently exists but I don't know if it's actually available to use. [3]

1. http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc6698/

2. http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/06/16/dnssecchrome.html

3. http://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/10/20/dane-stapled-certif...

no-one has mentioned perspectives (perhaps arguably because it's not an alternative, but a patch to help make the existing approach more reliable), but it exists now and seems to work - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/perspectives/lnppf... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/perspectives/

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