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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

Self-signed certificates are still better than http plain text. I understand not showing the padlock icon for self-signed certificates, I don't understand why you would warn people away from them when the worst case is that they are just as unsafe as when they use plain http. IMHO this browser behavior is completely nonsensical.

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How would a browser know that the the self-signed certificate that was just presented for www.mybank.com is intended to be self-signed (show no error, but also show no padlock) or whether it's the result of a MITM attack because www.mybank.com is supposed to present a properly signed certificate (show error)?

How would you inform people going to www.mybank.com which is presenting a self-signed cert in a way that a) they clearly notice but that b) doesn't annoy you when you connect to www.myblog.com which also is presenting a self-signed cert?

If the user typed www.mybank.com, let the server redirect to https but don't show the lock icon if it's self-signed. This is no worse than an impostor that just doesn't redirect to https.

If the user typed https://www.mybank.com, show the usual warning for self-signed certificates.

This is EXACTLY what I want for my intranet sites. It lets me protect my users from the wireshark in the next cubicle.

But that don't protect you from a malicious user hijacking this domain in the next cubicle. Perhaps, if your switches are not properly configured , that the guy in the next cubicle ou do some arp spoofing and https://intranet.yourdomain would be served by a bogus server collecting passwords.

But your users won't notice the difference, because they are used to see the certificate warning on his browser.

The solution for this is to run your own CA internally and push out the cert to all the machines. (if you have byod stuff it makes it a little harder but you could still have an internal ca signing only a certain subdomain and get people ot install it)

How many people are careful to type "https" every time they visit a website? How many people pay close attention to the lock icon/color of the URL bar? This advice seems to ignore the existence of sslstrip [0] and related attacks, and the numerous countermeasures that have been designed to deal with this problem (e.g. HSTS).

[0] http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/

You would have to simply install the certificate for the CA that signed the certificate. Self-signed just means that YOU are the CA.

How would a browser know that the fact that www.mybank.com doesn't use SSL at all is intended by the bank, or the result of a MITM attack? At the end of the day it all relies on the user seeing the (lack of) a padlock in his browser. So as long as you don't show a padlock (or a different kind of padlock) for www.mybank.com when the certificate is self signed, you're good.

No. Self-signed certificates are much worse because they bring a false sense of security.

A self-signed certificate is trivially MITMed unless you have a way to authenticate the certificate. At the moment CAs are the best known way to do that (and before anyone brings certificate pinning or WoT, they come with their own problems, please read this comment of mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616766).

EDIT: You can downvote all you want but I'm still right.

Each time anyone repeats the "self-signed certificates are still better than HTTP plain text" lie is hurting everyone in the long run.

They're much worse, both for the users and from a security perspective. Self-signed certificates are evil unless you know exactly what you're doing and are in full control of both ends of the communication (in which case just trust it yourself and ignore the warnings).

The extent to which this is true depends on browser behavior. With some browser behavior self-signed certs could make some users safer against some threats; with other browser behavior they could make some users more vulnerable to some threats.

An opportunistic privacy solution with no legacy installed base to worry about is tcpcrypt:

http://www.tcpcrypt.org/

So if anyone wants to make progress on opportunistic unauthenticated encryption without having to fight about UA behaviors, tcpcrypt may be more fertile ground than self-signed certificates.

> With some browser behavior self-signed certs could make some users safer against some threats

How exactly? Did you read my linked comment?

As far as I can tell, self-signed certs are always a no-no. As soon as one is compromised and has to be revoked the whole system breaks apart.

The only situation where a self-signed certificate makes sense is when you control both ends of the communication and can revoke the cert on the client yourself.

In the age of WiFi, you can't dismiss active attacks.

EDIT: Again, whoever is downvoting can downvote all he wants but I'm still right. If I am not, prove it via comments, not downvotes, and we'll be able to discuss each other's views.

Even parent's Tcpcrypt link says it is vulnerable.

> By default Tcpcrypt is vulnerable to active attacks

> Tcpcrypt, however, is powerful enough to stop active attacks, too, if the application using it performs authentication.

How are you going to perform authentication via insecure channels without CAs?

Well, the best example I know of is proposals to do opportunistic upgrades from HTTP to HTTPS, for example via a browser header in the HTTP reply. If the browser performs the opportunistic upgrade, and negotiates an HTTPS connection behind the scenes, and doesn't tell the user that the connection was served over HTTPS, then accepting a self-signed cert invisibly in this context makes the user no worse off than not performing the upgrade (and better off against an adversary who's not currently performing an active attack).

I forgot what the current status of drafts proposing this is. Amazingly, I found that Rohit Khare described a form of this mechanism way back in 1998 (so it's not a super-new concept).

Although such scheme is indeed safer than HTTP (protects against passive attacks), what you're describing is not self-signed certificates, but merely encryption (with new random _unathenticated_ keys per session).

Keys would be exchanged via Diffie-Hellman as usual, but a certificate wouldn't be involved since it's useless anyways (you can't certify anything in such a scheme, why bother at all?) and thus would be vulnerable to active attacks.

Certificates imply long-term authentication. It's an important nuance since they are long-lived by definition, so they have to be trusted and revoked as needed, in which case we're still facing the problem I mentioned earlier.

I agree that the certificates don't serve any useful function in this scenario; they might be required pro forma, but they aren't actually doing anything helpful.

> A self-signed certificate is trivially MITMed unless you have a way to authenticate the certificate.

Trivial? Yes. As trivial as intercepting plain HTTP? No.

The NSA or adversary du jour can vacuum up anything sent over plain HTTP with zero risk. Self-signed HTTPS forces the attacker to commit some resources and, more importantly, run the risk of exposure. Security is not a binary (no encryption scheme is perfect), it's about increasing the cost to attackers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8625420

HTTPS with self-signed certificates remains better than plain HTTP. The fact that you can propose an unimplemented, unstandardized, theoretical scheme that would offer the same advantages as HTTPS with self-signed certificates does not make HTTPS with self-signed certificates worse than plain HTTP.

Reddit discussion about this, with much of the same arguments there as here (and talking past each other just as much):

http://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2l7ufn/alwa...

The warning is designed to let people know that who you're talking to can't be proven, which is important when someone tries to impersonate a bank, or your email provider, or any other number of important sites.

CA-signed certificates don't prove you're talking to who you think you are either as any CA trusted by your browser/OS can sign any certificate.

This is true for most sites now, but is being solved gradually, with hard-coded certificate pinning already shipping in Firefox and Chrome, and the HTTP Public Key Pinning extension coming soon.

Yes. That's not perfect. But it raises the bar for forgery to "can sign certificates as a root authority", which is still fairly high. (e.g. I can't do it, and neither can you.) It stops coffee shop/hotel wifi operators and mobile providers from injecting content into your session.

If we encourage users to blindly accept self-signed certificates (giving us end-to-end encryption but sacrificing identification), nothing would stop those actors from altering your HTTPS sessions as easily as they alter your HTTP sessions today. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

You don't need a CA system to solve that problem, though. Take, for example, Convergence[0] which uses a notary system in place of the CA system.

[0] http://convergence.io

But when you browse over http, you don't know who you're talking to either, so how are self-signed certificates worse than http?

I'm really having trouble figuring out the attack scenario unique to self-signed certificates that you don't have with plain http.

Security-wise, if they are both vulnerable to trivial exploits, how can you say one is "more secure" than another?

Because encryption with SSL without trust of the SSL cert is meaningless. It might as well be not encrypted.

I wonder if this is true.

If there's a man in the middle, then they can read the traffic. But others still have a problem.

With HTTP, you know that everyone can read the traffic.

I think unsigned certs, especially with pinning, can be used to make wholesale collection of internet traffic vastly more difficult.

Now you are talking about obscurity, not security. In my opinion.

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