Deprecating Non-Secure HTTP
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
If SSL doesn't change, this move will cut the little folks out of the internet. What are Mozilla's values?
Not great for people running small websites.
$9 - $11 / year for perfectly good certs. Less than $1 per month is a small burden.
https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates/domain-v...
So long as you don't need any subdomains, right?
I actually expect the price of plaintext HTTP hosting to go up a bit; partly due to reduced demand, but also due to increased risk/liability. With SSL being the "industry best practice", I expect at least a few bean counters will view the risk of private information leaks or hypothetical legal liability for enabling DDOS (similar to the "attractive nuisance" doctrine).
There will be a turbulent transition period, of course. As someone currently living at the poverty line, I have argued against the CA system many times. A SSL cert (and anual renewal) may be an insignificant cost to some people, but it is a real barrier when tha cost represents days/weeks of food. Unfortunately, none of this removes the need for encryption or the risks of plaintext. This is why I'm very excited about Let’s Encrypt; It might solve the cost problem, and it might avoid the StartSSL "no second-source" problem because it is a protocol first.
Internet use is only going up, so these transition costs are only going to go up. We can pay it now, or pay even more in the future.
Also, why do you think the supply of SSL hosting services is necessarily limited any more than traditional plaintext hosting would be?
From the site: Let’s Encrypt is a new Certificate Authority: It’s free, automated, and open. Arriving Mid-2015
The web is moving faster every day, apparently. I sure do hope that project will be all it's chalked up to be.
For example, I need IP-only certs for a new project I'm working on (waiting for DNS to propagate to all clients is too unreliable and slow). If letsencrypt doesn't do that... well then I'd have to hope real hard for a competent CA out there who has an automated process available that allows IP-only certs. And whatever their price, if companies start following Mozilla's lead too soon, I'll have to pay up.
The wording in the article is perhaps not so damning yet, but it's still making me uneasy that they put out this press release while there are currently ZERO viable solutions for this.
"Note that while ACME is defined with enough flexibility to handle different types of identifiers in principle, the primary use case addressed by this document is the case where domain names are used as identifiers. For example, all of the identifier validation challenges described in Section {identifier-validation-challenges} below address validation of domain names. The use of ACME for other protocols will require further specification, in order to describe how these identifiers are encoded in the protocol, and what types of validation challenges the server might require."
https://cabforum.org/internal-names/
The PDF document defines "Reserved IP Address" as "An IPv4 or IPv6 address that the IANA has marked as reserved".
I watched a demo where they went from a vanilla apache install to an A scoring HTTPS site in sub 5 minutes at Libreplanet. It's a good idea to publicize the upcoming LARGE change.
On the other hand, our infrastructure, partnerships, and technology are very real. I hope they'll make the process just as easy as what you saw for many people soon.
I'm curious about your requirement for IP only certs? Sure you don't "own" a domain name, but it's even less true that you "own" a specific IP address. (Well, at least for me, perhaps if your project is in the datacenter/isp/network-infrastructure space you might actually have some cintractual "ownership" of an IP address?)
Anyone incapable of following the steps required there is probably not who you'd want implementing your web server security…
If you're going the minimally technical route then you're using shared or managed hosting and it's not your job to set up the SSL.
Crypto is non-trivial. There'll never be a proper "Click this button to automatically secure your random php app running in cPanel/Plesk".
The best we'll see I suspect is a "click here and make your website pass the minimal checks modern browsers use to determine if you're secure", then we'll have a daily stream of site owners claiming "the PII/password/creditcard breach wasn't my fault - I used 2048 bit encryption!"
This doesn't make any sense. You're not waiting for DNS to propagate to clients; if anything you're waiting for recursive DNS servers at shitty ISPs to time out their caches when they are configured to not honor the RR's TTL sent by the authoritative server in a misguided attempt to make the internet "faster".
But this is completely avoidable without having to use IPs or certificates with CN/SAN that are IPs: get a wildcard cert and rotate the subdomain name. It's a new hostname, so it busts intermediate DNS caches by being new queries; since it's a new query, there's no "propagation to clients" to wait for when you change IPs, all queries for the new name hit authoritative servers. Additionally, it looks infinitely more legit than a website that is accessible only via IP address. And doubly additionally, if you're going through so many IPs, presumably you'll be rotating some out and those may be assigned to other people who can then get their own cert for that IP and impersonate you.
I assumed the grandparent simply didn't understand the need to lower his TTLs.
Some quick tests with dig seem to indicate that, at least for the region I'm in, my queries to google's public DNS is rotating between 4 or 5 servers, as evidenced by the TTLs being returned.
It occurred rarely, but a few years ago it was a regular problem because some bigger ISPs were doing it[0]. Not sure how common it is these days.
That being said, I'm having troubling coming up with a project that would be better served with IP addresses than a constant name, so I have no idea what the OP I was responding to could be doing that that problem needed to be addressed at all.
What I want involved is an identity verification organization whose mission is clearly defined to be identity verification and management of a PKI trust.
Rob Graham was called out in this article which was subsequently edited: https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/553716844650307584
Also, they lie constantly, in lousy attempts of populism and being lavished with attention: http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/07/eff-lies-about-netneutrali...
Their staff might be feminists, but that doesn't mean they engage in gender discrimination. If you have something better, post it.
If the friction for testing, say, an enterprise LOB app on an internal-only QA IIS server is any higher than "basically zero" with Firefox, and the same friction doesn't apply to Chrome or IE, well.
2. Let's Encrypt will use an open protocol, so it should be OS-agnostic.
3. "Privileged Contexts" is being developed as a W3C working draft [1]. It's quite likely this won't be just a Mozilla-thing. Google has been fairly aggressive when it comes to pushing for more (and better) SSL as well (see SHA1 cert deprecation).
How does you corporation handle actually important corporate sites that nobody must access?
It sound to my like your corp has some issues on this side.
It doesn't, they ship a tool only for convenience. An open source tool running on your machine would be reverse-engineerable anyway. Plus, it is expected that shared hosting providers will run the tool for you.
Currently SSL is a revenue stream for many shared hosting providers. Are there are on-record comments from major providers who are planning on supporting Let's Encrypt?
The only problem is lack of browser support for server name indication so one IP can be shared by many customers, but it's getting less of an issue by end-users renewing their hardware or updating their browser.
I can't find anything lower than $60.
[1] http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/39165/vmbox-co-openvz-ssd-c...
$45 for a one year wildcard
(not affiliated, but have bought a few certs from them without problems)
StartCom offers the free (for personal use) Class 1 X.509 SSL certificate "StartSSL Free"
The 1-click installations that are provided by the hosts are usually more than that.
Yes, even $50/year for a business in not that big a deal but so much of the market has international users where $50 is really expensive. There are also small time hobby/businesses where $50 makes an impact.
Major browser vendors like Google and Mozilla don't change their policies in a vacuum while the rest of the world stays static. The move to "deprecate" HTTP is an explicit attempt to manipulate the rest of the world into making SSL easier and more affordable. It is unfair to evaluate this proposal in isolation without considering the market upheaval that it is very much intended to trigger.
Currently, most web hosts charge a hefty markup on SSL certificates and charge even more to enable them on a website hosted with them. This practice may no longer be sustainable as more and more people begin to demand SSL. "Free SSL with every 1-year contract!" could well become a standard marketing slogan, just as "Free domain with every 1-year contract!" has been for the last 10+ years.
Some domain registrars already offer free or low-cost (~$1.99) SSL certificates with the purchase of every domain. This may become more widespread as registrars scramble to remain competitive.
Android 2.x and Windows XP are major excuses for not adopting SNI, but the upcoming release of Windows 10 will reduce the market share of XP even further, and old Android's lifespan is also running out thanks to the planned obsolescence of mobile devices. By 2017-18, nobody will care about these platforms anymore, and if anyone still does, we can tell them to get Firefox.
Even without StartSSL or Let's Encrypt, existing CAs may be forced to cut their prices drastically as a horde of super-price-conscious consumers begin to flood their once prestigious trading floor. Some CAs have already been offering $20 wildcard certs through selected resellers. Expect more of these offers in the near future. This is a race to the bottom, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it!
To top it off, CloudFlare is offering free SSL (SNI required) to everyone. Expect services like this to become more common as SSL comes to be seen as an essential component of every online service.
Of course, there's no guarantee that these changes will occur. But I can guarantee that most of them will not occur unless there's massive, organized presssure on the lazy, greedy incumbents. Google and Mozilla are doing the world a great service by adding their weight to this much-needed pressure. Remember when the rest of the world basically ran an extortion racket to force the web hosting industry into upgrading to PHP 5? That was glorious. I want to see it happen again, this time for easy and affordable SSL.
If the deadline arrives and the world still isn't ready for the transition, we'll think again and adjust our strategies accordingly. Nothing wrong with that. In the meantime, let's be optimistic and go bully some web hosts!
I'd love to believe this but I've never once seen the https-only nazis bring up this issue on their own, or show any concern for the fact that it will limit speech on the web. The y mostly work for companies where getting ssl certs is no big deal, and they put their personal projects on github or heroku anyways.
The backbone of the web was the fact that you could put up a website on your own computer within a matter of minutes. That is now going to be gone and I've never seen the biggest advocates of this change show any concern whatsoever.
The plan is to disable some of the "more dangerous" features when the page is requested over HTTP, in order to entice webmasters to adopt SSL. The list hasn't even been written yet, but I'm guessing that most of those features will be fancy javascript and third-party plugins like Flash. Which you probably shouldn't rely on being enabled in the first place.
I personally wouldn't mind if every insecure page behaved as if I had NoScript & NoFlash enabled by default.
You may be right about the excessive idealism of so-called HTTPS nazis on some online forums, but I'm pretty sure that the people in charge at Google and Mozilla are more level-headed and realistic.
> the goal of this effort is to send a message to the web developer community that they need to be secure
> That would allow things like CSS and other rendering features to still be used by insecure websites ... [but] restrict qualitatively new features, such as access to new hardware capabilities ... [like] persistent permissions for camera and microphone access
If accessing my camera over an insecure connection is your definition of doing interesting things, I would be happy to block you.
In fact, I can't think of a single proposed addition to the current web stack that would be safe to use over an insecure connection.
You have every right to express your views using a static document and stylesheet. But anything beyond that tends to involve executing your code on my computer, and nobody has any obligation to let you do that, especially over an insecure connection. Requiring people to make some additional effort before they can access other people's property sounds like a nice balance of rights and obligations to me.
> The plan is to disable some of the "more dangerous" features when the page is requested over HTTP
And now you're saying that every new feature falls into this category.
Listen, I'm all for going all-in on SSL. What I'm not for is doing until SSL is as seamless and inexpensive as HTTP.
What really concerns me is that the https-only nazis do not share this concern. It's never mentioned in their blog posts.
It actually really scares me that something that has been so important for making the web as powerful for the cause of freedom is not even on the radar of the people who are controlling the direction of the web.
My fundamental disagreement with you is that I don't think we can wait until "SSL is as seamless and inexpensive as HTTP". That will never happen unless we can pose a credible threat to the profit margins of web hosts and CAs. And sending a horde of unsatisfied customers in their general direction is one of the most effective ways to pose such a threat.
Also having it developed by 19 university types and one guy from Bell labs was asking for trouble
Subtle misreading. It's not that new features are in that category by definition, it's that every major feature proposal kijin has seen so far has been of the dangerous sort.
Clarity, because there will be so much distilled information and tooling around setup.
Affordability, because there will be so much volume that companies will start to compete on price in the same way that domain companies do.
You could compare it to IPsec, which is what most VPNs use, which is comparable in security and design. They both, together with SSL, suffer from a bad case of design-by-committee, including atrocities like X509.
DNSSEC did get an important thing right. You are in full control of your own keys, and your DNS provider can not impersonate you. Having an external DNS hosting provider was not common back then, but it is now, and I'm glad they got that right.
Indeed, but afaik there are methods to mitigate it (NSEC3) and more refined ones in development (NSEC4, NSEC5).
Now you might say don't trust the registrar, trust the people who run the .com (or whatever) TLD. That's getting close to what DNSSEC does, which some people say is better. But CAs weren't designed for this like DNSSEC. With the way CAs work, we would have to give the runners of .com power over all domains, which some people might not think is so bad. But it would also mean we would have to give the owners of .sucks power over all domains as well, which most people would be against.
The idea was that users should want to validate they speak with the organization McDonald's, not with mcdonalds.com which may or may not belong to them. Turns out users don't, and that the distinction gets even less important over time. Domain names is an important identifier for an organization now. You can still however see the old process at work in EV certificates, which normally carries an extra cost.
If SSL had been designed for domain validation from the start, if would have looked like DNSSEC. Cryptographically verified domain assignments is a good idea, and infinitely more secure than the domain validation schemes we use today.
Here at HN there are a handful who can't resist going on about NSA every time DNSSEC is mentioned, so I expect a few of those now. Please do understand the whole picture and how the complete certificate stack works before taking those statements at face value.
FYI that's exactly what EV SSL does now - hence the company checks, and the green bar:
Eg, here's a regular certificate
openssl x509 -in example.com.crt -noout -text | grep Subject
Subject: 1.3.6.1.4.1.311.60.2.1.3=GB/businessCategory=Private Organization/serialNumber=09378892, C=GB, ST=City of London, L=London, O=example Limited, CN=billing.example.com, DNS:billing.example.com, DNS:www.billing.example.com
[0] http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/24/with-google-domains-its-tim...
This "certificates are expensive" argument was only valid a decade ago, we have free certs now.
This applies to HTTP as well. That's why Firefox and Chrome will be visibly warning it's insecure.
Revocation isn't part of the normal lifecyle of TLS certificates either: you'll only need this once you've had a security breach.
Mozilla pushing forward aggressively forces people to address the pain points.
Wouldn't it just be significantly easier to simply change the URL art style to make clear that HTTP is "insecure." Like a red broken padlock on every HTTP page?
That has the following advantages:
- HTTP remains fully working for internal/development/localhost/appliance usage (no broken features).
- Users are reminded that HTTP is not secure.
- Webmasters are "embarrassed" into upgrading to HTTPS.
- Fully backwards compatible.
Seems like a perfect solution where everyone wins.
* It is a static site with no forms or logins
* It is non-critical info
* The site operator can't afford a certificate (Let's Encrypt is only one site...)
Yes, the hosts could wildcard. Yes, there are other solutions out there. But for the average Joe who is blogging about his vacations and family? They're going to be completely lost.
Why don't shared hosts just wildcard? Shared certificate? Well, let's think about it... Charging ~$5/month/dedicated IP is a nice upsell, and getting $70 for an installed SSL cert that costs them $10 from their SSL cert reseller, that takes them 2 minutes to configure... That's a nice slice of pie. I'd take that bet any day.
It's only an upsell now. If in the future SSL is required to get access, it stops being an upsell and starts having to be part of the basic package. Whether that will raise prices significantly is yet to be seen.
Average Joe uses Facebook, Tumblr, Wordpress, or any number of existing hosts to blog to his family.
These capabilities are sensitive enough that you want to give users control over who is granted access. But if pages are being loaded over HTTP, the user can have no way of establishing the authenticity of the Javascript code they're granting permissions to.
When the user first visits an HTTPS page with a self-signed cert, they get the content, and the URL art style has a broken lock or something warning it's not known to be secure. (It's better than raw HTTP but it's not trusted.) With certificate pinning by the browser, the next time the user visits that page, if it's different, then they get the current experience that warns them in big scary text and requires several clicks to get past. There's a question of if it's different in that the server owner upgraded to a paid SSL cert should it show a warning or not, but if there's a way to sign that upgrade with the old cert that the browser can know about there shouldn't be a problem...
Showing a big scary warning in one case, and not in the user, implies to the user that the browser has some reason to think one is more secure, which is misleading.
Of course the whole thing can be automated by the browser and happen behind the scene - i.e. Firefox connecting to a Mozilla service for each self signed website it sees and comparing the fingerprints. Then it can store information about this self-signed certificate as trusted.
Except that rather than creating a self-signed certificate and then asking an external service to store a fingerprint, you just let the external service sign your certificate.
EDIT: Oh yeah, and signing the certificate up-front has the nice benefit of not forcing browsers to leak private information (namely, the domain names that are being accessed) to a centralized third party.
Do we assume the user is going to notice that URL art style, and actually heed it? Because if the answer is "no" (and I think in reality, the answer would be "no"), then pick a high value site, and MitM it with a self-signed cert. The user misses the indicator, and proceeds to interact with the site; does JS work? (let's steal the user's cookies) do forms work? (please log in!)
Say I navigate to some restaurant's web page using HTTP. Even if I used HTTPS, someone spying on my traffic would know what I'm reading, if the IP address is a dedicated server for that web site only. Whether I use HTTP or HTTPS, they could infer that I'm interested in visiting the restaurant.
Secondly, I'm only interested in the opening hours. That is not classified information.
I suppose that a MITM attack could be perpetrated whereby the attackers rewrite the opening hours. I end up going to the place while it is in fact closed (and the area happens to be deserted), making me an easy target for the attackers to rob me.
Okay, okay, please deprecate HTTP; what was I thinking!
And that restaurant better get a properly signed certificate; no "self signed" junk! Moreover, I'm not going to accept it over the air the first time I visit, no siree. DNS could be redirecting me to a fake page which also has a signed certificate. I'm going to physically go the restaurant one time first, and obtain their certificate from them in person, on a flash drive, then install it in my devices. Then I'm going to pretend I was never there and don't know their opening hours, and obtain that info again using a nearly perfectly secured connection!
> Even if I used HTTPS, someone spying on my traffic would
> know what I'm reading, if the IP address is a dedicated
> server for that web site only
You could have multiple domains in the certificate to avoid identification, but that has its own problems.
[1] http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/a-new-type-of-phishing-attac...
All that that attack requires, to be successful, is the ability for pages served over HTTP to run Javascript and submit forms.
Or a MITM attack could be perpetrated whereby your computer is -however briefly- part of a JavaScript powered DDOS machine: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/31/massive-denial-of...
This is the techie version of "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". It's a pathetic argument and brings nothing to the table.
Just because you don't care about the NSA knowing you like McDonalds when you browse their menu, everybody else in the world shouldn't care about their government knowing they are gay (which, need I remind you, is an offense punishable by death in certain countries) when they browse an article on LGBT rights.
Because, if McDonalds doesn't need SSL for their menu, why would a writer need it for his small-audience blog?
I don't see any benefit in this type of blanket, all or nothing, type of approach. In fact, I see it doing more damage than good. Encrypting blogs, news websites, etc still makes no sense to me. I'm actually disappointed in Mozilla for looking at doing this. As a developer I respect many of their products and see them as champions of the web in a lot of ways.
HTTPs does not:
- protect a user from malware on their own system with keylogging taking place
- increase security in outdated and insecure websites (eg: old known exploitable code)
- prevent any browser drive-by downloaders or exploits
- increase the security of the web server itself (web stack thats serving requests) - yeah that's you using a private VPS without doing Kernel updates.
These are likely the major factors of why people have security issues. What is forcing HTTPS on the entire web actually doing? Who is it benefiting? The government can still snoop your data in-flight. If someone is connected to a fake wifi endpoint there is on the fly SSL decryption out there.....
Do we still need TLS for actual secure transactions that deal with personal data? Yes, of course. That's what it is intended for.
Do we need TLS to read the latest TMZ post about Miley Cyrus? You decide... (oh and it's http if you were wondering)
When you visit "blogs, news websites, etc" do you think there's no value in being able to know for sure that the content is exactly what the owner of the site intended? Even though ISPs have proven themselves willing to intercept and modify that content in transit?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/07/how-a-banner-a...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/08/why-comcasts-j...
>a web browser has no business dictating that the entire web should be forced in HTTPs.
1. that isn't what is happening as per the article. They are going to begin picking features that shouldn't be allowed over HTTP (like, say, geo location, web camera access, etc).
2. a browser is precisely the actor that should push for these things. If not browser vendors, who?
>What is forcing HTTPS on the entire web actually doing?
Encrypting streams of data that were previously unencrypted.
>Who is it benefiting?
Users.
>The government can still snoop your data in-flight.
So your argument is 'this isn't perfect for all attack vectors, so it isn't useful at all'?
>Do we need TLS to read the latest TMZ post about Miley Cyrus?
Yes. See how easy that is?
Imagine you're making some meatballs. You've got pigs, spices, and a stove.
If you're in Germany, there's no problem -- kill some pigs, grind some pork, mix in the spices, and cook your meatballs. You could make sausages the same way (as long as you've got tubing). And you're free to sample your food as you cook it to make sure it suits your tastes.
If you're in the US, you've got two options:
1. Give up on sausage entirely. Make sure your ground pork is well cooked before you even think of eating any of it.
2. Carefully vet the pigs for trichinosis before introducing their pork into your kitchen.
Unsurprisingly, we use option 1.
Germany, like the rest of Europe, has opted for a blanket solution where they're not allowed to have pigs with trichinosis. The US has opted for a different blanket solution where you can't eat raw pork. Nobody is suggesting that we carefully inspect individual pigs and treat the meat according to whether they had trichinosis.
"Multiple CVEs fixed including CVE-2014-3506, CVE-2014-3507, CVE-2014-3508, CVE-2014-3509, CVE-2014-3510, CVE-2014-3511, CVE-2014-3570, CVE-2014-3572, CVE-2014-8275, CVE-2015-0205 and CVE-2015-0206."
So if I were running a TLS-enabled site using LibreSSL from OpenBSD 5.6, I'd have been exposed to potentially 11+ CVEs. A little sooner with OpenSSL, and I would have been exposed to Heartbleed. And who knows how many CVEs will arise before 5.8 is released?
Why is it so impossible to write a secure TLS library? Why should I put my entire server at risk to appease the attempts of Mozilla and Google to prop up the CA business? Sorry, but I'll stick to parsing lines of text.
Let 'em remove HTTP completely. Hopefully after they break 90% of the web, we'll get some real user revolt, and some real competitors in the web browser space might emerge. Maybe from some people who actually listen to what their users are asking for.
I guess now we know what that "signed extensions only" change was for: what do you think they're going to do when someone submits a "Restore HTTP Functionality" add-on in the future?
So your argument is that since locks can occasionally be picked, doors shouldn't have locks? What exactly is the massive burden with HTTPS? The computational cost is tiny and will continue to become tinier, there are free cert providers like StartSSL and more coming soon, and the implementation is simple enough that anyone managing a server should be able to handle it easily.
The number of websites where I wouldn't prefer encryption and identity authentication is around zero, and the number of websites where I'm okay with someone injecting arbitrary JavaScript is exactly zero. The time people spend making flawed "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" or "crypto libraries/CAs are bad, scary, and hard to use" arguments would be much better spent actually trying to improve those circumstances for the inevitable and necessary shift to HTTPS everywhere.
A faulty lock on my house doesn't turn into Heartbleed.
The thing is, I don't need a lock on my server that serves up static, legal content. You might think it's a problem, that the NSA is going to spy on you, or China is going to inject attacks into your requests to my server, but that's your problem.
I'm not going to run a massively buggy TLS library with an API guide that would take a whole team of engineers weeks to decipher, just because you're intensely paranoid about accessing game-related data over HTTP.
Seriously, look at the GnuTLS documentation sometime. It's psychotic. As is MatrixSSL, PolarSSL, OpenSSL, and NSS. The closest to sanity I've ever seen was libtls, which is only on OpenBSD, still has lots of CVEs popping up, and can't do non-blocking mode.
> What exactly is the massive burden with HTTPS?
1. write your own HTTPS server. I'll wait a few months, or
2. find a library that's easy to use and won't expose my server to Heartbleed-like attacks, and
3. pay me $70/yr for the wildcard cert I would need.
I'll cover the extra CPU costs, since you say they're so small. (even though when people say "small", they're counting overhead as a percentage against a site running a bloated beast like Wordpress in PHP + MySQL.)
> there are free cert providers like StartSSL and more coming soon
That don't provide wildcart certs (and I have a wildcard CNAME entry; and I make use of that.)
> The number of websites where I wouldn't prefer encryption and identity authentication is around zero
And you're free to not visit my site, just like I wouldn't ever patronize a webstore that wasn't HTTPS. That's how markets are supposed to work. I don't see why your browser has to make the decision for the both of us.
> and the number of websites where I'm okay with someone injecting arbitrary JavaScript is exactly zero
Honestly ... I would be okay with blocking Javascript over HTTP. But I think that's more because I just hate Javascript :P
> would be much better spent actually trying to improve those circumstances
You seriously want me to write a TLS library?
My dream goal would actually be to have it built-into the sockets layer. If it could be enabled as easily as a setsockopt(SO_TLS_CERTIFICATE, (void*)certificatedata, ...); and OS updates could fix the security, I'd be a lot more inclined to get on board with the programming side.
I don't have a solution to the wildcard cert issue. I can't well start up my own CA to give them out for free. I guess it would at least be nice to see if they ever tone down self-signed certs from "WORSE THAN HITLER" to "at least equal to HTTP" in terms of warning messages. People keep talking about it, but it's been what? Over a decade now? I'll believe it when I see it.
For example, take the xkcd homepage. Not only do I not log into it, there's nowhere I _could_ log in. The only input is a search box (which seems to be disabled at the moment anyway). Is it really a security risk if my communication with xkcd's servers is unencrypted? (Yes, xkcd has a store and a forum, and I understand why you'd need HTTPS on those subdomains - but I don't see why the main domain needs it.)
I agree with the parts of their plan to disable browser features that could be a security risk to non-HTTPS pages - that makes total sense. But it seems absurd to prevent static pages from using future CSS layout features just because they're not using HTTPS.
How would you feel if they inserted javascript to mine bitcoins?
> How would you feel if they inserted javascript to mine bitcoins?
What about a site giving out health info? No login there, but could have consequences if tampered with. Or recipes (same as health info in some cases). Or news (could make investors jump).
Not that HTTPS fixes all of this, but there's no reason to think that a non-interactive or "static page can never benefit from security.
https://citizenlab.org/2014/08/cat-video-and-the-death-of-cl...
Setting up a new box? Put your CA-cert in its trust roots. Then use your CA to generate a server cert for it; plop that in /etc/nginx and wherever else. Now it's secure!
This is exactly the original use-case for X.509 certificate authorities: pairing devices on a private network without having to give each of them a set of of their peers' keys in advance. You have a private network that you run services on? You're a CA.
And really, in the dev-environment case, you actually want client-auth, too, because then you get "clients who don't have a CA-issued client cert can't connect" for free.
In proper X.509, the server auths the client just like the client auths the server—it's really more of an equal-peers "we're both trusted by the CA—the network owner—so we should both trust each-other" kind of thing. The public Internet centralized X.509 model—where the client has a huge list of CAs that the user doesn't even know the contents of, and the server doesn't check anything—is a very strange and non-idiomatic implementation of the premise.
A quick search turned up some more instructions here: https://blog.httpwatch.com/2013/12/12/five-tips-for-using-se...
And you're surprised that not every developer has done this? A minority of the developers I've ever worked with have ever done any of these things.
openssl s_server -accept 8000 -key key.pem -cert cert.pem -HTTP
[1]: http://www.w3.org/TR/powerful-features/#is-origin-trustworth...
Self-signed certificates are treated as errors: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=431386
Switch generic icon to negative feedback for non-https sites: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041087
Here's a proposed way of phasing this plan in over time:
1. Mid-2015: Start treating self signed certificates as unencrypted connections (i.e. stop showing a warning, but the UI would just show the globe icon, not the lock icon). This would allow website owners to choose to block passive surveillance without causing any cost to them or any problems for their users.
2. Late-2015: Switch the globe icon for http sites to a gray unlocked lock. The self signed certs would still be the globe icon. The would incentivize website owners to at least start blocking passive surveillance if they want to keep the same user experience as previous. Also, this new icon wouldn't be loud or intrusive to the user.
3. Late-2016: Change the unlocked icon for http sites to a yellow icon. Hopefully, by the end of 2016, Let's Encrypt has taken off and has a lot of frameworks like wordpress including tutorials on how to use it. This increased uptake of free authenticated https, plus the ability to still use self-signed certs for unauthenticated https (remember, this still blocks passive adversaries), would allow website owners enough alternative options to start switching to https. The yellow icon would push most over the edge.
4. Late-2017: Switch the unlocked icon for http to red. After a year of yellow, most websites should already have switched to https (authenticated or self-signed), so now it's time to drive the nail in the coffin and kill http on any production site with a red icon.
5. Late-2018: Show a warning for http sites. This experience would be similar to the self-signed cert experience now, where users have to manually choose to continue. Developers building websites would still be able to choose to continue to load their dev sites, but no production website would in their right mind choose to use http only.
I would personally rather see those promoted and methods developed to securely bootstrap them than make us all reliant on centralised CA infrastructure. The centralised CAs are all at the mercy of their governments and hence, in my opinion, ought to be considered almost as insecure as self-signed certs.
EDIT: I think I misunderstood your comment - reading again it sounds like you are also in favour of self-signed (hopefully so).
(BTW, if you're not using a conventional CA, you'd best off being your own CA, and signing your certs with a CA certificate you've generated rather than simply self-signing the cert. It's a little more trouble in the short term, but it means that each time you subsequently need to generate a new cert, you don't need to put up with warnings everywhere because it'll be validated by your own CA cert. The downside of this is having to install the CA cert everywhere. That's what I do for my private stuff. There are tonnes of tutorials online on how to do it.)
It's not the same in e.g. Russia (and I'm sure it's not just Russia). In Russia, the Web is now officially being censored by the state. They have a national register of prohibited resources -- basically, a huge list of URLs. Every ISP must block all access to those URLs, or else.
So if a page (perhaps, a comment page?) on your site enters the register, and it is served over unencrypted HTTP, ISPs can use DPI to block the access to just that specific page -- which sucks, but at least your site is still accessible. If, however, you use HTTPS -- then ISPs have no other choice but to block all traffic to your site entirely. Given that choice, many webmasters (myself included) will have to choose plain HTTP.
> then ISPs have no other choice but to block all traffic
> to your site entirely. Given that choice, many
> webmasters (myself included) will have to choose plain
> HTTP
(only half-joking...)
So, apparently does not matter how many web-services would be secured by HTTPS, there's no problem to spy, and there's always the way to make owners (even if it's Google) let governments use their data - does not matter whether it's encrypted or not. Moreover, in Russia this list is available for everyone, but PRISM has been revealed to public only by Snowden.
This seems like a somewhat rushed idea with good intentions but without sufficient community discussion.. rather than put all our eggs in one basket with LetsEncrypt et al, which are noble efforts to fix a broken system, are there things we can do right now in terms of favoring self-authentication of self-signed certs? This whole thing feels a bit like a witchhunt to punish non-HTTP sites.
That's a good question, but I've yet to see any justification for thinking the answer is "yes".
If an attacker controls your network connection and/or DNS, what possible information could you obtain to prove the authenticity of a website, without reference to an external source of authority?
> For the first of these steps, the community will need to agree on a date, and a definition for what features are considered “new”. For example, one definition of “new” could be “features that cannot be polyfilled”.
I hope that includes WebRTC, since WebRTC can be used to figure out your local IP address, which (when combined with your public IP address) is essentially a unique identifier[0]. WebRTC is a technology that enables some great things (like Firefox Hello!), but it's a MASSIVE privacy hole[1], and one that I can't imagine justifying for non-secure endpoints.
EDIT: Added link to proof-of-concept attack
[0] https://www.browserleaks.com/webrtc
[1] https://github.com/diafygi/webrtc-ips/blob/master/index.html
I do find it interesting that someone starting out as a significant effort after 2010 would bother having a partially https site, with back and forth jumps for login. It seems to me like it's actually more work than just having it all https and flat.
In addition to making the web more centralized, forcing everyone into HTTPS actually makes it much easier to effect broad scale traffic analysis. On top of that many info-sec experts suspect that the actual cipher in play here may eventually be proven to have significant weaknesses at some future date. AND HTTPS is more expensive to support in terms of bandwidth, CPU, and increased latency. It could result it more coal being burned each year to push all of those extra bytes around.
There is also censorship risk in named-data and content-centric networking, which offer multicast and caching benefits, but rely on uniquely identified content.
I'm saddened that you are so economically prejudiced against potential content creators.
when I was experimenting with computers I had a WAMP executable on my LAN.
less parties involved the better.
1. The technical solution is trivial. You always have encryption, but http=self-signed cert, and no authentication, and no lock icon. https=CA cert, encryption, authentication, and lock icon.
2. There are strong government and corporate interests in being able to filter the open web. This closes the open web.
3. For the first time in my life, I have a comment on Hacker News or Reddit at -4. I've posted much more controversial things before (I do care about anonymity; I do use one-off cypherpunks accounts, so my post history won't indicate things). Good debate was virtually always well-received, up-voted, and not censored. The only exception was here, and one place where there was a strong, clear, well-financed astroturf campaign. That's one datapoint, but overall, the debate on the topic smells of financed astroturf rather than genuine grassroots.
Mozilla is one of the most consumer-friendly companies in the world, and all I can see is you trying to undermine their efforts. Are there issues with the current state of affairs? Sure. Are they at fault?
You've been downvoted because your comment reeks of gratuitous negativity, not because a debate is not welcome.
Step 2: Advertise to the community you'll be deprecating unencrypted on port 80 after 2 years time. Ideally, make patches to nginx and apache such that it's a small config change.
Step 3: Change behavior such that:
1. Port 80+old http+no encryption: Show a small warning
2. Port 80+encryption+self-signed cert: No warning. Also, unlocked padlock. "HTTP" in URL. Behavior as for current unencrypted web sites.
3. Port 443+encryption+self-signed cert: BIG SCARY WARNING.
4. Port 443+encryption+cert without identity: No padlock. HTTPS in the URL, but grey, and unlocked padlock.
5. Port 443+encryption+cert with identity: Padlock. Green. Name of organization. Indicated as trusted.
One of the problems with a push like this is that, aside from preventing open web, it also undermines the meaning of a cert. With initiatives like https://letsencrypt.org/, I a cert means I actually don't know who I'm talking to (at least in a legal sense -- I can identify the entity, and take them to court if they rob me).
To answer your question: I'm actually not too unhappy with the current state of affairs. I'd be more happy with the state of affairs I proposed above. I'm very unhappy with the state of affairs Mozilla proposes. I value an open web more than I do an arguably more secure one.
This stuff ain't rocket science. Mozilla has smart people. If it's being done a dumb way, there's a reason for it.
I'm sure the Firefox team (and Chrome, which is pushing in the same direction) will be keeping a close eye on the progress of Let's Encrypt, and using it to set the timeframe for their proposed changes.
(Not to mention that Mozilla is a major sponsor of Let's Encrypt, so it's reasonable to expect a high degree of coordination.)
Presumably it will all be synced with their plans to launch a free CA[1] in the near future.
> limited to servers you can actually install their program on
They did a bit of Q&A on HN or Reddit a while back, and it seems like you can use them in various capacities, but you'll certainly be able to get your certs signed without using their suite (and use them with the software of your choosing).
> Also, I assume they'll get the root CA included by all major vendors/browsers?
IIRC they're having another CA cross-sign.
The CA will be cross-signed by IdenTrust, which is accepted by mainstream browsers, so those browsers will also accept the certs we issue.
Or do you mean, you can have multiple servers and only need to run the client on one of them?
It's also right that you can have multiple servers and only run the client on one of them, if you're willing to copy key material from one server to another.
ISPs and companies all over the world cache static HTTP content (i.e. HTTP resources with proper caching headers). Doesn't endpoint-to-endpoint encryption basically kill that?
What I'd love is to have HTTPS for encrypted traffic, and signed HTTP for traffic that doesn't need encryption. So you would use the certificate to authenticate the payload, but a cache would still be able to deliver the content (because a replay would be valid).
> Not all data needs to be secure. Not all websites need to be secure. Requiring HTTPS means additional compute and additional servers securing something may not need to be secured and provides no benefit – only cost. Free and open information should be (optionally) free of encryption as well.
Indeed, there still a portion of the internet that could benefit from being SSL free.
Some things about this decisions doesn't seem thought out. -who regulates the companies selling certificates? ($5 for a cert seems shady), are cert companies fronts for others entities? -does this really prevent malware? -will self signed certificates get a bit more respect? -how does this stop Lenovo from adding preinstalled malware that circumvents security certificates?
"It should be noted that this plan still allows for usage of the “http” URI scheme in legacy content."
SSL means something very specific; something that people should no longer be deploying. The article notably uses the term 'Non-secure HTTP' which at this point in time means HTTPS leveraging TLS (probably at least 1.2) but leaves some room for future interpretation as newer versions or entirely different standards arise.
No one is advocating for 'SSL' here, and continuing to use the term 'SSL' or 'SSL/TLS' when we really mean 'TLS' further confuses the situation.
I won't bore you with the details, they're well explained at http://disablessl3.com/ among other places. All major browsers have ended support for SSL, and more secure alternatives have been available for years.
It's not a high risk; attacks require scenarios that may not be common, but it remains true that there's no reason to deploy SSL today.
BEAST can be mitigated through ciphersuite selections and other measures. This makes it somewhat different than POODLE which is a protocol design flaw for which no reliable mitigation exists.
Suggesting folks not deploy SSLv3 is hardly a controversial statement. It's not just a difference in version number, it's a difference in protocol specification and name. When we say 'Use SSL' a well intentioned reader may follow that guidance and implement SSLv3, or worse disable support for TLS. Words mean things.
So instead of all this bullshit from Chrome, Firefox, et al., can I please just send some huge check to GoDaddy or Verisign or whomever and continue to use the internet as an open platform and not some managed service where we try to hold everyone's hand because we've conditioned them to spew their personal information all over the web all day?
Is the entire local subnet going to be a secure origin like localhost? Because that sounds problematic... What I want is a way to single-click pin a self-signed certificate to "turn it green".
They should, via mDNS AKA Zeroconf AKA Bonjour AKA Avahi. Often, printer-name.local port 80 or port 631 will lead to the printer's status page.
When I look at it from a different lens, I believe the internet should be as private as possible. Encryption is a solution. I think we should all make a push to make things more secure. Hopefully, we can destroy the cottage industry around SSL certs and it will be bundled in as an expected value add with either hosting or DNS purchase. I think that $1 a month is enough rent for a cert, I saw an SSL cert offered for $600 bucks which is quite problematic if it represented the threshold someone would have to cross to get a cert.
Hopefully, mozilla will work to sort out the CA problem, which is the real thing holding back HTTPS adoption.
I agree with another comment that a red broken lock for HTTP connections would be a better approach.
The problem is that browsers have gone and made self-signed certs suspect, and yet not created, for example, a well-established foundation for signing such certs.
coming soon: https://letsencrypt.org/
I'm sure there are others...
In the best case, this will make website owners value HTTPS as a marketing decision (rather than a boring non-mandatory privacy decision, because let's be honest, what business really cares about its users' privacy as much as it cares about marketing goals?). Much like how Apple helped making Flash irrelevant (at the cost of impacting their users' experience just like Mozilla does now).
If we must have central trust sources, then have central hash servers so when I visit a new self-signer I can externally verify the hash.
While SSL with self-signed certs don't make MITM attacks much harder, they do prevent passive evesdropping. Yet the firefox UI seems to imply the contrary, by making it harder to use https-sites with self signed certs than unencrypted sites.
what if im inside the network i tell your monitoring that everythings ok while i break stuff?
if you compromise one client you have access to the data this client sends only
in particular, very few internal networks enforce L2 security (ie its possible to sniff all data on the same VLAN as you are).
"Please consider the impacts of banning HTTP"
I'm not sure if considering localhost to be secure/"encrypted" (access to all features) would be a good or bad idea...
Browser vendors have indirectly created the money sucking machine that is the certification industry by requiring potential root CAs to have been audited to a very thorough standard (e.g. WebTrust).[0] Most of these audits implicitly require dedicated premises, extreme physical security measures, dedicated hardware, multiple dedicated uplinks, 24x7 personnel, and more. Even browsers that don't use their own cert store prop up this system by using the OS store which does require said audits. (And if anyone doubts how instrumental the browsers are to the continuance of this system, imagine how relatively niche the X509 industry would become if they moved to using something else.) As anyone who has tried to grok the documents at [0] will attest, it's a damn scary thing. Honestly you may as well try to start a bank. Or a country.
This level of difficulty creates a monopoly (or oligopoly, to be more precise.) Few people have the will/finance to do it so few do, and those who do get to take the piss with pricing. As I previously wrote[1], this means FOUR companies control the CAs that issue 91% of ALL the internet's TLS certificates.
LetsEncrypt seems like a good thing, and it might be, but it also might not be. It is, underneath all the PR, pretty much just another root CA who holds itself to the same auditing standards. It is no-doubt a very expensive undertaking and as such we may reasonably assume that there will be few, if any, additional zero-cost, fully-supported CAs in the future: and herein lies one problem. Unless you have specific requirements that LetsEncrypt just doesn't support, you have no reason not to use them. So a future CA landscape might be ONE company controlling 99% of the internet's secrets. Oh dear.
What's more, we should not underestimate the importance of cheap shared hosting. The internet is a medium for information and nothing more, and everybody has something that they might wish to broadcast. Currently, deprecating vanilla HTTP is akin to deprecating the ideas of millions of non-experts who rely on shared hosting to participate. We're telling them to join us in the land of VPSs and terminal emulators/Plesk (shudder), or to use one of the many PaaS services we've created over their own homemade solution. This is fundamentally anti-technology, which is supposed to harness innovation and make lives easier. This point is especially pertinent when you consider that the vast majority of these sites probably don't need encryption at all, so it's not even like you can mitigate the pain with direct benefits - because there are none.
Finally, TLS is a pain in the arse to administer. Really - it's not fun. I'm no stranger to it, and even I get a bit of a sinking feeling when it has to be done. To this day I'm bound to using Chrome, because no matter what I do I cannot get Firefox to parse (never mind accept) my NAS's self-signed cert. Requiring TLS across the board is tantamount to requiring many millions of hours of pain across the world.
To hold up some moral torch that does not have universal applicability and actively makes life difficult, and then declare it as canonical truth that all must adhere to is arrogance of the highest order. A great deal of chat in the tech community is dedicated to lambasting short-sighted and ill-conceived laws (think surveillance, copyright, patents, etc.) and yet here we are, making them. We have to do better.
[0]: http://www.webtrust.org/homepage-documents/item27839.aspx
[1]: http://lorddoig.svbtle.com/heartbleed-should-bleed-x509-to-death