10 ms·

The network is hostile

276 points by pmh 11y ago

panarky 11y ago
All networks are hostile, not just the internet or "external" network. Google's BeyondCorp [1] initiative recognizes this and treats the internal network as untrusted. Instead of trusting a privileged network or VPN, securely identify devices and users assuming untrusted networks. [1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/43231.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... [PDF]
- Gibbon1 11y ago
  I keep coming back to the idea that one should assume the computer is untrusted. Which leads to two unpopular suggestions, keyboards that encrypt typed characters to prevent spoofing by entities without physical access. Displays with a separate side channel overlay system to bypass the core CPU for certain security operations like entering pins.
  - alan_cx 11y ago
    Absolutely. I take the view that if one needs very high security, you steer well clear of anything electronic and go back to the old ways. The idea of secure electronic communications is well and truly dead. If one's life depends on it, why even begin to trust IT? Over the last few years just about every aspect of IT has been exposed as a risk. I'm sorry, but its game over. Personally, I'd use the hell out of IT creating a nice normal profile for the spies, then go completely off piste for anything I absolutely needed to be secure. What I'd like to know is why people though it was ever fully secure in the first place. It really never was.
  - spin 11y ago
    I've often thought about this, but came to the opposite conclusion: a laptop is the smallest thing you can trust. The keyboard sends data to the CPU. The CPU sends data to the screen. The CPU does encryption and talks to the network. I feel like there's no point in trying to chop it down any smaller than that. All you're doing is shifting trust from "system A" to "system B", without really changing anything.
    - Gibbon1 11y ago
      The keyboard has a CPU that can do encryption and signing, in addition to decoding for key presses. Ditto for touch screens. The reason for putting the encryption in system B AKA the keypad and display controllers is, if you want end to end encryption, the keypad decoder and the display controller are the closest to the end points you can get. And they are single purpose devices that don't run arbitrary code nor accept arbitrary input. Compare that with laptop CPU's and complex operating systems with their huge attack surfaces. Running software written by completely untrustworthy corporations and individuals.
      - leni536 11y ago
        > And they are single purpose devices that don't run arbitrary code nor accept arbitrary input. But be careful designing firmware upgrades though. Also I really don't see what kind of attack it prevents when you have a trusted keyboard and display but otherwise compromised OS.
sekasi 11y ago
One glaringly obvious problem with this concept is that this very article requires some basic insight in security engineering, and even for people that are interested, it can be hard to digest. How do we (blanket statement) try to address the overall level of understanding that people have around this topic and make them understand that the problem is real, serious and needs significant thought? I've thought about this a fair bit. Think about your average non-super-technical co-worker. How do we get them to see the problem in a clear way, and how do we rally people around the problem? I don't know how to, but I try and fail and try again. It's a tough gig. I do have an enormous man crush on Matthew Green though.
Zigurd 11y ago
This should be completely clear to the people running mass-market internet communication and storage services. And yet none of them encrypt payloads. Ephemeral keys and forward secrecy are a solved problem for real time and near-real-time communication. Why don't we have a Hangouts or Skype or Yahoo Messenger that are secure against the state-actor threat? At some point we have to assume the companies providing these services have been persuaded to sell us all out.
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  >> At some point we have to assume the companies providing these services have been persuaded to sell us all out. Therein lies the problem. Money controls everything. It's scary sometimes how fast people forget the moral obligation to their clients and sell them out as soon as someone drops a few million dollars in their laps.
  - nine_k 11y ago
    If these were paying customers, selling out would look much less attractive. But we enjoy and expect certain services for free. In this case, as we all know, we are necessarily the product being sold.
    - Zigurd 11y ago
      I don't want to detract from the valid point that if you are not paying for a service, you are the product, not the customer.But I do pay for online services from Google and Amazon and others, and would happily pay for secure communication. None of them encrypt real time communication, and none encrypt my data at rest with my key. Any portal that has directories or a social graph is very well placed to implement a web-of-trust that would not rely on CAs. But there's nothing like that out there.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    It's not just about money. After 9/11, AT&T etc were arguably motivated to cooperate with the NSA out of fear and patriotism. From Bamford, I get that the NSA and its precursors have done the same since the 1800s.
x5n1 11y ago
> hostile to the core values of Western democracies. It seems the governments have a very different idea of what those values are than the people. Until those ideas are aligned, governments are out to get the people. There is no point in any of this. Because ultimately, no matter what technical solutions you can come up with, force and law always trump those. Perhaps at some point you could make the argument that we don't explicitly know what the government does and that's why it's doing it and getting away with it. That's no longer the case. We know exactly what the government does, we don't think that it's right, and yet we can do nothing to stop it. So either we need to overhaul government or accept the status quo and quit bitching about it or trying to create technical solutions to fix social problems. If the government can mandate networks spy on computers, it can mandate manufacturers spy on users. As they are already doing this, fixing the network solves nothing. As for foreign adversaries spying on users, well if you are not in the US avoiding that is impossible as most of your computing experience is under regulatory capture by the US government.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  On the contrary, technical solutions trump force and law. Force and law only defeat political and military solutions. In the US, and perhaps other Western democracies, governments are the people and people are the government, not separate from each other. If a government is doing something, it's because the people value it, at least enough to not change it. Edit: Downmods? Really? Refute my claims rather than attempt to bury them.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikestew 11y ago
    Your comment isn't inflammatory, nor do you seem to just be talking out your ass, so have an imaginary Internet point. I've up voted worse. However... > If a government is doing something, it's because the people value it, at least enough to not change it. I'm tempted to tell you that's bullshit, and others might feel strongly enough about it that they're clicking the down arrow. The NSA, for example, doesn't care which way I voted. So we have to sit around "knowing" they do stuff, but with no evidence. Finally, evidence comes out ala Snowden. Wait ten more years while we finally get around to passing laws to reign in the offending agencies/people. Add it all up and thirty years have gone by. Meanwhile, using the NSA example, they've found other ways to sneak around or outright flaunt laws, lather, rinse, repeat. It might look like no one cares, (rather than actually value it, as you say) but even if they do care the change doesn't come overnight.
windexh8er 11y ago
Such a simple thought: "the network is hostile". Yet when you consider the implications of that statement across the board you see stop-gap after stop-gap to fill the void. And as Green points out - the state of the state is bleak when it comes to the surveillance state. His closing point is very open ended. But, thinking about this as to how "network security" sells products in today's landscape if Green's suggestion that these new systems would fulfill the goal of not having to worry about the network because the systems are designed with an inherent zero-trust model, how does the landscape of "network security" change? If the data path is immune from protections (firewall, IPS, URL, etc.) then does the endpoint radically change? Do we all end up with a containerized laptop with a front-end NGFW/UTM/security blob with which is locally routed within to my guest operation system of choice? And are the general functions broken out into secure segments so that I can work and play while minimizing risk of a malicious actor exfiltrating corporate data while I browse the questionable reaches of the Internet? Thought provoking, although - as Green states, I don't see many moving the ball quickly (yet?).
- bostik 11y ago
  One piece of what you wrote highlights a big part of the problem. My apologies for lifting just four words out of your longer sentence, but the point is, I believe, critical: > "network security" sells products Because people desire fire-and-forget solutions. We in the field know that security is not a product, or even (pun intended) a product of products. It's an ongoing process, where a term like "arms race" fails to convey the full meaning or scope. And above all, it's hard. If you want network and communications security at scale, you will need to solve how to deploy a fairly large set of keys. Secure key distribution depends on auditable trust. Bootstrapping trust relationships is HARD. Let's take an easy example. The entire CA industry is built around the premise of seeking rent on trust. And then, to work around the problems that arose from having a CA system in place, we came up with solutions like certificate pinning. Which really boils down to imposing distrust upon the very system that exists because they sell trust. While people want secure solutions, they really want to buy a product. Precisely they want something that "just works", and in effect make the complexities of security someone else's problem.
krallja 11y ago
This blog post isn't served over HTTPS, either: Secure Connection Failed The connection to blog.cryptographyengineering.com was interrupted while the page was loading. The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
wavefunction 11y ago
2 tru, all networks are hostile until you takeover then they're frienly, to a pt. by that I mean witness the fitness of network evolution in a hostile environment
nly 11y ago
> Anyone who has taken a network security class knows that the first rule of Internet security is that there is no Internet security. True, but not a useful observation because we're stuck with the core of what we have. I think it's more worrying atm that nobody can be bothered to even deploy what we do have: TLS, OCSP stapling, HSTS, HPKP, DNSSEC. This stuff isn't difficult to deploy at the individual level. Especially for this crowd. You can make a difference. > We don't encrypt nearly enough Ironic from a security conscious cryptographer and blogger who isn't protecting his readers or himself with TLS. Ok, Matt isn't using WordPress, but many do, and I wonder how many of them ever log in to moderate, or edit a post, over networks they don't entirely trust? WordPress has a built-in file editor and stores its config file in the docroot by default for crying out loud... if someone gets your admin session cookie you're toast. They're one patch away from your password, and your commentators passwords and email addresses, if they trust you with such, and can plant as much malware on your site as they please. > It's the metadata, stupid Yet Matt Green and Troy Hunt both use Blogger, effectively allowing their readers interests and comments to be further pervasively catalogued by Google. I'm not saying these minor hypocrisies are even 1 millionth as grievous as failing to prevent the NSA from wiretapping the UN, or even terribly important at all, but damnit... there are things we can all do instead of just pining for a privacy utopia that isn't going to come. If you want privacy to be the norm then protect everything in your power, and aggressively, NOW, everyway you know how.
- Decade 11y ago
  I think it's more worrying atm that nobody can be bothered to even deploy what we do have: TLS, OCSP stapling, HSTS, HPKP, DNSSEC. This stuff isn't difficult to deploy at the individual level. That’s because this stuff is difficult. TLS: The Let’s Encrypt[1] ceremonies seem to be going apace, perhaps to be finally launched a month from now, but in the meanwhile you get only 1 free certificate per year that actually works with most clients: The StartSSL product.[2] Which means you can encrypt only 1 hostname. Have multiple domains? Too bad, you pay money. Have multiple hosts? Same thing. One of the things that made tech so accessible is that you didn’t need to pay to start playing, and TLS breaks that. Also, want to support Android Gingerbread clients? Then you need an IP address per TLS certificate. No SNI for you. You do know we’re in an IPv4 address space crunch, right? OCSP, HSTS, HPKP: Need a functioning TLS, first. DNSSEC: Have you actually tried to implement DNSSEC? My personal domain is validated using DNSSEC. A whole lot of pain for dubious gain. And these security technologies are not set and forget. Microsoft seems fond of getting TLS maintenance wrong, causing failures in cloud services[3] or the basic security model[4]. DNSSEC also is supposed to do regular key rotations. Which individual has time for all of that? That’s if you even have access to enable security. A whole lot of content is now published in centralized silos: Twitter, Facebook, Google, Wordpress. No federation, no outside control: no need for individuals and organizations to care about privacy. You are totally free to set up or join a diaspora* pod,[5] but you will find yourself forever alone. I think technology can be developed to make privacy easier, and I think insecure defaults and fallbacks should be eliminated, but I am convinced that it will not be easy. [1]https://letsencrypt.org https://letsencrypt.org [2]https://www.startssl.com https://www.startssl.com [3]http://blogs.msmvps.com/peterritchie/2013/03/01/azure-table-storage-and-the-great-certificate-expiry-of-2013/ http://blogs.msmvps.com/peterritchie/2013/03/01/azure-table-... [4]http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/microsoft-takes-4-years-to-recover-privileged-tls-certificate-addresses/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/microsoft-takes-4-ye... [5]https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org
exabrial 11y ago
Yet half of everyone on HN actually wants IPv6 so we can have less privacy...
- blfr 11y ago
  IPv6 gives you no less privacy. An IPv6 /64 identifies you just as much as a regular /32 IPv4.
  - sheensleeves 11y ago
    "In IPv6 when using address auto-configuration, the Interface Identifier (MAC address) of an interface port is used to make its public IP address unique, exposing the type of hardware used and providing a unique handle for a user's online activity." - wikipedia on ipv6. ipv4 is more fungible than your MAC address.
    - kalleboo 11y ago
      The current versions of Windows, Mac OS X, iOS and Android all use RFC 4941 Privacy Extensions by default to randomize the address used
    - brohee 11y ago
      So that's where this retardation is coming from... Of all the people that edited this page in the last ten year, no one checked if this was ever deployed...
      - sheensleeves 11y ago
        I was basing this on an ipv6 book I read a while ago. Just used wikipedia as the reference.
  - exabrial 11y ago
    Disagree, respectfully. With IPV4, it's extremely common, especially on consumer home routers to be behind a NAT. IPv6 destroys your privacy because it's now very easy for Google, click networks, NSA? to track a device behind a firewall. There's a reason Google is pushing IPv6 so hard.
rmc 11y ago
> hostile to the core values of Western democracies. The US Gov, and the NSA, act hostile to the core values of Western democracies.
zeveb 11y ago
The thing is, as Prof. Green points out, we've all always known this, but we've ignored it. If the protocol one uses isn't secure when used over Tor (because some Romanian exit node is able to snarf your password), then it's not secure enough to use across the Internet in general. XPKI simply isn't enough: it's a worst-of-all-worlds solution in which there's not just one global trust root, there are hundreds. Using the blockchain as a globally-verifiable data store is interesting, but comes with an incredible cost (and may still be vulnerable to manipulation). Better, I think, would be to embrace the reality that human beings are citizens of states, and to leverage that: if the governments of the United States, Iran, Germany, Russia, Australia, Uzbekistan, Chad, Chile and Peru all agree to a statement, then it's very probably true. We could use that kind of unanimous (or supermajority) agreement as a trust root for identity, since it's extraordinarily unlikely that ever state in the world would agree to the same lie. Once we have a global trust root, it's easy enough to carve off namespaces within it. States could have authorised textual namespaces (e.g. '(global-root us)' for the United States: in a very real sense, '(global-root us foo)' is whatever the US government wants it to be). With this scheme, anyone would still be free to have his own, additional, alternate roots; an assertion of '(global-root uk british-airways)' would not apply to '(billy-joe random-orgs ba)' unless the objects thus named shared the same key.

276 points by pmh 11y ago

All networks are hostile, not just the internet or "external" network. Google's BeyondCorp [1] initiative recognizes this and treats the internal network as untrusted. Instead of trusting a privileged network or VPN, securely identify devices and users assuming untrusted networks. [1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/43231.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... [PDF]

Gibbon1 11y ago
I keep coming back to the idea that one should assume the computer is untrusted. Which leads to two unpopular suggestions, keyboards that encrypt typed characters to prevent spoofing by entities without physical access. Displays with a separate side channel overlay system to bypass the core CPU for certain security operations like entering pins.
- alan_cx 11y ago
  Absolutely. I take the view that if one needs very high security, you steer well clear of anything electronic and go back to the old ways. The idea of secure electronic communications is well and truly dead. If one's life depends on it, why even begin to trust IT? Over the last few years just about every aspect of IT has been exposed as a risk. I'm sorry, but its game over. Personally, I'd use the hell out of IT creating a nice normal profile for the spies, then go completely off piste for anything I absolutely needed to be secure. What I'd like to know is why people though it was ever fully secure in the first place. It really never was.
- spin 11y ago
  I've often thought about this, but came to the opposite conclusion: a laptop is the smallest thing you can trust. The keyboard sends data to the CPU. The CPU sends data to the screen. The CPU does encryption and talks to the network. I feel like there's no point in trying to chop it down any smaller than that. All you're doing is shifting trust from "system A" to "system B", without really changing anything.
  - Gibbon1 11y ago
    The keyboard has a CPU that can do encryption and signing, in addition to decoding for key presses. Ditto for touch screens. The reason for putting the encryption in system B AKA the keypad and display controllers is, if you want end to end encryption, the keypad decoder and the display controller are the closest to the end points you can get. And they are single purpose devices that don't run arbitrary code nor accept arbitrary input. Compare that with laptop CPU's and complex operating systems with their huge attack surfaces. Running software written by completely untrustworthy corporations and individuals.
    - leni536 11y ago
      > And they are single purpose devices that don't run arbitrary code nor accept arbitrary input. But be careful designing firmware upgrades though. Also I really don't see what kind of attack it prevents when you have a trusted keyboard and display but otherwise compromised OS.

sekasi 11y ago

One glaringly obvious problem with this concept is that this very article requires some basic insight in security engineering, and even for people that are interested, it can be hard to digest. How do we (blanket statement) try to address the overall level of understanding that people have around this topic and make them understand that the problem is real, serious and needs significant thought? I've thought about this a fair bit. Think about your average non-super-technical co-worker. How do we get them to see the problem in a clear way, and how do we rally people around the problem? I don't know how to, but I try and fail and try again. It's a tough gig. I do have an enormous man crush on Matthew Green though.

Zigurd 11y ago

This should be completely clear to the people running mass-market internet communication and storage services. And yet none of them encrypt payloads. Ephemeral keys and forward secrecy are a solved problem for real time and near-real-time communication. Why don't we have a Hangouts or Skype or Yahoo Messenger that are secure against the state-actor threat? At some point we have to assume the companies providing these services have been persuaded to sell us all out.

at-fates-hands 11y ago
>> At some point we have to assume the companies providing these services have been persuaded to sell us all out. Therein lies the problem. Money controls everything. It's scary sometimes how fast people forget the moral obligation to their clients and sell them out as soon as someone drops a few million dollars in their laps.
- nine_k 11y ago
  If these were paying customers, selling out would look much less attractive. But we enjoy and expect certain services for free. In this case, as we all know, we are necessarily the product being sold.
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    I don't want to detract from the valid point that if you are not paying for a service, you are the product, not the customer.But I do pay for online services from Google and Amazon and others, and would happily pay for secure communication. None of them encrypt real time communication, and none encrypt my data at rest with my key. Any portal that has directories or a social graph is very well placed to implement a web-of-trust that would not rely on CAs. But there's nothing like that out there.
- mirimir 11y ago
  It's not just about money. After 9/11, AT&T etc were arguably motivated to cooperate with the NSA out of fear and patriotism. From Bamford, I get that the NSA and its precursors have done the same since the 1800s.

x5n1 11y ago

> hostile to the core values of Western democracies. It seems the governments have a very different idea of what those values are than the people. Until those ideas are aligned, governments are out to get the people. There is no point in any of this. Because ultimately, no matter what technical solutions you can come up with, force and law always trump those. Perhaps at some point you could make the argument that we don't explicitly know what the government does and that's why it's doing it and getting away with it. That's no longer the case. We know exactly what the government does, we don't think that it's right, and yet we can do nothing to stop it. So either we need to overhaul government or accept the status quo and quit bitching about it or trying to create technical solutions to fix social problems. If the government can mandate networks spy on computers, it can mandate manufacturers spy on users. As they are already doing this, fixing the network solves nothing. As for foreign adversaries spying on users, well if you are not in the US avoiding that is impossible as most of your computing experience is under regulatory capture by the US government.

jsprogrammer 11y ago
On the contrary, technical solutions trump force and law. Force and law only defeat political and military solutions. In the US, and perhaps other Western democracies, governments are the people and people are the government, not separate from each other. If a government is doing something, it's because the people value it, at least enough to not change it. Edit: Downmods? Really? Refute my claims rather than attempt to bury them.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mikestew 11y ago
  Your comment isn't inflammatory, nor do you seem to just be talking out your ass, so have an imaginary Internet point. I've up voted worse. However... > If a government is doing something, it's because the people value it, at least enough to not change it. I'm tempted to tell you that's bullshit, and others might feel strongly enough about it that they're clicking the down arrow. The NSA, for example, doesn't care which way I voted. So we have to sit around "knowing" they do stuff, but with no evidence. Finally, evidence comes out ala Snowden. Wait ten more years while we finally get around to passing laws to reign in the offending agencies/people. Add it all up and thirty years have gone by. Meanwhile, using the NSA example, they've found other ways to sneak around or outright flaunt laws, lather, rinse, repeat. It might look like no one cares, (rather than actually value it, as you say) but even if they do care the change doesn't come overnight.

windexh8er 11y ago

Such a simple thought: "the network is hostile". Yet when you consider the implications of that statement across the board you see stop-gap after stop-gap to fill the void. And as Green points out - the state of the state is bleak when it comes to the surveillance state. His closing point is very open ended. But, thinking about this as to how "network security" sells products in today's landscape if Green's suggestion that these new systems would fulfill the goal of not having to worry about the network because the systems are designed with an inherent zero-trust model, how does the landscape of "network security" change? If the data path is immune from protections (firewall, IPS, URL, etc.) then does the endpoint radically change? Do we all end up with a containerized laptop with a front-end NGFW/UTM/security blob with which is locally routed within to my guest operation system of choice? And are the general functions broken out into secure segments so that I can work and play while minimizing risk of a malicious actor exfiltrating corporate data while I browse the questionable reaches of the Internet? Thought provoking, although - as Green states, I don't see many moving the ball quickly (yet?).

bostik 11y ago
One piece of what you wrote highlights a big part of the problem. My apologies for lifting just four words out of your longer sentence, but the point is, I believe, critical: > "network security" sells products Because people desire fire-and-forget solutions. We in the field know that security is not a product, or even (pun intended) a product of products. It's an ongoing process, where a term like "arms race" fails to convey the full meaning or scope. And above all, it's hard. If you want network and communications security at scale, you will need to solve how to deploy a fairly large set of keys. Secure key distribution depends on auditable trust. Bootstrapping trust relationships is HARD. Let's take an easy example. The entire CA industry is built around the premise of seeking rent on trust. And then, to work around the problems that arose from having a CA system in place, we came up with solutions like certificate pinning. Which really boils down to imposing distrust upon the very system that exists because they sell trust. While people want secure solutions, they really want to buy a product. Precisely they want something that "just works", and in effect make the complexities of security someone else's problem.

krallja 11y ago

This blog post isn't served over HTTPS, either: Secure Connection Failed The connection to blog.cryptographyengineering.com was interrupted while the page was loading. The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

wavefunction 11y ago

2 tru, all networks are hostile until you takeover then they're frienly, to a pt. by that I mean witness the fitness of network evolution in a hostile environment

nly 11y ago

> Anyone who has taken a network security class knows that the first rule of Internet security is that there is no Internet security. True, but not a useful observation because we're stuck with the core of what we have. I think it's more worrying atm that nobody can be bothered to even deploy what we do have: TLS, OCSP stapling, HSTS, HPKP, DNSSEC. This stuff isn't difficult to deploy at the individual level. Especially for this crowd. You can make a difference. > We don't encrypt nearly enough Ironic from a security conscious cryptographer and blogger who isn't protecting his readers or himself with TLS. Ok, Matt isn't using WordPress, but many do, and I wonder how many of them ever log in to moderate, or edit a post, over networks they don't entirely trust? WordPress has a built-in file editor and stores its config file in the docroot by default for crying out loud... if someone gets your admin session cookie you're toast. They're one patch away from your password, and your commentators passwords and email addresses, if they trust you with such, and can plant as much malware on your site as they please. > It's the metadata, stupid Yet Matt Green and Troy Hunt both use Blogger, effectively allowing their readers interests and comments to be further pervasively catalogued by Google. I'm not saying these minor hypocrisies are even 1 millionth as grievous as failing to prevent the NSA from wiretapping the UN, or even terribly important at all, but damnit... there are things we can all do instead of just pining for a privacy utopia that isn't going to come. If you want privacy to be the norm then protect everything in your power, and aggressively, NOW, everyway you know how.

Decade 11y ago
I think it's more worrying atm that nobody can be bothered to even deploy what we do have: TLS, OCSP stapling, HSTS, HPKP, DNSSEC. This stuff isn't difficult to deploy at the individual level. That’s because this stuff is difficult. TLS: The Let’s Encrypt[1] ceremonies seem to be going apace, perhaps to be finally launched a month from now, but in the meanwhile you get only 1 free certificate per year that actually works with most clients: The StartSSL product.[2] Which means you can encrypt only 1 hostname. Have multiple domains? Too bad, you pay money. Have multiple hosts? Same thing. One of the things that made tech so accessible is that you didn’t need to pay to start playing, and TLS breaks that. Also, want to support Android Gingerbread clients? Then you need an IP address per TLS certificate. No SNI for you. You do know we’re in an IPv4 address space crunch, right? OCSP, HSTS, HPKP: Need a functioning TLS, first. DNSSEC: Have you actually tried to implement DNSSEC? My personal domain is validated using DNSSEC. A whole lot of pain for dubious gain. And these security technologies are not set and forget. Microsoft seems fond of getting TLS maintenance wrong, causing failures in cloud services[3] or the basic security model[4]. DNSSEC also is supposed to do regular key rotations. Which individual has time for all of that? That’s if you even have access to enable security. A whole lot of content is now published in centralized silos: Twitter, Facebook, Google, Wordpress. No federation, no outside control: no need for individuals and organizations to care about privacy. You are totally free to set up or join a diaspora* pod,[5] but you will find yourself forever alone. I think technology can be developed to make privacy easier, and I think insecure defaults and fallbacks should be eliminated, but I am convinced that it will not be easy. [1]https://letsencrypt.org https://letsencrypt.org [2]https://www.startssl.com https://www.startssl.com [3]http://blogs.msmvps.com/peterritchie/2013/03/01/azure-table-storage-and-the-great-certificate-expiry-of-2013/ http://blogs.msmvps.com/peterritchie/2013/03/01/azure-table-... [4]http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/microsoft-takes-4-years-to-recover-privileged-tls-certificate-addresses/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/microsoft-takes-4-ye... [5]https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org

exabrial 11y ago

Yet half of everyone on HN actually wants IPv6 so we can have less privacy...

blfr 11y ago
IPv6 gives you no less privacy. An IPv6 /64 identifies you just as much as a regular /32 IPv4.
- sheensleeves 11y ago
  "In IPv6 when using address auto-configuration, the Interface Identifier (MAC address) of an interface port is used to make its public IP address unique, exposing the type of hardware used and providing a unique handle for a user's online activity." - wikipedia on ipv6. ipv4 is more fungible than your MAC address.
  - kalleboo 11y ago
    The current versions of Windows, Mac OS X, iOS and Android all use RFC 4941 Privacy Extensions by default to randomize the address used
  - brohee 11y ago
    So that's where this retardation is coming from... Of all the people that edited this page in the last ten year, no one checked if this was ever deployed...
    - sheensleeves 11y ago
      I was basing this on an ipv6 book I read a while ago. Just used wikipedia as the reference.
- exabrial 11y ago
  Disagree, respectfully. With IPV4, it's extremely common, especially on consumer home routers to be behind a NAT. IPv6 destroys your privacy because it's now very easy for Google, click networks, NSA? to track a device behind a firewall. There's a reason Google is pushing IPv6 so hard.

rmc 11y ago

> hostile to the core values of Western democracies. The US Gov, and the NSA, act hostile to the core values of Western democracies.

zeveb 11y ago

The thing is, as Prof. Green points out, we've all always known this, but we've ignored it. If the protocol one uses isn't secure when used over Tor (because some Romanian exit node is able to snarf your password), then it's not secure enough to use across the Internet in general. XPKI simply isn't enough: it's a worst-of-all-worlds solution in which there's not just one global trust root, there are hundreds. Using the blockchain as a globally-verifiable data store is interesting, but comes with an incredible cost (and may still be vulnerable to manipulation). Better, I think, would be to embrace the reality that human beings are citizens of states, and to leverage that: if the governments of the United States, Iran, Germany, Russia, Australia, Uzbekistan, Chad, Chile and Peru all agree to a statement, then it's very probably true. We could use that kind of unanimous (or supermajority) agreement as a trust root for identity, since it's extraordinarily unlikely that ever state in the world would agree to the same lie. Once we have a global trust root, it's easy enough to carve off namespaces within it. States could have authorised textual namespaces (e.g. '(global-root us)' for the United States: in a very real sense, '(global-root us foo)' is whatever the US government wants it to be). With this scheme, anyone would still be free to have his own, additional, alternate roots; an assertion of '(global-root uk british-airways)' would not apply to '(billy-joe random-orgs ba)' unless the objects thus named shared the same key.