4 ms·

Because the main thrust of HTTPS at this point is regaining some privacy from snooping governmental organizations more than it is building a trust chain.

dogma1138 11y ago
So having a chaotic system in which SSL certificates are easy to near trivial to get and hence spoof makes it harder for organizations to spy on you?
- Karunamon 11y ago
  In a manner of speaking. Even a self signed certificate prevents you from passive eavesdropping and traffic injection (a thing we know the US government is doing right now) if not an an active man in the middle (something which may or may not be happening to you on the plain HTTP connections you use every day)
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Passive eavesdropping yes, injection nope since it's not passive to begin with and unless you can explicitly verify it it's pretty useless. SSL works because we assume that people can't issue certificates for websites that they do not control which isn't the case.
    - pdkl95 11y ago
      MitM on a self-signed certificates costs more than QUANTUM-style packet races. Please, stop trying to keep the internet in plaintext.
      - dogma1138 11y ago
        I'm not trying to keep the internet in plain text, I'm trying to keep the internet a place where i can trust the certificates and not having to worry about a CA in china issuing certificates for the sites i visit because they can be CBA to check. An attack against a self signed cert may cost more then what ever but that wasn't what we were talking about initially either. If you can MITM which they can and can get cheap valid certificates it's game over. And while the NSA might be able to get certificates no matter the case, people have managed to buy certificates for domains they do not own multiple times now. Which puts the ability to MITM real world SSL sessions in the hands of individuals.
        pdkl95 11y ago
        > I'm trying to keep the internet a place where i can trust the certificates That ship sailed a long time ago. While hierarchical PKI has always been a flawed concept (I find it unlikely that you actually trust all of the organizations that firefox/etc ship as trusted roots). Even if you did, as you aid, these "authorities" have signed improper certs. Trying to patch holes in this failed system (such as revoking those improper certs) is yet another foolish attempt to enumerate badness[1]. If you want authentication, you need do your own chain-of-trust instead of assuming ~100 cert authorities will do that for you. > Which puts the ability to MITM real world SSL sessions in the hands of individuals. So we should keep the world in plaintext (by not allowing self signed certs)? Quite a few people besides the NSA already[2] MITM connections. My point is that we absolutely need to raise those costs. Even with the NSA, just because they have the capability to do something doesn't mean you should give up. Make the do the extra work of a MitM attck (even if probably a small amount of extra work in the case of the NSA). Add another categorization if you want. Nobody said you have to treat self-signed certs as secure, just that they need to be used. Privacy from eavesdroppers and authentication are separate goals. [1] http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/ http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d... [2] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html#bernstein https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...
        dogma1138 11y ago
        I think we are mostly in agreement, but the problem is that if the attacker can perform a MITM attack then a self signed certificate unless it's explicitly verified is worth less. I've said that we need to add additional levels of trust to the current PKI/SSL cert system preferably adding DNS records with the hash of the certificates and enforcing DNSSec globally this isn't the best solution but it's just enough of an easy hack that it will work for a good while. What i do not want to see is people thinking that if we just spam SSL certs and stick them on everything it will some how help us, this is the classical definition of security theater. When cost reduction isn't sufficient to thwart any effective surveillance, and worse using self signed certs trains people to just click accept, and free SSL certificates make it easier to gain valid certificates in a fraudulent manner things will only become worse not better. While it's true that authentication and encryption are separate domains with how TLS/SSL is implemented currently they are tied by the hip, if you can't trust the authentication part of SSL the encryption part becomes meaningless to all but the most primitive types of passive sniffing. If you want to separate them then lets kill TLS all together since PKI for the most part have failed, we can use other pure key exchange mechanism like well implemented DH without all the certificate nonsense.

dogma1138 11y ago

So having a chaotic system in which SSL certificates are easy to near trivial to get and hence spoof makes it harder for organizations to spy on you?

Karunamon 11y ago
In a manner of speaking. Even a self signed certificate prevents you from passive eavesdropping and traffic injection (a thing we know the US government is doing right now) if not an an active man in the middle (something which may or may not be happening to you on the plain HTTP connections you use every day)
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Passive eavesdropping yes, injection nope since it's not passive to begin with and unless you can explicitly verify it it's pretty useless. SSL works because we assume that people can't issue certificates for websites that they do not control which isn't the case.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    MitM on a self-signed certificates costs more than QUANTUM-style packet races. Please, stop trying to keep the internet in plaintext.
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      I'm not trying to keep the internet in plain text, I'm trying to keep the internet a place where i can trust the certificates and not having to worry about a CA in china issuing certificates for the sites i visit because they can be CBA to check. An attack against a self signed cert may cost more then what ever but that wasn't what we were talking about initially either. If you can MITM which they can and can get cheap valid certificates it's game over. And while the NSA might be able to get certificates no matter the case, people have managed to buy certificates for domains they do not own multiple times now. Which puts the ability to MITM real world SSL sessions in the hands of individuals.
      - pdkl95 11y ago
        > I'm trying to keep the internet a place where i can trust the certificates That ship sailed a long time ago. While hierarchical PKI has always been a flawed concept (I find it unlikely that you actually trust all of the organizations that firefox/etc ship as trusted roots). Even if you did, as you aid, these "authorities" have signed improper certs. Trying to patch holes in this failed system (such as revoking those improper certs) is yet another foolish attempt to enumerate badness[1]. If you want authentication, you need do your own chain-of-trust instead of assuming ~100 cert authorities will do that for you. > Which puts the ability to MITM real world SSL sessions in the hands of individuals. So we should keep the world in plaintext (by not allowing self signed certs)? Quite a few people besides the NSA already[2] MITM connections. My point is that we absolutely need to raise those costs. Even with the NSA, just because they have the capability to do something doesn't mean you should give up. Make the do the extra work of a MitM attck (even if probably a small amount of extra work in the case of the NSA). Add another categorization if you want. Nobody said you have to treat self-signed certs as secure, just that they need to be used. Privacy from eavesdroppers and authentication are separate goals. [1] http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/ http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d... [2] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html#bernstein https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...
        dogma1138 11y ago
        I think we are mostly in agreement, but the problem is that if the attacker can perform a MITM attack then a self signed certificate unless it's explicitly verified is worth less. I've said that we need to add additional levels of trust to the current PKI/SSL cert system preferably adding DNS records with the hash of the certificates and enforcing DNSSec globally this isn't the best solution but it's just enough of an easy hack that it will work for a good while. What i do not want to see is people thinking that if we just spam SSL certs and stick them on everything it will some how help us, this is the classical definition of security theater. When cost reduction isn't sufficient to thwart any effective surveillance, and worse using self signed certs trains people to just click accept, and free SSL certificates make it easier to gain valid certificates in a fraudulent manner things will only become worse not better. While it's true that authentication and encryption are separate domains with how TLS/SSL is implemented currently they are tied by the hip, if you can't trust the authentication part of SSL the encryption part becomes meaningless to all but the most primitive types of passive sniffing. If you want to separate them then lets kill TLS all together since PKI for the most part have failed, we can use other pure key exchange mechanism like well implemented DH without all the certificate nonsense.