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and worse using self signed certs trains people to just click accept This is a thing that happens right here, right now. We treat all of the following things a

and worse using self signed certs trains people to just click accept This is a thing that happens right here, right now. We treat all of the following things as equivalent big scary warnings from the browser regardless of how bad they are or what the impact on security actually is. * Expiration date d+1day (security impact: NIL) * Name doesn't match the cert * CA not trusted * Certificate is self-signed * Certificate was generated using old/broken crypto Weve've got a couple decades of retraining to do because of this boneheaded, "wolf-crying" design.

dogma1138 11y ago
* Expiration date d+1day (security impact: NIL) > not much impact unless the certificate age is tied to the time it might take some one to refactor a key * Name doesn't match the cert > Can't trust that you communicating with the correct party, worth as much as plain text to me * CA not trusted > Unless you can explicitly verity the end certificate and the chain = plain text to me * Certificate is self-signed > same as the above * Certificate was generated using old/broken crypto > depending on the exact issue government agencies will most likely be able to break the encryption, if it's more easy attacks like BEAST or CRIME so can resourceful non-governmental organizations and individuals. This isn't just crying wolf we need a new and better system, one that ensures that the key exchange is secure, and one that ensures that who ever you speaking too is the actual intended precipitant and not a system which currently if one of those fails both fail, and more often than not can easily fail on both on it's own out of the gate.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  It is exactly crying wolf because AFAIK, okay, cert expiration - you don't have to rekey when you go get a new one, you just get a new one. The benefit seems to be commercial, rather than technical. Name doesn't match: I've encountered a legitimate (as opposed to an obvious misconfiguration) error along these lines precisely zero times in well over a decade. CA untrusted: CA trust is worthless - the browser doesnt differentiate between "the person who holds the cert had control of the domain when we generated it" and "we made sure this person exists and checked their identity". (Unless you jump into the total scam that is EV certs...) Would you kindly stop banging on about "As good as plain text?". because as has been explained to you ad nauseum, in the worst case it becomes you vs one attacker who holds the key to the bogus cert, instead of you vs anyone on the local wifi network. The number of attackers is unbounded in the latter case, QED, it is strictly a better security posture. SSL as it exists today is fine for keeping a hacker out of your connection. It was not designed nor implemented for a post-Snowden world.

dogma1138 11y ago

* Expiration date d+1day (security impact: NIL) > not much impact unless the certificate age is tied to the time it might take some one to refactor a key * Name doesn't match the cert > Can't trust that you communicating with the correct party, worth as much as plain text to me * CA not trusted > Unless you can explicitly verity the end certificate and the chain = plain text to me * Certificate is self-signed > same as the above * Certificate was generated using old/broken crypto > depending on the exact issue government agencies will most likely be able to break the encryption, if it's more easy attacks like BEAST or CRIME so can resourceful non-governmental organizations and individuals. This isn't just crying wolf we need a new and better system, one that ensures that the key exchange is secure, and one that ensures that who ever you speaking too is the actual intended precipitant and not a system which currently if one of those fails both fail, and more often than not can easily fail on both on it's own out of the gate.

Karunamon 11y ago
It is exactly crying wolf because AFAIK, okay, cert expiration - you don't have to rekey when you go get a new one, you just get a new one. The benefit seems to be commercial, rather than technical. Name doesn't match: I've encountered a legitimate (as opposed to an obvious misconfiguration) error along these lines precisely zero times in well over a decade. CA untrusted: CA trust is worthless - the browser doesnt differentiate between "the person who holds the cert had control of the domain when we generated it" and "we made sure this person exists and checked their identity". (Unless you jump into the total scam that is EV certs...) Would you kindly stop banging on about "As good as plain text?". because as has been explained to you ad nauseum, in the worst case it becomes you vs one attacker who holds the key to the bogus cert, instead of you vs anyone on the local wifi network. The number of attackers is unbounded in the latter case, QED, it is strictly a better security posture. SSL as it exists today is fine for keeping a hacker out of your connection. It was not designed nor implemented for a post-Snowden world.