5 ms·

That doesn't prevent domain enumeration for your application though. Once you publish an application, anyone using it can find the address its hosted behind

• icebraining 10y ago
  > publish Sandstorm is a platform for personal computing; each person runs their own applications, much like in a PC. Also, applications don't get hostnames; each document (or equivalent) in the application gets its own hostname.
  • aroch 10y ago
    At which point we're back to my original point of why does the information disclosure matter?
    • kentonv 10y ago
      Defense-in-depth against CSRF attacks, which are still way too common. Sandstorm can't security-review the apps for you but it can mitigate most vulnerabilities.
  • kentonv 10y ago
    It's even finer-grained than that. Each session gets a hostname -- if you open the same document twice, it's at a different hostname each time. This also implies that different users get different hostnames, so you can't discover the host another user sees even if you have access to the same document.
    • collinmanderson 10y ago
      Isn't that insecure because hostnames are sent in the clear? (both in TLS handshake and DNS lookup?)
      • icebraining 10y ago
        The hostnames aren't authentication, just another layer of defense, mostly against JavaScript attacks (e.g. from hacked applications): https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/wildcard/#why-a-new-hostname-for-every-session-rather-than-for-every-document https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/wildcard/#...
        • kentonv 10y ago
          Right, this is about mitigating the damage when apps have a bug -- risk management. Instead of being exploitable from anywhere on the internet, the bug becomes exploitable only by attackers who have a passive network MITM, which, while possible, is a very high barrier.
  • tracker1 10y ago
    For such applications, there are plenty of relatively inexpensive paid options for wildcard certs. I don't think this is something Let's Encrypt should solve. I'd rather see them invest more time into supporting dynamic dns provider domains better, which imho is a much larger issue for small/hobby/free projects.
    • patates 10y ago
      I'm ready to pay a reasonable amount for a wildcard cert to use with some hobby projects. Is there a trustworthy cheap wildcard cert provider which is not Comodo?
      • gnyman 10y ago
        Have you checked StartSSL? They've worked fine for me.
    • icebraining 10y ago
      What's the problem with dynamic dns provider domains?
      • tracker1 10y ago
        I mean domains on no-ip, freedns, dyndns and the like.. that are subdomains are more likely to hit the default limits with Let's Encrypt... I'd like to see some auto-whitelisting for some of the more popular ones.
  • x1798DE 10y ago
    I thought sandstorm was a self-hosted thing. Why do the certs need to be signed by a public CA at all? A self-signed certificate is fine (and in some ways better than a public CA) when you can verify the source yourself because you generated it.
    • kentonv 10y ago
      Sure, you can use a self-signed cert, if you don't mind going through the process of installing the cert into every browser that you'll use to access the server. But Sandstorm is designed for sharing and collaboration. For example, you might write a document in Etherpad which you want other people to comment on. It may be tough to get the right certificate into all your friends' and family's browsers. (Note that Sandstorm actually provides free wildcard certificates if you are OK with using a subdomain of sandcats.io.)