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there's no reason your bank is less trusted than anyone else to confirm that they're really your bank, are they? Yes, there is. The list of entities I actuall

there's no reason your bank is less trusted than anyone else to confirm that they're really your bank, are they? Yes, there is. The list of entities I actually care about authenticity for are vanishingly small, basically just financial institutions and CAs themselves (for all other communication I don't trust who I think I'm talking with any more than I would trust a hypothetical man in the middle, so authenticity doesn't give me anything there). But for that small group, I definitely want an entity other than whoever controls their IT infrastructure to be verifying they are who they say they are. Meanwhile, all of the dicking around these attempts at preventing largely-hypothetical active attacks have stalled simply solving the much-easier and arguably more-important issue of simply securing transport against passive attacks. Connecting to TLS to news.ycombinator.com is nice in that I know nobody has read or altered the message in transit. The fact that a third party vouches that news.ycombinator.com is who they say they are doesn't add anything for me, because I don't trust news.ycombinator.com any more than I would trust somebody impersonating news.ycombinator.com. The CA in this situation simply complicates things and adds nothing for me.

tptacek 10y ago
I am having a really hard time following this argument. The CA isn't vouching for the content of your HTTPS requests.
- bandrami 10y ago
  No, the only thing the CA vouches for is that the other party is who they claim to be, which 99% of the time doesn't matter because I don't trust who they claim to be any more than I trust someone impersonating who they claim to be.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    I'm still lost. What do you think it is that Comodo is vouching for with Hacker News?
    - bandrami 10y ago
      That the person who received the certificate from them was in control of the domain (for some definition of "control" that meets Comodo's standards) at the time the certificate was issued. I've never tried to get a wildcard from Comodo, personally, but since there's no O section of the certificate I assume Comodo didn't do anything beyond "do you control the DNS" or "do you control certain email addresses". This is at least less wasteful of time and effort on everybody's part than Comodo verifying that a specific company or person was actually involved; again, I don't trust ycombinator any more than I trust someone impersonating ycombinator, so any 3rd party verification is kind of pointless to me.
  - jrochkind1 10y ago
    How can the CA be _more_ trustworthy as to whether the other party is really Bank of America... than Bank of America itself is? I don't understand your argument, and I think it's a novel interpretation of the CA infrastruture, I think whatever threats you are considering (that Bank of America would intentionally lie about what website is a Bank of America website?) is not something the CA infrastructure was designed to protect against or is capable of protecting against. If authorized Bank of America staff is committed to claiming some website is Bank of America, they can get it trusted as Bank of America by a third-party CA too, can't they? I think by definition any website that authorized Bank of America agents claim is a Bank of America website, _is_ a Bank of America website. That's all it means to be "really" a BoA website, to be a website BoA intentionally meant to represent BoA. I don't think the CA infrastructure can possibly defend against authorized Bank of America agents claiming a website is a BoA website when you think they were wrong to claim that. The CA infrastructure is meant to guarantee that the website was intentionally authorized by Bank of America to be a Bank of America website -- that's it. It doesn't even always do that securely because of flaws, but it never does any more than that. Am I missing something?
MaulingMonkey 10y ago
> Connecting to TLS to news.ycombinator.com is nice in that I know nobody has read or altered the message in transit. The fact that a third party vouches that news.ycombinator.com is who they say they are doesn't add anything for me, because I don't trust news.ycombinator.com any more than I would trust somebody impersonating news.ycombinator.com. The CA in this situation simply complicates things and adds nothing for me. You don't know that the message isn't read or altered in transit unless you know that your TLS connection is to the real news.ycombinator.com. ISPs have been running transparent HTTP proxies to inject ads and other nonsense into your content. It'd be trivial for them to run a transparent HTTPS proxy to do the same - aside from the little detail that your browser would try and fail to verify the certificates provided by said proxy were vouched for by a CA. I don't consider this is a "largely-hypothetical" attack. ISPs have been doing it for a few extra pennies of ad revenue.
- dlgeek 10y ago
  I /think/ that bandrami is trying to advocate for a DNSSEC/DANE based system for certificate trust which would put the trust in the DNS operators in lieu of the CAs, and be more about asserting "control over domain" than the "is the correct legal entity" that OV/EV (but not DV) certs claim. I'm personally not a huge fan, but (if I'm interpreting her/his argument correctly), it'd at least be secure against a casual MITM.

tptacek 10y ago

I am having a really hard time following this argument. The CA isn't vouching for the content of your HTTPS requests.

bandrami 10y ago
No, the only thing the CA vouches for is that the other party is who they claim to be, which 99% of the time doesn't matter because I don't trust who they claim to be any more than I trust someone impersonating who they claim to be.
- tptacek 10y ago
  I'm still lost. What do you think it is that Comodo is vouching for with Hacker News?
  - bandrami 10y ago
    That the person who received the certificate from them was in control of the domain (for some definition of "control" that meets Comodo's standards) at the time the certificate was issued. I've never tried to get a wildcard from Comodo, personally, but since there's no O section of the certificate I assume Comodo didn't do anything beyond "do you control the DNS" or "do you control certain email addresses". This is at least less wasteful of time and effort on everybody's part than Comodo verifying that a specific company or person was actually involved; again, I don't trust ycombinator any more than I trust someone impersonating ycombinator, so any 3rd party verification is kind of pointless to me.
- jrochkind1 10y ago
  How can the CA be _more_ trustworthy as to whether the other party is really Bank of America... than Bank of America itself is? I don't understand your argument, and I think it's a novel interpretation of the CA infrastruture, I think whatever threats you are considering (that Bank of America would intentionally lie about what website is a Bank of America website?) is not something the CA infrastructure was designed to protect against or is capable of protecting against. If authorized Bank of America staff is committed to claiming some website is Bank of America, they can get it trusted as Bank of America by a third-party CA too, can't they? I think by definition any website that authorized Bank of America agents claim is a Bank of America website, _is_ a Bank of America website. That's all it means to be "really" a BoA website, to be a website BoA intentionally meant to represent BoA. I don't think the CA infrastructure can possibly defend against authorized Bank of America agents claiming a website is a BoA website when you think they were wrong to claim that. The CA infrastructure is meant to guarantee that the website was intentionally authorized by Bank of America to be a Bank of America website -- that's it. It doesn't even always do that securely because of flaws, but it never does any more than that. Am I missing something?

MaulingMonkey 10y ago

> Connecting to TLS to news.ycombinator.com is nice in that I know nobody has read or altered the message in transit. The fact that a third party vouches that news.ycombinator.com is who they say they are doesn't add anything for me, because I don't trust news.ycombinator.com any more than I would trust somebody impersonating news.ycombinator.com. The CA in this situation simply complicates things and adds nothing for me. You don't know that the message isn't read or altered in transit unless you know that your TLS connection is to the real news.ycombinator.com. ISPs have been running transparent HTTP proxies to inject ads and other nonsense into your content. It'd be trivial for them to run a transparent HTTPS proxy to do the same - aside from the little detail that your browser would try and fail to verify the certificates provided by said proxy were vouched for by a CA. I don't consider this is a "largely-hypothetical" attack. ISPs have been doing it for a few extra pennies of ad revenue.

dlgeek 10y ago
I /think/ that bandrami is trying to advocate for a DNSSEC/DANE based system for certificate trust which would put the trust in the DNS operators in lieu of the CAs, and be more about asserting "control over domain" than the "is the correct legal entity" that OV/EV (but not DV) certs claim. I'm personally not a huge fan, but (if I'm interpreting her/his argument correctly), it'd at least be secure against a casual MITM.