3 ms·

Why is https is promoted as a way to fight surveillance when the typical HN user knows https does no such thing. How does https stop NSA or any resourced state

by throw2016 10y ago

Why is https is promoted as a way to fight surveillance when the typical HN user knows https does no such thing. How does https stop NSA or any resourced state actor? Even ordinary run of mill organizations routinely mitm https. And to add insult to injury this naive https protects against surveillance is promoted aggressively by people and entities who are known to be in bed with state entities, leading purveyors of spyware and are aggressively building profiles of individuals every second.

danblick 10y ago
I guess maybe you're being downvoted for the tone of your comment, but I came here wondering the same thing. Usually we think of communication as secure when messages can be read only by their intended recipients. We don't really get that when we're using the public key infrastructure in modern browsers. I'm not sure how much it matters (I don't mind if the government knows my credit card number), but I don't like the way PKI makes "private communication" sort of ambiguous...
- pfg 10y ago
  The public key infrastructure in modern browsers allows you to use HPKP, which gives you all you need in order to fully control that a message can only be read by its intended recipient, if you need that level of assurance. (Yes, it's TOFU, but is there any large-scale protocol that isn't either TOFU or requires out-of-band verification?) The public key infrastructure in modern browsers is also about to require that CAs use Certificate Transparency (a year from now), which is definitely an obstacle even for nation-state adversaries if they want to stay under the radar (once it's fully rolled out and backdating in order to bypass the requirement isn't possible anymore). Finally, if you're the target of a nation-state adversary, there are probably things you'd have to worry about other than the Web PKI. It's unlikely to be the most effective way to own you. The Web PKI isn't the weakest link by far.
philipkglass 10y ago
The interests of Google and users are aligned when it comes to making sure that intelligence agencies and other criminals can't read everyone's communications. I don't trust Google across the board but I'm still happy that Google promotes HTTPS. If a nation-state attacker decides they really want your secrets they will probably get them. This can mean measures up to and including clandestine hardware modifications of systems you use. HTTPS isn't going to save you in that case. HTTPS can, however, take a lot of the sting out of pervasive information insecurity promoted by nation states. It forces nation state attackers to go from passive to active attacks if they want to tamper with your system or read the contents of your communications. Pinned keys can thwart MITM tampering, when pinning is available, and even when an active attack can compromise security it's more likely to leave traces. It forces a natural balance on intelligence agencies that are (sadly, apparently) un-constrained by the consent of the governed: use that great 0-day exploit to monitor everyone you slightly suspect and it will be discovered/fixed that much faster. HTTPS doesn't do anything to prevent metadata based surveillance, of course. But keeping the contents of communications private still imposes significant and worthwhile limitations on how metadata surveillance is used for further targeting. Any broad security measures that make the NSA's adversarial role harder to perform also makes life harder for for attackers from other nation-states; I'd rather that everybody be able to keep the contents of their conversations secret than nobody be able to to, if we have to pick one extreme or the other.

danblick 10y ago

I guess maybe you're being downvoted for the tone of your comment, but I came here wondering the same thing. Usually we think of communication as secure when messages can be read only by their intended recipients. We don't really get that when we're using the public key infrastructure in modern browsers. I'm not sure how much it matters (I don't mind if the government knows my credit card number), but I don't like the way PKI makes "private communication" sort of ambiguous...

pfg 10y ago
The public key infrastructure in modern browsers allows you to use HPKP, which gives you all you need in order to fully control that a message can only be read by its intended recipient, if you need that level of assurance. (Yes, it's TOFU, but is there any large-scale protocol that isn't either TOFU or requires out-of-band verification?) The public key infrastructure in modern browsers is also about to require that CAs use Certificate Transparency (a year from now), which is definitely an obstacle even for nation-state adversaries if they want to stay under the radar (once it's fully rolled out and backdating in order to bypass the requirement isn't possible anymore). Finally, if you're the target of a nation-state adversary, there are probably things you'd have to worry about other than the Web PKI. It's unlikely to be the most effective way to own you. The Web PKI isn't the weakest link by far.

philipkglass 10y ago

The interests of Google and users are aligned when it comes to making sure that intelligence agencies and other criminals can't read everyone's communications. I don't trust Google across the board but I'm still happy that Google promotes HTTPS. If a nation-state attacker decides they really want your secrets they will probably get them. This can mean measures up to and including clandestine hardware modifications of systems you use. HTTPS isn't going to save you in that case. HTTPS can, however, take a lot of the sting out of pervasive information insecurity promoted by nation states. It forces nation state attackers to go from passive to active attacks if they want to tamper with your system or read the contents of your communications. Pinned keys can thwart MITM tampering, when pinning is available, and even when an active attack can compromise security it's more likely to leave traces. It forces a natural balance on intelligence agencies that are (sadly, apparently) un-constrained by the consent of the governed: use that great 0-day exploit to monitor everyone you slightly suspect and it will be discovered/fixed that much faster. HTTPS doesn't do anything to prevent metadata based surveillance, of course. But keeping the contents of communications private still imposes significant and worthwhile limitations on how metadata surveillance is used for further targeting. Any broad security measures that make the NSA's adversarial role harder to perform also makes life harder for for attackers from other nation-states; I'd rather that everybody be able to keep the contents of their conversations secret than nobody be able to to, if we have to pick one extreme or the other.