3 ms·

If I can MITM your http connection, I can MITM your https connection. But again, I'm not saying that there are no benefits to TLS, just that a blanket policy r

by Steeeve 10y ago

If I can MITM your http connection, I can MITM your https connection. But again, I'm not saying that there are no benefits to TLS, just that a blanket policy requiring TLS for _every_ government web service is a bad idea. One that prefers TLS or a best-effort-to-support TLS policy would make more sense. Look at the history a bit. InCommon's use of insecure hashes required that all clients re-issue their certificates in order to avoid browser warnings. At the University level that was impractical to do quickly. At a federal government level? That's a whole different beast. And look at heartbleed. How long did it take the federal government to make all resources secure again? Is it actually a completed project? There's operational overhead to consider. There's the fact that MITM for http is minimally different than https. There's the plain and simple fact that a lot of data simply does not need to be secure. And there's the fact that there are already existing problems with making data available to the public at large. If you want to provide confidence in government data, you could say that all certificates used by government resources are secured by X,Y, and Z certificate authorities and that would be a legitimate benefit.

yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
"There's the fact that MITM for http is minimally different than https." Unless I'm missing something important, that can be prevented with key pinning.
- willstrafach 10y ago
  Key pinning is not even needed. Entire point of SSL/TLS is to ensure end to end authenticity and confidentiality. I believe the above poster does not fully understand SSL/TLS at all.
  - dispose13432 10y ago
    > Entire point of SSL/TLS is to ensure end to end authenticity and confidentiality. The point is that country A can strongarm a certificate authority under their domain to sign any certificate they want. So if A wants to MITM google or github they can, and there's no way for you to know which certificate is the real one and which is the fake.
- Steeeve 10y ago
  Key pinning could do a little towards preventing MITM, but implementing it is dangerous - in fact the whole standard is dangerous. Smashing Magazine went live with it, then had a cert expire before their max-age header did - rendering their site unavailable to repeat visitors. Then there are attacks like pkpransom to deal with, or the fact that Chrome doesn't implement hpkp properly. Only ~400 sites actually implement pinning. It's going to be more of a security problem than a security solution in the next couple of years.
TheRealPomax 10y ago
>If I can MITM your http connection, I can MITM your https connection. No you can't, that's the whole point of public key encryption. Someone could give you every single byte, in order, from the entire two way negoatiation process, and you would still not be able to to MITM your way into the datastream unless you either reverse engineered both party's secret keys that are used to perform the {sender locks lock, send locked data, receiver counter locks, sends doubly locked data back, sender unlocks, send counter-locked-only data, receiver counter unlocks, receiver now has the original data} step. Unless you know BOTH keys that were used in the purely local locks, you can do exactly nothing at all despite seeing every single naked byte involved. Can you MITM it if you already know the keys? Of course. But that is not an argument against HTTPS, of course. Can you guess or compute the keys if you don't have them? Given enough time, again: of course. Can known shortcomings in a known cypher make the job of computing keys easier? third time: of course. And that's why HTTPS lets you specify which "secure, today" cyphers to use, and which "no longer, or never secure" cyphers you will absolutely not accept. HTTPS with sha-1 was very secure years ago, for instance. Today it's a stupid choice if you want to remain secure, because its too easy to break. HTTPS makes MITM "the least possible" by using a secure symmetric encryption for both parties to agree on which asymmetric encryption to use. And it lets parties agree on stronger and stronger cyphers as time goes on, so that the integrity of connections stays a moving target. MITM is a theoretical possibility, but unless you literally own a half-a-billion dollar supercomputer capable of factoring large primes in a reasonable amount of time, can you, personally? Plain and simple no.
- Steeeve 10y ago
  > No you can't, that's the whole point of public key encryption. . > but unless you literally own a half-a-billion dollar supercomputer capable of factoring large primes in a reasonable amount of time, can you, personally? Plain and simple no. I'm not sure if you're being purposefully dense, if you really don't know how easy it is, or if you place too much trust in the chain of resources required to make an SSL connection.
  - dispose13432 10y ago
    1. Key pinning. 2. Certificate transparency 3. Can't do it "accidentally". That's why a lot of people have 2 foot high fences, not that you can't jump over them but to create the atmosphere that this is private, and if you get caught there you can't say "oops". 4. Non-government (malicious router) can't MITM.

by Steeeve 10y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago

"There's the fact that MITM for http is minimally different than https." Unless I'm missing something important, that can be prevented with key pinning.

willstrafach 10y ago
Key pinning is not even needed. Entire point of SSL/TLS is to ensure end to end authenticity and confidentiality. I believe the above poster does not fully understand SSL/TLS at all.
- dispose13432 10y ago
  > Entire point of SSL/TLS is to ensure end to end authenticity and confidentiality. The point is that country A can strongarm a certificate authority under their domain to sign any certificate they want. So if A wants to MITM google or github they can, and there's no way for you to know which certificate is the real one and which is the fake.
Steeeve 10y ago
Key pinning could do a little towards preventing MITM, but implementing it is dangerous - in fact the whole standard is dangerous. Smashing Magazine went live with it, then had a cert expire before their max-age header did - rendering their site unavailable to repeat visitors. Then there are attacks like pkpransom to deal with, or the fact that Chrome doesn't implement hpkp properly. Only ~400 sites actually implement pinning. It's going to be more of a security problem than a security solution in the next couple of years.

TheRealPomax 10y ago

>If I can MITM your http connection, I can MITM your https connection. No you can't, that's the whole point of public key encryption. Someone could give you every single byte, in order, from the entire two way negoatiation process, and you would still not be able to to MITM your way into the datastream unless you either reverse engineered both party's secret keys that are used to perform the {sender locks lock, send locked data, receiver counter locks, sends doubly locked data back, sender unlocks, send counter-locked-only data, receiver counter unlocks, receiver now has the original data} step. Unless you know BOTH keys that were used in the purely local locks, you can do exactly nothing at all despite seeing every single naked byte involved. Can you MITM it if you already know the keys? Of course. But that is not an argument against HTTPS, of course. Can you guess or compute the keys if you don't have them? Given enough time, again: of course. Can known shortcomings in a known cypher make the job of computing keys easier? third time: of course. And that's why HTTPS lets you specify which "secure, today" cyphers to use, and which "no longer, or never secure" cyphers you will absolutely not accept. HTTPS with sha-1 was very secure years ago, for instance. Today it's a stupid choice if you want to remain secure, because its too easy to break. HTTPS makes MITM "the least possible" by using a secure symmetric encryption for both parties to agree on which asymmetric encryption to use. And it lets parties agree on stronger and stronger cyphers as time goes on, so that the integrity of connections stays a moving target. MITM is a theoretical possibility, but unless you literally own a half-a-billion dollar supercomputer capable of factoring large primes in a reasonable amount of time, can you, personally? Plain and simple no.

Steeeve 10y ago
> No you can't, that's the whole point of public key encryption. . > but unless you literally own a half-a-billion dollar supercomputer capable of factoring large primes in a reasonable amount of time, can you, personally? Plain and simple no. I'm not sure if you're being purposefully dense, if you really don't know how easy it is, or if you place too much trust in the chain of resources required to make an SSL connection.
- dispose13432 10y ago
  1. Key pinning. 2. Certificate transparency 3. Can't do it "accidentally". That's why a lot of people have 2 foot high fences, not that you can't jump over them but to create the atmosphere that this is private, and if you get caught there you can't say "oops". 4. Non-government (malicious router) can't MITM.