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That's 100% accurate but the parent post is clearly about EV certs attempting to provide added trust/identity beyond what's needed for the privacy provided by T

That's 100% accurate but the parent post is clearly about EV certs attempting to provide added trust/identity beyond what's needed for the privacy provided by TLS, and it's skeptical that that's happening. A more-SSH-like approach would be for browsers to identify PSL-level domains with simple site names, which can be done by-hand for the Alexa top 500 if nothing else; so "https://docs.google.com/whatever" https://docs.google.com/whatever" maps to a green "Google docs> whatever" in your URL bar; click to reveal the full URL. The idea is that a local store for this mapping is distributed across all of the browsers out there, so by default you get a yellow arrow on `-> https://idontknowthisdomain.example/` https://idontknowthisdomain.example/` and perhaps as HTTP goes south we get a red one on `-> http://thisdomainneither.example/` http://thisdomainneither.example/`. But you can right click that yellow arrow and it asks "Do you trust the following domain?" with a "Name: ____" box to submit your own name. After that, this domain has been white-listed for you to have the given name, just as in HTTPS. Possibly you can even have the page itself suggest the name via a meta tag. The important point is that the user has to say that they trust this domain to have that common-name, before they see it pop up in green. From there, the browsers can do what they already do best: phone home. If you get millions of different users suggesting the same official name for a web site, it's more reasonable to automatically add them so that more than just the instantaneous Alexa Top 500 is covered. You still rely on the core certs to provide privacy, but people who visit a phishing site now see by default either a yellow or red arrow where they are accustomed to seeing a green one that they either set up themselves or someone else set up for them.

gruez 9y ago
>From there, the browsers can do what they already do best: phone home. If you get millions of different users suggesting the same official name for a web site, it's more reasonable to automatically add them so that more than just the instantaneous Alexa Top 500 is covered. What about sybil attacks?
- deleted 9y ago
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- drostie 9y ago
  I've thought about it a bit, and I must say I'm not really sure what to make of it. I got some of my CS courses from a man named Kevin Walsh who I think was a Ph.D. candidate at the time; I think he's now teaching at Holy Cross. If my memory serves his group solved (at least for the time being) the Sybil attack problem on the then-active distributed-filesharing-networks at the time, but it never really grew in adoption because the stakes were really low. Their basic idea was (again if memory serves me right) to let people self-classify into clusters, so your esteem of someone else's ranking of websites would be based on your own ranking of those websites and how they match. In that way, you get a fully distributed web-of-trust system which nevertheless can't be Sybil-poisoned: to inject their own phishing sites, an attacker first needs to inject trustworthy reviews for a bunch of other unclassified sites, which violates the Sybil assumption that your reviewer identity is disposable or forgeable or whatever and demands that you contribute more to the network than you take away. I'm not sure if this could be quasi-centralized for browser reviews of proposed short-names for domains, since it assumes a big peer-to-peer decentralized system with lots of people reviewing lots of things and lets them sort themselves into their own groups; it gets dodgy if you're retroactively like "okay so here's the main group now". There is a hint of what it would look like if you try to recentralize it and say "this is the consensus for that domain name's shortname" in the form of how blockchain networks look: there you have a similar story of "if you want to break our consensus that your site is a phishing site, you first need to join our network and outperform the rest of it." But yeah, I think that sorting out the data requires some sort of complicated thinking. I'm more dreaming that sorting out the interface and getting approximate correctness for 90% of traffic so that people get accustomed to that little green box being there, is not especially hard. On the flip-side, this is already a problem in the form that browsers have to detect phishing somehow and there are Sybil attacks on that based on marking other sites as phishing to try to decrease peoples' confidence in these phishing indicators. So even though there is a technical problem here, I'm not sure I see it as novel to this particular approach.
matt4077 9y ago
> the parent post is clearly about EV certs attempting to provide added trust/identity beyond what's needed for the privacy provided by TLS, and it's skeptical that that's happening. The (great-grand)parent is probably not talking about EV certs, because then they'd be stupid. They say: > We could've had a mostly encrypted Internet a long time ago if encryption and privacy were not hitched to a commercial identity certificate with crappy maintenance tools. ...which wouldn't make sense if it didn't include the basic DV certificates, because then those DV certs would be exactly the sort of quick&easy encryption-without-identity they're looking for. They're complaining about encryption requiring a process that used to cost enough to discourage many people, even for DV certs. The situation has only really changed in the last two years or so with LE, and you can quite clearly see the impact of free certificates and a slightly better process on the rate of encryption.
- drostie 9y ago
  I'm talking about the overall post (i.e. JoshTriplett's submission) there, not the parentmost comment by payne92. I read payne92's comment as dreaming about an alternate past where something like Let's Encrypt was available from the start because that was the original model of trust in TLS, not authorities saying "we will certify that you are who you say you are" but merely authorities saying "we will certify that someone who proved their control of that domain name recently, said that this was a valid public key for it."
  - matt4077 9y ago
    Yeah, I think we're basically in agreement then. Although I'd note that Let's Encrypt's model is no different than the paid DV certificates that came before–they're just giving those away for free. You were always able to get such a certificate without proof of identity, for something around $100/y.
    - nsgi 9y ago
      Or more like $10/y, through a PositiveSSL reseller.
    - 9y ago

gruez 9y ago

>From there, the browsers can do what they already do best: phone home. If you get millions of different users suggesting the same official name for a web site, it's more reasonable to automatically add them so that more than just the instantaneous Alexa Top 500 is covered. What about sybil attacks?

deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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drostie 9y ago
I've thought about it a bit, and I must say I'm not really sure what to make of it. I got some of my CS courses from a man named Kevin Walsh who I think was a Ph.D. candidate at the time; I think he's now teaching at Holy Cross. If my memory serves his group solved (at least for the time being) the Sybil attack problem on the then-active distributed-filesharing-networks at the time, but it never really grew in adoption because the stakes were really low. Their basic idea was (again if memory serves me right) to let people self-classify into clusters, so your esteem of someone else's ranking of websites would be based on your own ranking of those websites and how they match. In that way, you get a fully distributed web-of-trust system which nevertheless can't be Sybil-poisoned: to inject their own phishing sites, an attacker first needs to inject trustworthy reviews for a bunch of other unclassified sites, which violates the Sybil assumption that your reviewer identity is disposable or forgeable or whatever and demands that you contribute more to the network than you take away. I'm not sure if this could be quasi-centralized for browser reviews of proposed short-names for domains, since it assumes a big peer-to-peer decentralized system with lots of people reviewing lots of things and lets them sort themselves into their own groups; it gets dodgy if you're retroactively like "okay so here's the main group now". There is a hint of what it would look like if you try to recentralize it and say "this is the consensus for that domain name's shortname" in the form of how blockchain networks look: there you have a similar story of "if you want to break our consensus that your site is a phishing site, you first need to join our network and outperform the rest of it." But yeah, I think that sorting out the data requires some sort of complicated thinking. I'm more dreaming that sorting out the interface and getting approximate correctness for 90% of traffic so that people get accustomed to that little green box being there, is not especially hard. On the flip-side, this is already a problem in the form that browsers have to detect phishing somehow and there are Sybil attacks on that based on marking other sites as phishing to try to decrease peoples' confidence in these phishing indicators. So even though there is a technical problem here, I'm not sure I see it as novel to this particular approach.

matt4077 9y ago

> the parent post is clearly about EV certs attempting to provide added trust/identity beyond what's needed for the privacy provided by TLS, and it's skeptical that that's happening. The (great-grand)parent is probably not talking about EV certs, because then they'd be stupid. They say: > We could've had a mostly encrypted Internet a long time ago if encryption and privacy were not hitched to a commercial identity certificate with crappy maintenance tools. ...which wouldn't make sense if it didn't include the basic DV certificates, because then those DV certs would be exactly the sort of quick&easy encryption-without-identity they're looking for. They're complaining about encryption requiring a process that used to cost enough to discourage many people, even for DV certs. The situation has only really changed in the last two years or so with LE, and you can quite clearly see the impact of free certificates and a slightly better process on the rate of encryption.

drostie 9y ago
I'm talking about the overall post (i.e. JoshTriplett's submission) there, not the parentmost comment by payne92. I read payne92's comment as dreaming about an alternate past where something like Let's Encrypt was available from the start because that was the original model of trust in TLS, not authorities saying "we will certify that you are who you say you are" but merely authorities saying "we will certify that someone who proved their control of that domain name recently, said that this was a valid public key for it."
- matt4077 9y ago
  Yeah, I think we're basically in agreement then. Although I'd note that Let's Encrypt's model is no different than the paid DV certificates that came before–they're just giving those away for free. You were always able to get such a certificate without proof of identity, for something around $100/y.
  - nsgi 9y ago
    Or more like $10/y, through a PositiveSSL reseller.
  - 9y ago