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Certsimple is talking their book. They sell EV certs, so they have to trash DV certs, like the ones Let's Encrypt provides for free. Reminder: Amazon uses DV ce

Certsimple is talking their book. They sell EV certs, so they have to trash DV certs, like the ones Let's Encrypt provides for free. Reminder: Amazon uses DV certs, and they seem to be doing fairly well.

Rjevski 9y ago
There should be a separation between transport security and brand authenticity, and the latter shouldn't even be part of TLS.
- nailer 9y ago
  EV is matching a legal entity to a pubkey. Nothing more, nothing less. Brands and trademark ownership don't come into it: it's legal identity only. Let's look at how other cryptosystems match identities to public keys: - Debian/dpkg does it with key signing parties, where people hold up their passports and read out the pubkeys used to sign their packages. From https://wiki.debian.org/Keysigning https://wiki.debian.org/Keysigning : > The people who will sign your key will need to see some form of government issued ID (passport or similar). This is almost the same as the EV process for a sole proprietor. - Email users who use GPG do it by publishing keys in places like keybase or university address books which confirm identity by control of other well known accounts associated with that person - eg, your Twitter handle, or university account associated with your identiy. - SSL/TLS used to do this with phone calls, faxes and YellowPages entries, verifying that all those fields you entered into your CSR were correct, before GeoTrust invented Domain Validation to save themselves a bunch of money. If you don't want to prove who you are, that's fine. But matching identities to pubkeys is a very, very normal part of PKI.
nailer 9y ago
There's quotes from two Google engineers both for and against 'Secure' in the article. In case you missed the links in the article, you can also read the original research https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2016/soups2016-paper-porter-felt.pdf#page=10 https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2016/sou..., section 7.2 and confirm the premise of the article's title for yourself. I use a DV cert on my personal site. CertSimple happily directs customers to LE, Heroku, AWS Cert Manager, CloudFlare and other places where you can get a cheap / free or shared DV cert for customers who just want people to encrypt data they send to their site and don't need to prove who they are. Reasons you might want to prove who you are: - You're handling sensitive data and want to prove there's a real company behind the site, rather than just someone who registered a domain. - You have other people pretending to be you and want to distinguish your site from theirs. - You have affiliates selling your product and want to show you're actually the real site. - You're a crypto nerd and the idea of connecting to random public keys makes you boak.
peterwwillis 9y ago
That said, the "Secure" indicator on Chrome is almost completely pointless from a user security standpoint. They would be potentially more secure with no indicator at all.
mbroshi 9y ago
This sounds ad hominem to me. While it's certainly worthwhile to consider Certsimple's motivations when reading the article, I actually found their case pretty compelling.
- nailer 9y ago
  It is - sbierwagen doesn't address any point raised in the article and I'll quite happily challenge him to do so - but it goes with the territory. Cynicism is healthy. The TLS industry has historically been quite shady. Symantec was selling 'Step up' encryption certs for Internet Explorer 5.5 pre 5.5 SP1 in 2015 as a value add. Comodo tried to trademark 'Let's Encypt' for some reason that still isn't clear. I'm quite happy for people to ignore the article I wrote, read Section 7.2 of Google's research, and verify for themselves the claim made in the title. Then consider whether most people understand that 'Secure' means 'Secure from eavesdropping' as the quoted Google engineer suggests.
  - sbierwagen 9y ago
    Ok, from your sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15009716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15009716 - You're handling sensitive data and want to prove there's a real company behind the site, rather than just someone who registered a domain. 1.) Unicode homoglyph attacks means "Goοgle Inc" looks just like "Google Inc". All browsers mitigate IDN attacks, but the way unicode strings are handled means the browser vendors have to be lucky forever, while an attacker just has to be lucky once. 2.) "Widget Inc" is a different legal entity from "Widgets LLC". Is some clerk in Delaware going to care that an attacker is registering a name vaguely similar to the name of your California corp? Probably not. 3.) Chrome uses the OS cert store. As of 2016, Windows trusts 356 root certificates. Any root can sign a cert for any domain name. How much do the owners of "TUBITAK Kamu SM SSL Kok Sertifikasi Surum 1" care about your security? 4.) It costs, what, a hundred bucks to register a corp online? Easy spend if you're spearfishing a high value target. "Shell-company-as-a-service" has been a value provider of law firms for centuries. - You have other people pretending to be you and want to distinguish your site from theirs. Wildcard EV certs let anyone in the world register "yourcorpname.customer-service.io", or "yourcorpname-help.com" Large corporations train users to do this, hilariously. In order to log into office 365, you visit... login.microsoftonline.com. - You're a crypto nerd and the idea of connecting to random public keys makes you boak. Crypto nerds don't trust the HTTPS PKI at all.
parenthephobia 9y ago
The article doesn't say that you can't stay in business using DV certs, so that seems irrelevant. The article says that "Secure" falsely communicates to the average user the sense that it is safe to proceed without caution, and indeed was specifically chosen for that reason. That's hardly controversial, I would have thought. If it's true, it's true whether or not the person telling you it sells EV certs. Unwary PayPal users are regularly phished even though PayPal have EV certs because the average user doesn't know that authentic PayPal websites should always say "PayPal, Inc. [US]" in the address bar, and aren't concerned when the address bar says Secure instead. I think the problem really is that we want users to be "safe" on the Internet without them having to learn anything, and the Internet just isn't there yet, and quite possibly never will be. It's like trying to design a gun you can't shoot yourself in the foot with, because people won't put up with being taught gun-safety. I do think we could benefit from new Internet users being made, probably by their browsers, to take a short training course in the basic aspects of what encryption really guarantees on the web, how recognise malicious websites, and the like.
ams6110 9y ago
A DV cert from letsencrypt means you have provided some bare minimum of evidence that you control the domain in question. That's it. Most people don't understand that. They just think "https == good" and it's taken years just to get to that point. CAs need to do more and browser vendors should expect them to if they want to be included in the default bundle. CAs should not be issuing certificates for any name that contains components like "paypal.com" or "google" or "gmail" Yeah it's kind of a game of whack-a-mole but at least get the low-hanging fruit.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  I agreed with you right up until this sentence: > CAs need to do more and browser vendors should expect them to if they want to be included in the default bundle. CAs _should not_ be expected to validate anything about a domain name other than who controls it (at least for DV certs). That's not their job, nor should it be. First, it's not nearly as simple as blacklisting domains containing "PayPal" or "Gmail". What if, for example, someone wants to register a domain like "paypal-sucks.com" and use that to express their distaste for PayPal's business practices? Should they not be allowed to do that? And what about wildcard certs? `*.some-site.com` matches `paypal.some-site.com` just as easily as it does `forum.some-site.com`. Do you expect CAs to police that somehow?
  - ams6110 9y ago
    You and I understand this. Most paypal users do not. That's why they keep getting phished even when their browser says they are on a "Secure" site. Maybe it would help to have something between the green "Secure" and the red "Danger! Stop!", e.g. an amber "warning" symbol implying that "You're connected to the site your browser is showing, but be sure it's the site you think it is." Sadly in reality I don't think that would go very far to solving the problem.
    - Ajedi32 9y ago
      The problem with showing a warning like that on every site you visit is that users will quickly become used to it and start ignoring it as a result. (Alarm fatigue) Warnings are only useful if they're shown rarely enough for users to take note of them as an unusual event when they do occur.

Rjevski 9y ago

There should be a separation between transport security and brand authenticity, and the latter shouldn't even be part of TLS.

nailer 9y ago
EV is matching a legal entity to a pubkey. Nothing more, nothing less. Brands and trademark ownership don't come into it: it's legal identity only. Let's look at how other cryptosystems match identities to public keys: - Debian/dpkg does it with key signing parties, where people hold up their passports and read out the pubkeys used to sign their packages. From https://wiki.debian.org/Keysigning https://wiki.debian.org/Keysigning : > The people who will sign your key will need to see some form of government issued ID (passport or similar). This is almost the same as the EV process for a sole proprietor. - Email users who use GPG do it by publishing keys in places like keybase or university address books which confirm identity by control of other well known accounts associated with that person - eg, your Twitter handle, or university account associated with your identiy. - SSL/TLS used to do this with phone calls, faxes and YellowPages entries, verifying that all those fields you entered into your CSR were correct, before GeoTrust invented Domain Validation to save themselves a bunch of money. If you don't want to prove who you are, that's fine. But matching identities to pubkeys is a very, very normal part of PKI.

nailer 9y ago

There's quotes from two Google engineers both for and against 'Secure' in the article. In case you missed the links in the article, you can also read the original research https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2016/soups2016-paper-porter-felt.pdf#page=10 https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2016/sou..., section 7.2 and confirm the premise of the article's title for yourself. I use a DV cert on my personal site. CertSimple happily directs customers to LE, Heroku, AWS Cert Manager, CloudFlare and other places where you can get a cheap / free or shared DV cert for customers who just want people to encrypt data they send to their site and don't need to prove who they are. Reasons you might want to prove who you are: - You're handling sensitive data and want to prove there's a real company behind the site, rather than just someone who registered a domain. - You have other people pretending to be you and want to distinguish your site from theirs. - You have affiliates selling your product and want to show you're actually the real site. - You're a crypto nerd and the idea of connecting to random public keys makes you boak.

peterwwillis 9y ago

That said, the "Secure" indicator on Chrome is almost completely pointless from a user security standpoint. They would be potentially more secure with no indicator at all.

mbroshi 9y ago

This sounds ad hominem to me. While it's certainly worthwhile to consider Certsimple's motivations when reading the article, I actually found their case pretty compelling.

nailer 9y ago
It is - sbierwagen doesn't address any point raised in the article and I'll quite happily challenge him to do so - but it goes with the territory. Cynicism is healthy. The TLS industry has historically been quite shady. Symantec was selling 'Step up' encryption certs for Internet Explorer 5.5 pre 5.5 SP1 in 2015 as a value add. Comodo tried to trademark 'Let's Encypt' for some reason that still isn't clear. I'm quite happy for people to ignore the article I wrote, read Section 7.2 of Google's research, and verify for themselves the claim made in the title. Then consider whether most people understand that 'Secure' means 'Secure from eavesdropping' as the quoted Google engineer suggests.
- sbierwagen 9y ago
  Ok, from your sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15009716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15009716 - You're handling sensitive data and want to prove there's a real company behind the site, rather than just someone who registered a domain. 1.) Unicode homoglyph attacks means "Goοgle Inc" looks just like "Google Inc". All browsers mitigate IDN attacks, but the way unicode strings are handled means the browser vendors have to be lucky forever, while an attacker just has to be lucky once. 2.) "Widget Inc" is a different legal entity from "Widgets LLC". Is some clerk in Delaware going to care that an attacker is registering a name vaguely similar to the name of your California corp? Probably not. 3.) Chrome uses the OS cert store. As of 2016, Windows trusts 356 root certificates. Any root can sign a cert for any domain name. How much do the owners of "TUBITAK Kamu SM SSL Kok Sertifikasi Surum 1" care about your security? 4.) It costs, what, a hundred bucks to register a corp online? Easy spend if you're spearfishing a high value target. "Shell-company-as-a-service" has been a value provider of law firms for centuries. - You have other people pretending to be you and want to distinguish your site from theirs. Wildcard EV certs let anyone in the world register "yourcorpname.customer-service.io", or "yourcorpname-help.com" Large corporations train users to do this, hilariously. In order to log into office 365, you visit... login.microsoftonline.com. - You're a crypto nerd and the idea of connecting to random public keys makes you boak. Crypto nerds don't trust the HTTPS PKI at all.

parenthephobia 9y ago

The article doesn't say that you can't stay in business using DV certs, so that seems irrelevant. The article says that "Secure" falsely communicates to the average user the sense that it is safe to proceed without caution, and indeed was specifically chosen for that reason. That's hardly controversial, I would have thought. If it's true, it's true whether or not the person telling you it sells EV certs. Unwary PayPal users are regularly phished even though PayPal have EV certs because the average user doesn't know that authentic PayPal websites should always say "PayPal, Inc. [US]" in the address bar, and aren't concerned when the address bar says Secure instead. I think the problem really is that we want users to be "safe" on the Internet without them having to learn anything, and the Internet just isn't there yet, and quite possibly never will be. It's like trying to design a gun you can't shoot yourself in the foot with, because people won't put up with being taught gun-safety. I do think we could benefit from new Internet users being made, probably by their browsers, to take a short training course in the basic aspects of what encryption really guarantees on the web, how recognise malicious websites, and the like.

ams6110 9y ago

A DV cert from letsencrypt means you have provided some bare minimum of evidence that you control the domain in question. That's it. Most people don't understand that. They just think "https == good" and it's taken years just to get to that point. CAs need to do more and browser vendors should expect them to if they want to be included in the default bundle. CAs should not be issuing certificates for any name that contains components like "paypal.com" or "google" or "gmail" Yeah it's kind of a game of whack-a-mole but at least get the low-hanging fruit.

Ajedi32 9y ago
I agreed with you right up until this sentence: > CAs need to do more and browser vendors should expect them to if they want to be included in the default bundle. CAs _should not_ be expected to validate anything about a domain name other than who controls it (at least for DV certs). That's not their job, nor should it be. First, it's not nearly as simple as blacklisting domains containing "PayPal" or "Gmail". What if, for example, someone wants to register a domain like "paypal-sucks.com" and use that to express their distaste for PayPal's business practices? Should they not be allowed to do that? And what about wildcard certs? `*.some-site.com` matches `paypal.some-site.com` just as easily as it does `forum.some-site.com`. Do you expect CAs to police that somehow?
- ams6110 9y ago
  You and I understand this. Most paypal users do not. That's why they keep getting phished even when their browser says they are on a "Secure" site. Maybe it would help to have something between the green "Secure" and the red "Danger! Stop!", e.g. an amber "warning" symbol implying that "You're connected to the site your browser is showing, but be sure it's the site you think it is." Sadly in reality I don't think that would go very far to solving the problem.
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    The problem with showing a warning like that on every site you visit is that users will quickly become used to it and start ignoring it as a result. (Alarm fatigue) Warnings are only useful if they're shown rarely enough for users to take note of them as an unusual event when they do occur.