11 ms·

I wish browser vendors would let me choose a trusted entity and make it simple for me to trust only CAs that my trusted entity supports, or the intersection of

I wish browser vendors would let me choose a trusted entity and make it simple for me to trust only CAs that my trusted entity supports, or the intersection of what multiple trusted entities endorse. The incentive for a mass-market browser is to trust pretty much everything, but I'd prefer to use a browser that is a bit more paranoid. If a website can't load properly because I don't trust one or more of the CAs, I might want to temporarily "live dangerously" but would be a bit more cautious about typing data into a form, etc. Browser vendors should not try to create a one-size-fits-all list of trusted CAs, since there is obviously a very different level of trust deserved by various CAs based on the track record of each one. If I were a state actor intelligence agency, compromising CAs would be toward the top of my list because of the amazing opportunity for man-in-the-middle attacks. Distrusting Symantec certificates is a great step in the right direction.

hiram112 9y ago
Exactly. I've never understood why all the US / EU language versions of Chrome, Firefox, etc. include all the root certs for CAs from China, Turkey, Russia, etc. I cannot read Mandarin or Turkish, and in the unlikely event I get forwarded to a site from a company targeting citizens from these countries, I'd prefer to just get an SSL exception instead of the 'trusted' page.
- nl 9y ago
  What about the huge number of English language Chinese run ecommerce sites? Why should they be discriminated against because of their native language? That just makes the normal user who wants to buy stuff learn to ignore SSL errors.
  - hamandcheese 9y ago
    Is it unreasonable to expect a foreign ecommerce site to use a CA that it's users can trust?
    - nl 9y ago
      Yes, absolutely. I think the @grandalf idea of selectable trust list providers has some merit (although there are some security trade-offs there). I don't think the automatic mistrust of certificates from "CAs from China, Turkey, Russia" automatically follows from that.
    - vacri 9y ago
      You're right. Americans should discard Turkish and Chinese CAs in favour of one homed in the heart of their tech capital in Silicon Valley. Clearly those foreign ones are shysters and not to be trusted like a locally-built, trustworthy business! Oh, what's that? Symantec is an American company, headquartered in Mountain View, CA?
      - jrochkind1 9y ago
        Meanwhile, the rest of the world probably wonders if they should trust American CA's! I'm not sure a geographically silo'd internet is what we should be going for. i miss the days when the dream of the internet was prefiguring a borderless world.
  - d33 9y ago
    Wouldn't you say it would be enough to pin those certs to TLDs?
    - nl 9y ago
      By TLD do you mean country domains? Then absolutely not. Why should a US company not be allowed to use a Swiss-issued certificate for a .io domain name?
      - duskwuff 9y ago
        And for that matter -- if a CA really is untrustworthy, why should domains under any TLD be exposed to them?
  - hiram112 9y ago
    Did you not miss the part where I referred to my 'localized' version of Firefox or Chrome (i.e. US English)? For example: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/ Again, I cannot read Mandarin or Turkish, and likely never ever will. It seems to me that it'd be much more likely that a site, even if run by Chinese or Turks, caters to American customers, should invest in a certificate trusted by a US CA, and similarly for every market they expect to do business in. And likewise, I don't know why localized versions of browsers for the Chinese market would include trusted certs from Turkey or Brazil. Seems like its a lot easier to force multinational companies, who already are going to have to invest in huge amounts of research and technology to deal with foreign taxes, currencies, bank accounts, etc., to add to their burden the responsibility for obtaining certs from their customers' local CAs, instead of having every single CA on Earth be trusted by all releases of browsers.
valarauca1 9y ago
This is a managed by your OS. You are free to delete CA's from its trust store. What Chrome is doing is irreguarless if that cert is in your OS's store it won't trust it. Keychain for OSX mmc in windows cmd prompt Linux has /usr/share/certificates
- dlubarov 9y ago
  > This is a managed by your OS. It depends on the browser -- e.g. Chrome uses the system's CA certs, but Mozilla ships with its own.
  - snowwrestler 9y ago
    Ok well the broader point still applies, right? You can edit Firefox's CA list if you want to.
- nurettin 9y ago
  Firefox has it's own certificate bundle, so do Java applications.
geofft 9y ago
> I wish browser vendors would let me choose a trusted entity and make it simple for me to trust only CAs that my trusted entity supports, or the intersection of what multiple trusted entities endorse. But you do; the trusted entity is your browser manufacturer. Given the massive amount of attack surface in the browser, I'm already trusting my browser to make sound security decisions all the time. And I've seen really good work from both the Firefox and Chrome teams on asking hard questions towards CAs; I don't think I can think of a group I'd trust to make better decisions. (Arguably there's the EFF, but I definitely trust the EFF less as a technical body than Mozilla or Google, for the simple reason that the EFF is an advocacy body, not a technical body.) > The incentive for a mass-market browser ... If I were a state actor intelligence agency But protecting against intelligence agencies is most effective and important in a mass-market browser, not in a nerd browser. There isn't any sense in a society where nerds as a group have more protection against government dragnet surveillance than everyone else. If you're a specific nerd working to save the world in a specific way and you're worried about targeted attacks against you personally, you have a threat model that can't be adequately responded to by trusting a subset of CAs. You need to do your important work on a machine that's locked down far more deeply than just by distrusting a few CAs (e.g., you probably want to disable 80% of the web platform to reduce attack surface), and ideally you'd do your less-sensitive work, e.g., reading the news and chatting with friends and listening to music, on a browser that looks as normal as possible to avoid standing out.
feelin_googley 9y ago
1. Uninstall the CA certficates the browser has pre-installed 2. Create and install own CA certificate 3. Download or create desired server certficates, sign them with own CA and install them I have not tried 1 but I regularly do 2 and 3. (Usually for monitoring outgoing encrypted traffic.) Anyway, the idea of your comment is spot on, I think. The process whereby users blindly trust browser authors has serious flaws. The user should be the one controlling the list of trusted CAs and servers, not a third party such as ad-supported company or organization distributing a web browser. The more the user (cf. third parties) actively controls what endpoints she will trust, the better. The system should encourage users to be active in managing what certficates they will trust versus passively letting ad-supported web companies do this for them. It is the user who has the greatest incentive to make things right in terms of her own security and privacy. Third parties may help, but they ultimately have their own interests to worry about.
- omni 9y ago
  How do you know you're not being MitM'd during step 3?
  - ethbro 9y ago
    For all reasonable adversary examples shy of panopticon, downloading from multiple physical sites and global proxies and comparing the same roots across downloads should be sufficient, no?
    - omni 9y ago
      Ohhhh gotcha, seems legit. I thought the certs in step 3 were individual site certs, not the roots. Thought he was going for some site-level pinning or something.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
skywhopper 9y ago
As mentioned, you do have this power. But for the average user, this gives too much control, because the average user has no way to judge the trustworthiness of various CAs, if they even understood what CAs were, which they don't have the time or inclination to care about. I'd say most Hacker News readers wouldn't be able to make the correct determinations about this either.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  It's also worth noting that for average users, whenever any sort of "option" is given that can potentially open a security whole, there exists some malware out there that tries to get the user to abuse that option in order to infect them. This always happens, and is the reason so many things on Chrome are locked down and very hard to modify.
  - Alyssa5454 9y ago
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tinus_hn 9y ago
Being cautious about entering data on a form is a cute idea but it doesn't work in reality. The web, with JavaScript loaded from multiple origins, doesn't work that way. These origins are practically invisible to you, they have complete access to the pages they are included in and you have no way of checking their certificates.
- grandalf 9y ago
  I'm aware of this. At present, those scripts can be run from any origin using any of the many CAs the OS/browser trusts.
otp124 9y ago
Would you accept a browser plugin that reads only the certificate information and makes a decision to alert, or block/override the DOM rendering to protect the user?
hannob 9y ago
> I wish browser vendors would let me choose a trusted entity and make it simple for me to trust only CAs that my trusted entity supports, or the intersection of what multiple trusted entities endorse. This is an idea that I hear in variations from time to time, yet I think it's utterly wrong and goes against everything we know about IT security UI. The reason why HTTPS works at scale and is - with all its weaknesses - a crypto success story is because it works automatically. Unlike other things like PGP that ultimately expect from the user to get an understanding of complex concepts like public key cryptography and web of trusts. What you're trying to do is move HTTPS away from "it just works" to "user has to understand what a CA and a PKI is". Fortunately none of the relevant actors or browser vendors is moving in that direction, the opposite is happening. HTTPS is becoming the default, it works automatically and the security improvements that are being deployed (mainly CT) are systemic improvements to strengthen the whole system.
- ykler 9y ago
  I certainly agree that something that just works is by far the most important priority and do worry about anything that could muddy that message. On the other hand, I suppose what the parent proposes could be useful for users with heightened security concerns even if they are only a tiny minority, similarly to how tor is useful (and, in fact, using this setting would be less conspicuous than using tor and also less suspicious since there is no way of using it for criminal activity).
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  Not really. To be honest, the existing UX for trust relationships is hardly near optimal. Nobody needs to understand what CAs and PKIs are. I actually think the proper UI could make it pretty smooth and understandable by the layperson. All a user needs to be asked is "Whom would you trust to certify that the websites you visit are genuinely those they claim to be?" and be presented with a few reasonable options, such as perhaps (1) Default (recommended), (2) Certification companies (Verisign, Thawte, etc.), (3) Government agencies (e.g. CIA, NSA, etc.), (4) Other/Custom (advanced).
  - icebraining 9y ago
_pmf_ 9y ago
I don't understand the reasoning behind not being allowed to deactivate/deinstall the standard trusted root certificates.
eyeareque 9y ago
Moxie proposed something like this in the past, quite forward thinking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_(SSL) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_(SSL)

hiram112 9y ago

Exactly. I've never understood why all the US / EU language versions of Chrome, Firefox, etc. include all the root certs for CAs from China, Turkey, Russia, etc. I cannot read Mandarin or Turkish, and in the unlikely event I get forwarded to a site from a company targeting citizens from these countries, I'd prefer to just get an SSL exception instead of the 'trusted' page.

nl 9y ago
What about the huge number of English language Chinese run ecommerce sites? Why should they be discriminated against because of their native language? That just makes the normal user who wants to buy stuff learn to ignore SSL errors.
- hamandcheese 9y ago
  Is it unreasonable to expect a foreign ecommerce site to use a CA that it's users can trust?
  - nl 9y ago
    Yes, absolutely. I think the @grandalf idea of selectable trust list providers has some merit (although there are some security trade-offs there). I don't think the automatic mistrust of certificates from "CAs from China, Turkey, Russia" automatically follows from that.
  - vacri 9y ago
    You're right. Americans should discard Turkish and Chinese CAs in favour of one homed in the heart of their tech capital in Silicon Valley. Clearly those foreign ones are shysters and not to be trusted like a locally-built, trustworthy business! Oh, what's that? Symantec is an American company, headquartered in Mountain View, CA?
    - jrochkind1 9y ago
      Meanwhile, the rest of the world probably wonders if they should trust American CA's! I'm not sure a geographically silo'd internet is what we should be going for. i miss the days when the dream of the internet was prefiguring a borderless world.
- d33 9y ago
  Wouldn't you say it would be enough to pin those certs to TLDs?
  - nl 9y ago
    By TLD do you mean country domains? Then absolutely not. Why should a US company not be allowed to use a Swiss-issued certificate for a .io domain name?
    - duskwuff 9y ago
      And for that matter -- if a CA really is untrustworthy, why should domains under any TLD be exposed to them?
- hiram112 9y ago
  Did you not miss the part where I referred to my 'localized' version of Firefox or Chrome (i.e. US English)? For example: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/ Again, I cannot read Mandarin or Turkish, and likely never ever will. It seems to me that it'd be much more likely that a site, even if run by Chinese or Turks, caters to American customers, should invest in a certificate trusted by a US CA, and similarly for every market they expect to do business in. And likewise, I don't know why localized versions of browsers for the Chinese market would include trusted certs from Turkey or Brazil. Seems like its a lot easier to force multinational companies, who already are going to have to invest in huge amounts of research and technology to deal with foreign taxes, currencies, bank accounts, etc., to add to their burden the responsibility for obtaining certs from their customers' local CAs, instead of having every single CA on Earth be trusted by all releases of browsers.

valarauca1 9y ago

This is a managed by your OS. You are free to delete CA's from its trust store. What Chrome is doing is irreguarless if that cert is in your OS's store it won't trust it. Keychain for OSX mmc in windows cmd prompt Linux has /usr/share/certificates

dlubarov 9y ago
> This is a managed by your OS. It depends on the browser -- e.g. Chrome uses the system's CA certs, but Mozilla ships with its own.
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  Ok well the broader point still applies, right? You can edit Firefox's CA list if you want to.
nurettin 9y ago
Firefox has it's own certificate bundle, so do Java applications.

geofft 9y ago

> I wish browser vendors would let me choose a trusted entity and make it simple for me to trust only CAs that my trusted entity supports, or the intersection of what multiple trusted entities endorse. But you do; the trusted entity is your browser manufacturer. Given the massive amount of attack surface in the browser, I'm already trusting my browser to make sound security decisions all the time. And I've seen really good work from both the Firefox and Chrome teams on asking hard questions towards CAs; I don't think I can think of a group I'd trust to make better decisions. (Arguably there's the EFF, but I definitely trust the EFF less as a technical body than Mozilla or Google, for the simple reason that the EFF is an advocacy body, not a technical body.) > The incentive for a mass-market browser ... If I were a state actor intelligence agency But protecting against intelligence agencies is most effective and important in a mass-market browser, not in a nerd browser. There isn't any sense in a society where nerds as a group have more protection against government dragnet surveillance than everyone else. If you're a specific nerd working to save the world in a specific way and you're worried about targeted attacks against you personally, you have a threat model that can't be adequately responded to by trusting a subset of CAs. You need to do your important work on a machine that's locked down far more deeply than just by distrusting a few CAs (e.g., you probably want to disable 80% of the web platform to reduce attack surface), and ideally you'd do your less-sensitive work, e.g., reading the news and chatting with friends and listening to music, on a browser that looks as normal as possible to avoid standing out.

feelin_googley 9y ago

1. Uninstall the CA certficates the browser has pre-installed 2. Create and install own CA certificate 3. Download or create desired server certficates, sign them with own CA and install them I have not tried 1 but I regularly do 2 and 3. (Usually for monitoring outgoing encrypted traffic.) Anyway, the idea of your comment is spot on, I think. The process whereby users blindly trust browser authors has serious flaws. The user should be the one controlling the list of trusted CAs and servers, not a third party such as ad-supported company or organization distributing a web browser. The more the user (cf. third parties) actively controls what endpoints she will trust, the better. The system should encourage users to be active in managing what certficates they will trust versus passively letting ad-supported web companies do this for them. It is the user who has the greatest incentive to make things right in terms of her own security and privacy. Third parties may help, but they ultimately have their own interests to worry about.

omni 9y ago
How do you know you're not being MitM'd during step 3?
- ethbro 9y ago
  For all reasonable adversary examples shy of panopticon, downloading from multiple physical sites and global proxies and comparing the same roots across downloads should be sufficient, no?
  - omni 9y ago
    Ohhhh gotcha, seems legit. I thought the certs in step 3 were individual site certs, not the roots. Thought he was going for some site-level pinning or something.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

skywhopper 9y ago

As mentioned, you do have this power. But for the average user, this gives too much control, because the average user has no way to judge the trustworthiness of various CAs, if they even understood what CAs were, which they don't have the time or inclination to care about. I'd say most Hacker News readers wouldn't be able to make the correct determinations about this either.

ehsankia 9y ago
It's also worth noting that for average users, whenever any sort of "option" is given that can potentially open a security whole, there exists some malware out there that tries to get the user to abuse that option in order to infect them. This always happens, and is the reason so many things on Chrome are locked down and very hard to modify.
- Alyssa5454 9y ago
  I earn $85 hourly for working online from home. I never thought that it's possible but my best friend is making $10000 every month working this job and she told me about it. Check it out by visiting followin link>> ＡＭＡZＩＮＧＪＯＢＳ ᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵwww.bosscyber.comᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵᴵ

tinus_hn 9y ago

Being cautious about entering data on a form is a cute idea but it doesn't work in reality. The web, with JavaScript loaded from multiple origins, doesn't work that way. These origins are practically invisible to you, they have complete access to the pages they are included in and you have no way of checking their certificates.

grandalf 9y ago
I'm aware of this. At present, those scripts can be run from any origin using any of the many CAs the OS/browser trusts.

otp124 9y ago

Would you accept a browser plugin that reads only the certificate information and makes a decision to alert, or block/override the DOM rendering to protect the user?

hannob 9y ago

> I wish browser vendors would let me choose a trusted entity and make it simple for me to trust only CAs that my trusted entity supports, or the intersection of what multiple trusted entities endorse. This is an idea that I hear in variations from time to time, yet I think it's utterly wrong and goes against everything we know about IT security UI. The reason why HTTPS works at scale and is - with all its weaknesses - a crypto success story is because it works automatically. Unlike other things like PGP that ultimately expect from the user to get an understanding of complex concepts like public key cryptography and web of trusts. What you're trying to do is move HTTPS away from "it just works" to "user has to understand what a CA and a PKI is". Fortunately none of the relevant actors or browser vendors is moving in that direction, the opposite is happening. HTTPS is becoming the default, it works automatically and the security improvements that are being deployed (mainly CT) are systemic improvements to strengthen the whole system.

ykler 9y ago
I certainly agree that something that just works is by far the most important priority and do worry about anything that could muddy that message. On the other hand, I suppose what the parent proposes could be useful for users with heightened security concerns even if they are only a tiny minority, similarly to how tor is useful (and, in fact, using this setting would be less conspicuous than using tor and also less suspicious since there is no way of using it for criminal activity).
mehrdadn 9y ago
Not really. To be honest, the existing UX for trust relationships is hardly near optimal. Nobody needs to understand what CAs and PKIs are. I actually think the proper UI could make it pretty smooth and understandable by the layperson. All a user needs to be asked is "Whom would you trust to certify that the websites you visit are genuinely those they claim to be?" and be presented with a few reasonable options, such as perhaps (1) Default (recommended), (2) Certification companies (Verisign, Thawte, etc.), (3) Government agencies (e.g. CIA, NSA, etc.), (4) Other/Custom (advanced).
- icebraining 9y ago

_pmf_ 9y ago

I don't understand the reasoning behind not being allowed to deactivate/deinstall the standard trusted root certificates.

eyeareque 9y ago

Moxie proposed something like this in the past, quite forward thinking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_(SSL) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_(SSL)