8 ms·

Crypto Zealots

132 points by r4um 9y ago

blattimwind 9y ago
(Surprisingly the fine article is about cryptography, not fake internet money)
- Khol 9y ago
  Is this really surprising? I'm (still) more surprised when I click on an article with crypto in the title and it's not about cryptography. (There may be some underlying bias as to the links I see/am sent.)
  - zaarn 9y ago
    I've seen people use "crypto analysis" to mean "understands the kraken exchange UI better than most people". (A crime for which the only appropriate punishment is immediate banishment, IMO) It's very disappointing tbh, I love crypto. As in, cryptography.
  - simias 9y ago
    In this particular instance I fully expected an article about cryptocurrencies but I think that's mainly because of the other word in the title. I don't usually associate cryptography with zealotry.
- mkj 9y ago
  Good. http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2018-February/033917.html http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2018-February...
betageek 9y ago
> We’ve seen programs such as Let’s Encrypt that bring the price of domain name public key certificates down to a base of free Only free if you value your time at $0.
- robert_foss 9y ago
  It is very easy to set up in a permanent fashion.
  - betageek 9y ago
    Your definition of permanent is different to mine. LetsEncrypt relies on corporate sponsorship that could disappear at any time, then where would you be? Back to jumping through the same hoops you had to jump through before
    - tialaramex 9y ago
      Nah, there are two things going on here, and they're separate 1. The Let's Encrypt service from ISRG, which is a charity and so obviously if the donations dried up and somehow we didn't fix that then eventually (maybe a year or more) it would go away. This is also true for Wikipedia and the EFF in the most obvious direct sense, but it's true for all commercial services you rely on too, Youtube, Facebook, Hacker News, all could go away if their owners decide there isn't enough money any more. 2. ACME and other certificate automation. These are protocols, in ACME's case IETF Standards Track protocols, for how we can validate control over a name and issue certificates to an applicant. These don't vanish if ISRG goes away. For example loads of cPanel users already don't use Let's Encrypt, they have a single button "Yes, I want free certificates" feature, and Comodo (the root CA behind that) is taking a slice out of the cPanel license fees.
    - jmull 9y ago
      Your worst case scernaio is so mild: nothing lost. Why not use LetsEncrypt until it’s no longer available?
      - eadmund 9y ago
        > Your worst case scernaio is so mild: nothing lost. Not really. With Let's Encrypt available, the browser makers are now talking about penalising all HTTP sites. Next year, or the year after that, they could decommission Let's Encrypt (or start charging), and suddenly we'd all see what had been lost: it'd no longer be possible to set up an unpenalised site for free. Personally, I believe that an IP cert should be issued along with one's IP address, and a hostname cert should be issued along with one's domain name.
eadmund 9y ago
> We’ve seen programs such as Let’s Encrypt that bring the price of domain name public key certificates down to a base of free. And, interestingly enough, turn the implicit assumptions behind the whole XPKI infrastructure on their head. CAs built their business on the idea that we needed to know that sears.com is Sears, Roebuck & Co., while sears.net is a family website. But it turns out that we don't really care: we care that google.com is google.com, and that's it. What we really want is to know that the IP address we're talking to is the IP address we think we're talking to, and that the IP address we're talking to is the one we looked up for a particular DNS name. What we really want is not an identity-authentication certificate, but rather authorisation certificates. Over twenty years ago, RFCs 2692 & 2693 (and follow-up draft work) identified the issue, and offered a solution — but the industry stuck with identity-authentication certificates. This is kinda crazy when you think of it: knowing who someone is doesn't guarantee that I want to do business with him.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  >"CAs built their business on the idea that we needed to know that sears.com is Sears, Roebuck & Co., while sears.net is a family website. But it turns out that we don't really care: " // Don't we? I think people in general do care, but having a cert doesn't show it to be true unless you trust all CAs?
  - michaelcampbell 9y ago
    I think in general, no, we don't. I know this crowd thrives on the non-general, pedantic edge cases, however, so it depends on which "we" we are talking about.
- ballenf 9y ago
  > But it turns out that we don't really care: we care that google.com is google.com, and that's it. It's worse than that. 9/10 users I observe 'google'* google in order to run a google search. Every single time they go to a website that isn't saved as a bookmark, they search for it instead of typing an address into the address bar. I used to be surprised seeing people google 'gmail' and then click the top ad every morning... But I don't blame the users as much anymore. The companies that makes the browsers and web search know all this too and the UI has actually evolved to further muddy the difference between search and address. (Increasingly they bing it due to MS defaults in Win 10.) But your overall point is well taken and very true: having the sears.com domain name might not be as important as having the top google hit for 'sears'.
motohagiography 9y ago
It is worth reading the article this posted one is in response to. (http://www.circleid.com/posts/20180225_humming_an_open_internet_demise_in_london/ http://www.circleid.com/posts/20180225_humming_an_open_inter...) It has the kind of inflammatory institutional chauvinism one usually expects from bureaucrats defending their turf and moralizing their powers, but it's important to understand the outcomes the people like them are aiming for. Additionally, ignoring for a moment the usual appeals for intelligence and law enforcement, the coalition of interests the author is referencing includes those interested in enforcing "societal norms," and "support for persons with disabilities." The first means censorship and those people never seem to go away. But the second has nothing to do with transport layer encryption and appears to be a dogwhistle offering tacit institutional support to political agitators who want to get onside with adding surveillance levers to the internet. The article could reasonably be interpreted as a threat that if TLS 1.3 is adopted and imposes further costs on pervasive surveillance apparatuses, they will co-operate to further balkanize the internet.
- lakechfoma 9y ago
  That article was so hard to read. He jumps to so many conclusions without any logical path like the use of TLS will stress the bandwidth of providers, claiming its like "unauthorized taking of the provider's transport network resources". How will TLS vs not TLS meaningfully impact amount of traffic on a network? He doesn't say, just claims it. I'm guessing he means the provider can't throttle/control traffic based on packet inspection as easily? Regardless, this is like saying everyone in the neighborhood running all of their faucets at the same time is like stealing from the water provider. That's literally their only job, to be a pipe for water. People aren't stealing by stressing the network, if anything the network would be stealing for not running as advertised. "TLS 1.3 significantly facilitates widespread malware distribution" this guy...has to be getting paid by someone to say this, right? Who is this dude, what is CircleID?
  - milesvp 9y ago
    There's throttling to consider, but there's also caching. It's been a long time since I've had conversations with any NetOps folks working for ISPs, but it used to be very important for the health of a network to do considerable caching wherever possible. It's why http includes cache control headers. With TLS, only the browser can now honor this TTL, and an ISP can no longer cache a particularly popular webpage. I've long suspected that caching strategies are no longer very useful given how the internet looks today, but I also understand powerlaws and it wouldn't surprise me if caching is just as useful today as it was 20 years ago.
baby 9y ago
> A better position is to use QUIC. Not only is the payload encrypted, but the entire transport flow control is covered by the veil of encryption. I'm not sure I understand his/her point. Maybe this is pointing to QUIC encrypting part of the handshake?
- tialaramex 9y ago
  Not just the handshake. With say HTTPS (HTTP over TLS over TCP) the unencrypted TCP layer is where the flow control is, a bad guy can see and manipulate this flow even though the application data is opaque to them. Every TCP packet is identified as to which session it's part of, and the TCP stack is relying on the flow control to tell it e.g. to slow down because things are congested. In QUIC all that vanishes inside the encryption. The only things left unencrypted are the source and destination address.
  - baby 9y ago
    Oh I see what you're saying. Is it really an improvement though? If a bad guy can see and manipulate your TCP flow, he could also just drop packets.
    - slrz 9y ago
      It's an improvement because middleboxes can't mess up your packets when you're using authenticated encryption. Sure, they can still drop all of them, but that's a much easier problem to debug than otherwise. We have all these problems because a lot of middleboxes crap their pants when they "see" something in the protocol headers that their developers did not consider because it didn't seem to happen on their laptops or whatever. So you make the protocol headers invisible to the network's middleboxes to prevent the middlebox developer's broken mental model about that protocol from breaking your pipes.
      - baby 9y ago
        I see your point. Also, they can still "control" the flow of QUIC (to a lesser degree I'd imagine) by dropping some of the packets.
davedx 9y ago
For me, a "crypto zealot" is somebody who says we shouldn't use SMS based 2FA because it has some vulnerabilities: people who advocate using only the best crypto, or none at all. This just sounds like building a universal layer of encryption around all communications. It's not zealotry but common sense.
- ryanlol 9y ago
  >some vulnerabilities lol. I guess that’s one way to put it.
  - unethical_ban 9y ago
    Any 2FA > Any 1FA, for a constant first factor.
Luker88 9y ago
After reading both the linked article and the original to which this responds, I can say I am one of those Crypto zaelots. And not just because I am developing a protocol that encrypts everything end-to-end. The original article's claims are ludicrous, stating that TLS 1.3 would be basically unlawful, since the ISPs can not read the data. Than it says that a open internet is bad, citing small, empty pages that go from "there are nazis there" to "this and that political figure is there only thanks to the internet". The solution is: middleboxes that see all your traffic. ...'cause Trump would not have been elected with your middleboxes or something? That alone is disturbing on many levels. The author of the linked article points out that it is a bad idea due to what Snowden brought up, but basically stops there. So please let me say, fuck you and your middleboxes. But not only because of the Snowden revelations. I have seen middleboxes truncate traffic because they didn't understand a TCP option. Throttle/drop everything because they were way too downsized and could not handle the traffic, some barely able to NAT, let alone do their inspection. Centralized firewalls crashing due to too many packets in memory. Captive portals that spoof dns so that they can display the login page, except that I can't see that, 'cause HSTS and they don't have the certificate, or my device caches the DNS query result and I can't see that site anymore. So Fuck you and your middleboxes. Especially those that intercept all your TLS traffic, analyze and then pass it through, signed with their CA. Except they didn't really control the original certificate, or you can't control the trusted CAs. Or those that blocked me from updating antiviruses, because guess what, false positives. Or those that MITM your dns queries, to give you your much needed advertisement, when they don't outright MITM your HTTP to add their advertisement. Are any of those middleboxes ever updated anyway? By the developers, not by the local admins. Those middleboxes that break stuff and make troubleshooting hell. I have seen too many old, never-updated stuff to believe in your middleboxes anymore. If a company wants/needs to see/modify the traffic, then fine. On their devices. Install a CA there or install a VPN that tunnels the device to your proxy or something. Why does it have to transparent, for everyone? So really, I'm with the author. Fuck you and your fucking middleboxes.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > I am one of those Crypto zealots It's an unusual feeling to become a strawman. Every so often, somebody attacks a point by saying "Why, $foo is absurd! If you did foo, you'd be embracing a world that that looks like $bar!" And I read their piece, and think "Yeah, I'm totally on board with $bar. Sounds good!" It's a depressing reminder of just how far apart people's goals can be. I don't just disagree with them, I have views so distant that they use my beliefs as a reduction to the absurd. Fuck that article, and fuck its middleboxes. I accept that I am, by many standards, a crypto zealot. I'm alright with that.
Aissen 9y ago
If there's still any doubt that encrypting everything is the right way to go for internet protocols: Huge: @Citizenlab catches ISPs invisibly redirecting download requests for popular programs, injecting them with government spyware. Unencrypted web traffic is now provably a critical, in-the-wild vulnerability. 20-30% of top internet sites affected. https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/972110541408952320 https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/972110541408952320
- symtos 9y ago
  The ISP in question is in Turkey, so it should probably be noted that the Turkish government has a root cert trusted by both Mozilla and Microsoft. https://ccadb-public.secure.force.com/mozilla/IncludedCACertificateReport https://ccadb-public.secure.force.com/mozilla/IncludedCACert... https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/51151.microsoft-trusted-root-certificate-program-participants-as-of-january-30-2018.aspx https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/...
  - upofadown 9y ago
    Pretty sure that such a root cert would be fairly quickly yanked if they got caught using it for MITM attacks. That would cause a lot of trouble for the primary users of such certs. Such attacks are best done with some relatively obscure and unimportant compromised certificate authority.
tptacek 9y ago
The piece in CircleID to which Geoff Huston is responding is pretty clearly a troll, a bid for attention from someone professionally attached to some pretty marginal "standards" groups. It's incoherent and poorly informed. It's possible to make colorable arguments about the need for security protocols that admit to legitimate monitoring. The CircleID piece didn't make any of those. It's a little embarrassing to see someone of Geoff Huston's stature responding to what is so clearly a plea for recognition from someone who would otherwise have no impact whatsoever on Internet engineering. It's much more embarrassing for CircleID to have published that piece to begin with, but, what do you expect? CircleID is terrible.
- sesutton 9y ago
  From reading a few of Anthony Rutkowski's other screeds against end-to-end encryption I got the impression he might be a shill for some middlebox vendor. Did some digging and turns out he is an executive at Yaana which is a company that does exactly the kind of work that TLS 1.3 is trying to frustrate (credit to HN user Animats [1]). >"Yaana is a leading global provider of a wide range of intelligent compliance solutions including lawful interception, accurate data retention, big-data search & disclosure, advanced security and application specific analytics." That he thinks his unhinged writing style might be persuasive to anyone is baffling to me. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586504
  - twic 9y ago
    > That he thinks his unhinged writing style might be persuasive to anyone is baffling to me. This is what got me. "humming"! It's classic crank writing; who could possibly imagine that anyone could take this seriously?
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Humming, unfortunately, really is an IETF thing. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282

Crypto Zealots

132 points by r4um 9y ago

blattimwind 9y ago

(Surprisingly the fine article is about cryptography, not fake internet money)

Khol 9y ago
Is this really surprising? I'm (still) more surprised when I click on an article with crypto in the title and it's not about cryptography. (There may be some underlying bias as to the links I see/am sent.)
- zaarn 9y ago
  I've seen people use "crypto analysis" to mean "understands the kraken exchange UI better than most people". (A crime for which the only appropriate punishment is immediate banishment, IMO) It's very disappointing tbh, I love crypto. As in, cryptography.
- simias 9y ago
  In this particular instance I fully expected an article about cryptocurrencies but I think that's mainly because of the other word in the title. I don't usually associate cryptography with zealotry.
mkj 9y ago
Good. http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2018-February/033917.html http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2018-February...

betageek 9y ago

> We’ve seen programs such as Let’s Encrypt that bring the price of domain name public key certificates down to a base of free Only free if you value your time at $0.

robert_foss 9y ago
It is very easy to set up in a permanent fashion.
- betageek 9y ago
  Your definition of permanent is different to mine. LetsEncrypt relies on corporate sponsorship that could disappear at any time, then where would you be? Back to jumping through the same hoops you had to jump through before
  - tialaramex 9y ago
    Nah, there are two things going on here, and they're separate 1. The Let's Encrypt service from ISRG, which is a charity and so obviously if the donations dried up and somehow we didn't fix that then eventually (maybe a year or more) it would go away. This is also true for Wikipedia and the EFF in the most obvious direct sense, but it's true for all commercial services you rely on too, Youtube, Facebook, Hacker News, all could go away if their owners decide there isn't enough money any more. 2. ACME and other certificate automation. These are protocols, in ACME's case IETF Standards Track protocols, for how we can validate control over a name and issue certificates to an applicant. These don't vanish if ISRG goes away. For example loads of cPanel users already don't use Let's Encrypt, they have a single button "Yes, I want free certificates" feature, and Comodo (the root CA behind that) is taking a slice out of the cPanel license fees.
  - jmull 9y ago
    Your worst case scernaio is so mild: nothing lost. Why not use LetsEncrypt until it’s no longer available?
    - eadmund 9y ago
      > Your worst case scernaio is so mild: nothing lost. Not really. With Let's Encrypt available, the browser makers are now talking about penalising all HTTP sites. Next year, or the year after that, they could decommission Let's Encrypt (or start charging), and suddenly we'd all see what had been lost: it'd no longer be possible to set up an unpenalised site for free. Personally, I believe that an IP cert should be issued along with one's IP address, and a hostname cert should be issued along with one's domain name.

eadmund 9y ago

> We’ve seen programs such as Let’s Encrypt that bring the price of domain name public key certificates down to a base of free. And, interestingly enough, turn the implicit assumptions behind the whole XPKI infrastructure on their head. CAs built their business on the idea that we needed to know that sears.com is Sears, Roebuck & Co., while sears.net is a family website. But it turns out that we don't really care: we care that google.com is google.com, and that's it. What we really want is to know that the IP address we're talking to is the IP address we think we're talking to, and that the IP address we're talking to is the one we looked up for a particular DNS name. What we really want is not an identity-authentication certificate, but rather authorisation certificates. Over twenty years ago, RFCs 2692 & 2693 (and follow-up draft work) identified the issue, and offered a solution — but the industry stuck with identity-authentication certificates. This is kinda crazy when you think of it: knowing who someone is doesn't guarantee that I want to do business with him.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
>"CAs built their business on the idea that we needed to know that sears.com is Sears, Roebuck & Co., while sears.net is a family website. But it turns out that we don't really care: " // Don't we? I think people in general do care, but having a cert doesn't show it to be true unless you trust all CAs?
- michaelcampbell 9y ago
  I think in general, no, we don't. I know this crowd thrives on the non-general, pedantic edge cases, however, so it depends on which "we" we are talking about.
ballenf 9y ago
> But it turns out that we don't really care: we care that google.com is google.com, and that's it. It's worse than that. 9/10 users I observe 'google'* google in order to run a google search. Every single time they go to a website that isn't saved as a bookmark, they search for it instead of typing an address into the address bar. I used to be surprised seeing people google 'gmail' and then click the top ad every morning... But I don't blame the users as much anymore. The companies that makes the browsers and web search know all this too and the UI has actually evolved to further muddy the difference between search and address. (Increasingly they bing it due to MS defaults in Win 10.) But your overall point is well taken and very true: having the sears.com domain name might not be as important as having the top google hit for 'sears'.

motohagiography 9y ago

It is worth reading the article this posted one is in response to. (http://www.circleid.com/posts/20180225_humming_an_open_internet_demise_in_london/ http://www.circleid.com/posts/20180225_humming_an_open_inter...) It has the kind of inflammatory institutional chauvinism one usually expects from bureaucrats defending their turf and moralizing their powers, but it's important to understand the outcomes the people like them are aiming for. Additionally, ignoring for a moment the usual appeals for intelligence and law enforcement, the coalition of interests the author is referencing includes those interested in enforcing "societal norms," and "support for persons with disabilities." The first means censorship and those people never seem to go away. But the second has nothing to do with transport layer encryption and appears to be a dogwhistle offering tacit institutional support to political agitators who want to get onside with adding surveillance levers to the internet. The article could reasonably be interpreted as a threat that if TLS 1.3 is adopted and imposes further costs on pervasive surveillance apparatuses, they will co-operate to further balkanize the internet.

lakechfoma 9y ago
That article was so hard to read. He jumps to so many conclusions without any logical path like the use of TLS will stress the bandwidth of providers, claiming its like "unauthorized taking of the provider's transport network resources". How will TLS vs not TLS meaningfully impact amount of traffic on a network? He doesn't say, just claims it. I'm guessing he means the provider can't throttle/control traffic based on packet inspection as easily? Regardless, this is like saying everyone in the neighborhood running all of their faucets at the same time is like stealing from the water provider. That's literally their only job, to be a pipe for water. People aren't stealing by stressing the network, if anything the network would be stealing for not running as advertised. "TLS 1.3 significantly facilitates widespread malware distribution" this guy...has to be getting paid by someone to say this, right? Who is this dude, what is CircleID?
- milesvp 9y ago
  There's throttling to consider, but there's also caching. It's been a long time since I've had conversations with any NetOps folks working for ISPs, but it used to be very important for the health of a network to do considerable caching wherever possible. It's why http includes cache control headers. With TLS, only the browser can now honor this TTL, and an ISP can no longer cache a particularly popular webpage. I've long suspected that caching strategies are no longer very useful given how the internet looks today, but I also understand powerlaws and it wouldn't surprise me if caching is just as useful today as it was 20 years ago.

baby 9y ago

> A better position is to use QUIC. Not only is the payload encrypted, but the entire transport flow control is covered by the veil of encryption. I'm not sure I understand his/her point. Maybe this is pointing to QUIC encrypting part of the handshake?

tialaramex 9y ago
Not just the handshake. With say HTTPS (HTTP over TLS over TCP) the unencrypted TCP layer is where the flow control is, a bad guy can see and manipulate this flow even though the application data is opaque to them. Every TCP packet is identified as to which session it's part of, and the TCP stack is relying on the flow control to tell it e.g. to slow down because things are congested. In QUIC all that vanishes inside the encryption. The only things left unencrypted are the source and destination address.
- baby 9y ago
  Oh I see what you're saying. Is it really an improvement though? If a bad guy can see and manipulate your TCP flow, he could also just drop packets.
  - slrz 9y ago
    It's an improvement because middleboxes can't mess up your packets when you're using authenticated encryption. Sure, they can still drop all of them, but that's a much easier problem to debug than otherwise. We have all these problems because a lot of middleboxes crap their pants when they "see" something in the protocol headers that their developers did not consider because it didn't seem to happen on their laptops or whatever. So you make the protocol headers invisible to the network's middleboxes to prevent the middlebox developer's broken mental model about that protocol from breaking your pipes.
    - baby 9y ago
      I see your point. Also, they can still "control" the flow of QUIC (to a lesser degree I'd imagine) by dropping some of the packets.

davedx 9y ago

For me, a "crypto zealot" is somebody who says we shouldn't use SMS based 2FA because it has some vulnerabilities: people who advocate using only the best crypto, or none at all. This just sounds like building a universal layer of encryption around all communications. It's not zealotry but common sense.

ryanlol 9y ago
>some vulnerabilities lol. I guess that’s one way to put it.
- unethical_ban 9y ago
  Any 2FA > Any 1FA, for a constant first factor.

Luker88 9y ago

After reading both the linked article and the original to which this responds, I can say I am one of those Crypto zaelots. And not just because I am developing a protocol that encrypts everything end-to-end. The original article's claims are ludicrous, stating that TLS 1.3 would be basically unlawful, since the ISPs can not read the data. Than it says that a open internet is bad, citing small, empty pages that go from "there are nazis there" to "this and that political figure is there only thanks to the internet". The solution is: middleboxes that see all your traffic. ...'cause Trump would not have been elected with your middleboxes or something? That alone is disturbing on many levels. The author of the linked article points out that it is a bad idea due to what Snowden brought up, but basically stops there. So please let me say, fuck you and your middleboxes. But not only because of the Snowden revelations. I have seen middleboxes truncate traffic because they didn't understand a TCP option. Throttle/drop everything because they were way too downsized and could not handle the traffic, some barely able to NAT, let alone do their inspection. Centralized firewalls crashing due to too many packets in memory. Captive portals that spoof dns so that they can display the login page, except that I can't see that, 'cause HSTS and they don't have the certificate, or my device caches the DNS query result and I can't see that site anymore. So Fuck you and your middleboxes. Especially those that intercept all your TLS traffic, analyze and then pass it through, signed with their CA. Except they didn't really control the original certificate, or you can't control the trusted CAs. Or those that blocked me from updating antiviruses, because guess what, false positives. Or those that MITM your dns queries, to give you your much needed advertisement, when they don't outright MITM your HTTP to add their advertisement. Are any of those middleboxes ever updated anyway? By the developers, not by the local admins. Those middleboxes that break stuff and make troubleshooting hell. I have seen too many old, never-updated stuff to believe in your middleboxes anymore. If a company wants/needs to see/modify the traffic, then fine. On their devices. Install a CA there or install a VPN that tunnels the device to your proxy or something. Why does it have to transparent, for everyone? So really, I'm with the author. Fuck you and your fucking middleboxes.

Bartweiss 9y ago
> I am one of those Crypto zealots It's an unusual feeling to become a strawman. Every so often, somebody attacks a point by saying "Why, $foo is absurd! If you did foo, you'd be embracing a world that that looks like $bar!" And I read their piece, and think "Yeah, I'm totally on board with $bar. Sounds good!" It's a depressing reminder of just how far apart people's goals can be. I don't just disagree with them, I have views so distant that they use my beliefs as a reduction to the absurd. Fuck that article, and fuck its middleboxes. I accept that I am, by many standards, a crypto zealot. I'm alright with that.

Aissen 9y ago

If there's still any doubt that encrypting everything is the right way to go for internet protocols: Huge: @Citizenlab catches ISPs invisibly redirecting download requests for popular programs, injecting them with government spyware. Unencrypted web traffic is now provably a critical, in-the-wild vulnerability. 20-30% of top internet sites affected. https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/972110541408952320 https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/972110541408952320

symtos 9y ago
The ISP in question is in Turkey, so it should probably be noted that the Turkish government has a root cert trusted by both Mozilla and Microsoft. https://ccadb-public.secure.force.com/mozilla/IncludedCACertificateReport https://ccadb-public.secure.force.com/mozilla/IncludedCACert... https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/51151.microsoft-trusted-root-certificate-program-participants-as-of-january-30-2018.aspx https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/...
- upofadown 9y ago
  Pretty sure that such a root cert would be fairly quickly yanked if they got caught using it for MITM attacks. That would cause a lot of trouble for the primary users of such certs. Such attacks are best done with some relatively obscure and unimportant compromised certificate authority.

tptacek 9y ago

The piece in CircleID to which Geoff Huston is responding is pretty clearly a troll, a bid for attention from someone professionally attached to some pretty marginal "standards" groups. It's incoherent and poorly informed. It's possible to make colorable arguments about the need for security protocols that admit to legitimate monitoring. The CircleID piece didn't make any of those. It's a little embarrassing to see someone of Geoff Huston's stature responding to what is so clearly a plea for recognition from someone who would otherwise have no impact whatsoever on Internet engineering. It's much more embarrassing for CircleID to have published that piece to begin with, but, what do you expect? CircleID is terrible.

sesutton 9y ago
From reading a few of Anthony Rutkowski's other screeds against end-to-end encryption I got the impression he might be a shill for some middlebox vendor. Did some digging and turns out he is an executive at Yaana which is a company that does exactly the kind of work that TLS 1.3 is trying to frustrate (credit to HN user Animats [1]). >"Yaana is a leading global provider of a wide range of intelligent compliance solutions including lawful interception, accurate data retention, big-data search & disclosure, advanced security and application specific analytics." That he thinks his unhinged writing style might be persuasive to anyone is baffling to me. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586504
- twic 9y ago
  > That he thinks his unhinged writing style might be persuasive to anyone is baffling to me. This is what got me. "humming"! It's classic crank writing; who could possibly imagine that anyone could take this seriously?
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Humming, unfortunately, really is an IETF thing. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282