4 ms·

Technically, certificates automatically validated only guarantees that you are on the website that let's encrypt thinks correspond to facebook.com. MiTM state w

Technically, certificates automatically validated only guarantees that you are on the website that let's encrypt thinks correspond to facebook.com. MiTM state wide could tamper with it

amaccuish 9y ago
How so?
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Presumably, someone could MITM a CA, and get their own domain validated certificate to another site. The cert may protect you from MITM in a coffee shop, but it doesn't necessarily help you against state-level actors.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    It’s currently standard for CAs to host multiple verifiers in multiple jurisdictions, to reduce the chances of this happening, afaik.
    - schoen 9y ago
      Let's Encrypt is developing this feature but it might be a little premature to call it "standard"—it's not specified in the Baseline Requirements and I'm not sure whether there's any CA that has announced it as a part of all certificate issuance.
      - amaccuish 9y ago
        Most CAs aren't automated :) I believe any that do ensure that DNS requests are tried from multiple different locations to prevent this happening. Though you're right, the standards haven't caught up yet.
  - alwillis 9y ago
    >The cert may protect you from MITM in a coffee shop, but it doesn't necessarily help you against state-level actors. I can use HPKP to pin the cert I get from Lets Encrypt; a cert issued for my domain some other way won’t be trusted due to the hash of its public key being different from the one I pinned. From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Public_Key_Pinning https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Public_Key...: The Public Key Pinning Extension for HTML5 (HPKP) is a security feature that tells a web client to associate a specific cryptographic public key with a certain web server to decrease the risk of MITM attacks with forged certificates. HPKP makes administration more complicated but if your threat model includes state-level actors, it prevents them from getting a CA to issue a valid certificate for your domain. Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) has been mandatory for CAs since September 2017; it uses DNS to specify which CAs are allowed to issue certificates for your domain: https://blog.qualys.com/ssllabs/2017/03/13/caa-mandated-by-cabrowser-forum https://blog.qualys.com/ssllabs/2017/03/13/caa-mandated-by-c....
    - pfg 9y ago
      It's worth noting that Chrome has plans to deprecate header-based pins in a few months and static pins (the ones baked into binaries) at some point after their Certificate Transparency policy covers all non-expired certificates. That'll make Firefox the only mainstream browser with HPKP support. (Mozilla hasn't announced their intentions so far.)

Technically, certificates automatically validated only guarantees that you are on the website that let's encrypt thinks correspond to facebook.com. MiTM state wide could tamper with it

amaccuish 9y ago

How so?

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Presumably, someone could MITM a CA, and get their own domain validated certificate to another site. The cert may protect you from MITM in a coffee shop, but it doesn't necessarily help you against state-level actors.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  It’s currently standard for CAs to host multiple verifiers in multiple jurisdictions, to reduce the chances of this happening, afaik.
  - schoen 9y ago
    Let's Encrypt is developing this feature but it might be a little premature to call it "standard"—it's not specified in the Baseline Requirements and I'm not sure whether there's any CA that has announced it as a part of all certificate issuance.
    - amaccuish 9y ago
      Most CAs aren't automated :) I believe any that do ensure that DNS requests are tried from multiple different locations to prevent this happening. Though you're right, the standards haven't caught up yet.
- alwillis 9y ago
  >The cert may protect you from MITM in a coffee shop, but it doesn't necessarily help you against state-level actors. I can use HPKP to pin the cert I get from Lets Encrypt; a cert issued for my domain some other way won’t be trusted due to the hash of its public key being different from the one I pinned. From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Public_Key_Pinning https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Public_Key...: The Public Key Pinning Extension for HTML5 (HPKP) is a security feature that tells a web client to associate a specific cryptographic public key with a certain web server to decrease the risk of MITM attacks with forged certificates. HPKP makes administration more complicated but if your threat model includes state-level actors, it prevents them from getting a CA to issue a valid certificate for your domain. Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) has been mandatory for CAs since September 2017; it uses DNS to specify which CAs are allowed to issue certificates for your domain: https://blog.qualys.com/ssllabs/2017/03/13/caa-mandated-by-cabrowser-forum https://blog.qualys.com/ssllabs/2017/03/13/caa-mandated-by-c....
  - pfg 9y ago
    It's worth noting that Chrome has plans to deprecate header-based pins in a few months and static pins (the ones baked into binaries) at some point after their Certificate Transparency policy covers all non-expired certificates. That'll make Firefox the only mainstream browser with HPKP support. (Mozilla hasn't announced their intentions so far.)