4 ms·

I don't understand the glee, schadenfreude even. So because the UI side of things didn't work out, it is an improvement that now all certificates will go back t

I don't understand the glee, schadenfreude even. So because the UI side of things didn't work out, it is an improvement that now all certificates will go back to the "crusty Perl script fetching a side-channel secret from a webserver" method of "validation"? On the contrary, we should just push for extended validation on all certificates. Whether they come with a fancy UI or not. Because if we are on the topic of https UI effectiveness, then I'm pretty sure everything we have right now is doing a horrible job and could be removed with much the same tenuous reasoning.

Znafon 7y ago
Why push for extended validation of there is no security benefits and the user experience is the same? I remember that someone had successfully got an extended certificate for "Stripe, Inc". Things like certificate transparency log monitoring seems better than EV to improve security.
- stefan_ 7y ago
  Maybe EV isn't the answer. But there is opportunity for something else out there, because right now https is not living up to the "authentication" promise when you have Firefox, Chrome et al. kotau to company proxies and all kinds of dubious state CAs in the trust root. That's before you get to the UI failures, where phishers can trivially get that lock for their microssoft.com domains.
  - hsk823 7y ago
    Yes but none of those issues are fixed via extended validation of TLS certs. Extended validation was simply a cash grab and a human component to validating you are who you are beyond a domain name mismatch. EV process was the same as any other cert process, what ever company out there issues the EV was just doing extra leg work and making sure business registration paperwork was legit, etc. etc. It didn't make it more safe, it just added extra steps to validate ownership of a domain. MITM TLS proxies and shady root CAs are and will continue to exist in the enterprise and for state actors for the foreseeable future. EV does not challenge this, in fact EV certs like any cert that's intercepted properly, the end user will never know that it happened.
  - hannob 7y ago
    > But there is opportunity for something else out there, because right now https is not living up to the "authentication" promise when you have Firefox, Chrome et al. kotau to company proxies and all kinds of dubious state CAs in the trust root. There's already a lot of things being done to improve the situation. Honest question: Are you aware of them? Do you know Certificate Transparency? Have you followed the intense discussion about Dark Matter? Do you know what the Baseline Requirements are? Do you know how Webauthn prevents Phishing?
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  There is a security benefit to EV: the paper trail to which the CA attests. That provides a tool that law enforcement can use to track you down if you use your EV-cert-provisioned site to commit a crime. To get an EV cert, you must prove to the CA your identity, portions of which are then encoded in the cert itself. This is analogous to how a fraud is discouraged in physical stores. A street address and business license won't prevent a store from ripping you off. But it gives you plenty of info to pursue a complaint if it happens.
  - eridius 7y ago
    That's assuming you even get an EV cert though. EV failed because it didn't provide any benefit, as evidenced by sites like PayPal (which you would think is the poster child for EV) ditching it. Because it didn't matter to users if you had an EV cert, you didn't need to get one. The reason why "Stripe, Inc." is interesting is because it disproves the whole claim that users can trust the business name displayed, because they can't. It doesn't matter if the CA has a paper trail for the EV cert, because nobody's saying people will use EV certs for large-scale phishing attacks (users don't even notice its absence to begin with so there's no point). But since you can't trust the business name, it means EV is actually an attack vector for spearfishing. Pick a single high-value target, get a misleading EV cert, get them on that site. EV is now a significant negative.
    - snowwrestler 7y ago
      > The reason why "Stripe, Inc." is interesting is because it disproves the whole claim that users can trust the business name displayed, because they can't. The only people who made this claim, did it so they could attack it. The only claim of the EV system is that the display name matches a real legal entity, which is not the same thing as being consumer-recognizable. The intent with EV was that the presence of its UI element--regardless of what it said--would confer trust. The idea does not rely on users recognizing the company name any more than trust in physical stores relies on users memorizing street addresses. The concept is that a legit company would opt to tie its online presence back to its legal entity (via an EV cert), but a scam would not because doing so would take more effort and make it harder to escape. Again: this is analogous to the effort that it takes to set up a physical store. You can buy things off the back of a truck, but everyone knows that is sketchy. You don't know where that stuff came from, and you have no recourse once the truck drives away. Setting up a store is a lot harder than driving up a truck--a company has to establish a legal presence in the jurisdiction, sign a lease, get a business license, comply with all sorts of regulations, pay taxes, etc. But they go through that effort because doing so confers trust. It is this system that is behind the social convention that it's ok to walk into a new store and hand them your credit card to buy something. The goal of EV, of the CA system in general, was to try to create a similar set of trust signifiers and conventions online.
donmcronald 7y ago
It’s because the existing system is built around greed more than quality identity verification. I wouldn’t be able to verify the identity of someone in (ex:) India and, I assume, it’s just as hard for them to verify mine. Every time I’ve done verification for code signing I’ve dealt with someone who, IMHO, wasn’t qualified to verify my identity. One of the worst experiences I had was getting docs notarized just to have the CA turn around and ask me to send them a list of notaries in my area so they could call the one I used. The whole system is terrible and the margins are so huge that nothing will ever be fixed unless the CAs are forced to come up with something better.
jerf 7y ago
"I don't understand the glee, schadenfreude even." Because he has personally been on the front line of the debate, been told by lots of people and entities with power in the relevant domain that he's wrong, and events are proving him right, at least in terms of his predictions about what would happen. Taking a bit of a victory lap is only human. I thought he was suitably discreet about it. Separately, I think it there is improvement here, which is that the system is no longer claiming to be securing an element of the connection which it isn't really securing. Sometimes if you want to make progress you have to clear the fake solutions out of the way that are just sitting there creating the illusion the problem is solved, so that nobody tries a real solution. Personally I'd say that what we have right now does a good job of being what it is, it's just that there's a mismatch between what it is and what people thinks it is. This makes room for other potentially better solutions by helping to resolve that mismatch. (In a nutshell, the system is good at asserting that you are speaking to someone who has convinced the world that they are capable of serving web requests issued using a particular domain name (I tried to write that carefully), and that nobody in the middle of that connection can intercept or modify the contents. We can now clearly see a problem in how we connect that legal entity to the domain name, without EV certificates sitting there pretending to solve that problem.)
icedchai 7y ago
I'd rather not go back to the 2000's and earlier method of validation that required faxing in paperwork, then waiting days and days, etc. This is paperwork which could easily be forged, by the way. Finally, after decades, it is simple enough to get TLS that people actually do it.
UncleMeat 7y ago
Because it makes the people who complain about LetsEncrypt go away. EV certs (arguably) provide extremely little value while allowing an industry to extract money for no reason and also publish FUD about LetsEncrypt, which is among the most impactful projects in history for getting humans to use encryption.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  The only meaningful impact of LetsEncrypt and HTTPS Everywhere pushes is that now most phishing sites use HTTPS. Since most non-technical users trust the presence of the lock icon (even though they shouldn't), this has been great for phishing sites.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - IcePic 7y ago
    Then again, the phishing problem is that you can get m1cros0ft.com registered. If you can get that one and trick someone, you won. If you can get it and a cert for it (free or not) then you as a phisher win. If you can't get it, then you can't get an LE cert for it either and you lose. Therefore, the LE part is just icing on the cake, not the enabler for scams.
    - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
      Cost is a barrier to entry, and when you are scamming people, you often have to be able to generate large numbers of scam attempts, as most will fail. A cert costing $70 is a big deal for a scammer, because a scammer may need to get certs for a large number of domains. Therefore, before HTTPS Everywhere, phishers weren't using them much, it added a lot of cost to each attempt. Now, it's a requirement to avoid warnings in browsers, and the certs are free, and hence, all phishers now use HTTPS. And unfortunately, a whole generation of computer illiterate users believe that lock means the site is legit.
      - 7y ago

Znafon 7y ago

Why push for extended validation of there is no security benefits and the user experience is the same? I remember that someone had successfully got an extended certificate for "Stripe, Inc". Things like certificate transparency log monitoring seems better than EV to improve security.

stefan_ 7y ago
Maybe EV isn't the answer. But there is opportunity for something else out there, because right now https is not living up to the "authentication" promise when you have Firefox, Chrome et al. kotau to company proxies and all kinds of dubious state CAs in the trust root. That's before you get to the UI failures, where phishers can trivially get that lock for their microssoft.com domains.
- hsk823 7y ago
  Yes but none of those issues are fixed via extended validation of TLS certs. Extended validation was simply a cash grab and a human component to validating you are who you are beyond a domain name mismatch. EV process was the same as any other cert process, what ever company out there issues the EV was just doing extra leg work and making sure business registration paperwork was legit, etc. etc. It didn't make it more safe, it just added extra steps to validate ownership of a domain. MITM TLS proxies and shady root CAs are and will continue to exist in the enterprise and for state actors for the foreseeable future. EV does not challenge this, in fact EV certs like any cert that's intercepted properly, the end user will never know that it happened.
- hannob 7y ago
  > But there is opportunity for something else out there, because right now https is not living up to the "authentication" promise when you have Firefox, Chrome et al. kotau to company proxies and all kinds of dubious state CAs in the trust root. There's already a lot of things being done to improve the situation. Honest question: Are you aware of them? Do you know Certificate Transparency? Have you followed the intense discussion about Dark Matter? Do you know what the Baseline Requirements are? Do you know how Webauthn prevents Phishing?
snowwrestler 7y ago
There is a security benefit to EV: the paper trail to which the CA attests. That provides a tool that law enforcement can use to track you down if you use your EV-cert-provisioned site to commit a crime. To get an EV cert, you must prove to the CA your identity, portions of which are then encoded in the cert itself. This is analogous to how a fraud is discouraged in physical stores. A street address and business license won't prevent a store from ripping you off. But it gives you plenty of info to pursue a complaint if it happens.
- eridius 7y ago
  That's assuming you even get an EV cert though. EV failed because it didn't provide any benefit, as evidenced by sites like PayPal (which you would think is the poster child for EV) ditching it. Because it didn't matter to users if you had an EV cert, you didn't need to get one. The reason why "Stripe, Inc." is interesting is because it disproves the whole claim that users can trust the business name displayed, because they can't. It doesn't matter if the CA has a paper trail for the EV cert, because nobody's saying people will use EV certs for large-scale phishing attacks (users don't even notice its absence to begin with so there's no point). But since you can't trust the business name, it means EV is actually an attack vector for spearfishing. Pick a single high-value target, get a misleading EV cert, get them on that site. EV is now a significant negative.
  - snowwrestler 7y ago
    > The reason why "Stripe, Inc." is interesting is because it disproves the whole claim that users can trust the business name displayed, because they can't. The only people who made this claim, did it so they could attack it. The only claim of the EV system is that the display name matches a real legal entity, which is not the same thing as being consumer-recognizable. The intent with EV was that the presence of its UI element--regardless of what it said--would confer trust. The idea does not rely on users recognizing the company name any more than trust in physical stores relies on users memorizing street addresses. The concept is that a legit company would opt to tie its online presence back to its legal entity (via an EV cert), but a scam would not because doing so would take more effort and make it harder to escape. Again: this is analogous to the effort that it takes to set up a physical store. You can buy things off the back of a truck, but everyone knows that is sketchy. You don't know where that stuff came from, and you have no recourse once the truck drives away. Setting up a store is a lot harder than driving up a truck--a company has to establish a legal presence in the jurisdiction, sign a lease, get a business license, comply with all sorts of regulations, pay taxes, etc. But they go through that effort because doing so confers trust. It is this system that is behind the social convention that it's ok to walk into a new store and hand them your credit card to buy something. The goal of EV, of the CA system in general, was to try to create a similar set of trust signifiers and conventions online.

donmcronald 7y ago

It’s because the existing system is built around greed more than quality identity verification. I wouldn’t be able to verify the identity of someone in (ex:) India and, I assume, it’s just as hard for them to verify mine. Every time I’ve done verification for code signing I’ve dealt with someone who, IMHO, wasn’t qualified to verify my identity. One of the worst experiences I had was getting docs notarized just to have the CA turn around and ask me to send them a list of notaries in my area so they could call the one I used. The whole system is terrible and the margins are so huge that nothing will ever be fixed unless the CAs are forced to come up with something better.

jerf 7y ago

"I don't understand the glee, schadenfreude even." Because he has personally been on the front line of the debate, been told by lots of people and entities with power in the relevant domain that he's wrong, and events are proving him right, at least in terms of his predictions about what would happen. Taking a bit of a victory lap is only human. I thought he was suitably discreet about it. Separately, I think it there is improvement here, which is that the system is no longer claiming to be securing an element of the connection which it isn't really securing. Sometimes if you want to make progress you have to clear the fake solutions out of the way that are just sitting there creating the illusion the problem is solved, so that nobody tries a real solution. Personally I'd say that what we have right now does a good job of being what it is, it's just that there's a mismatch between what it is and what people thinks it is. This makes room for other potentially better solutions by helping to resolve that mismatch. (In a nutshell, the system is good at asserting that you are speaking to someone who has convinced the world that they are capable of serving web requests issued using a particular domain name (I tried to write that carefully), and that nobody in the middle of that connection can intercept or modify the contents. We can now clearly see a problem in how we connect that legal entity to the domain name, without EV certificates sitting there pretending to solve that problem.)

icedchai 7y ago

I'd rather not go back to the 2000's and earlier method of validation that required faxing in paperwork, then waiting days and days, etc. This is paperwork which could easily be forged, by the way. Finally, after decades, it is simple enough to get TLS that people actually do it.

UncleMeat 7y ago

Because it makes the people who complain about LetsEncrypt go away. EV certs (arguably) provide extremely little value while allowing an industry to extract money for no reason and also publish FUD about LetsEncrypt, which is among the most impactful projects in history for getting humans to use encryption.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
The only meaningful impact of LetsEncrypt and HTTPS Everywhere pushes is that now most phishing sites use HTTPS. Since most non-technical users trust the presence of the lock icon (even though they shouldn't), this has been great for phishing sites.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- IcePic 7y ago
  Then again, the phishing problem is that you can get m1cros0ft.com registered. If you can get that one and trick someone, you won. If you can get it and a cert for it (free or not) then you as a phisher win. If you can't get it, then you can't get an LE cert for it either and you lose. Therefore, the LE part is just icing on the cake, not the enabler for scams.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    Cost is a barrier to entry, and when you are scamming people, you often have to be able to generate large numbers of scam attempts, as most will fail. A cert costing $70 is a big deal for a scammer, because a scammer may need to get certs for a large number of domains. Therefore, before HTTPS Everywhere, phishers weren't using them much, it added a lot of cost to each attempt. Now, it's a requirement to avoid warnings in browsers, and the certs are free, and hence, all phishers now use HTTPS. And unfortunately, a whole generation of computer illiterate users believe that lock means the site is legit.
    - 7y ago