28 ms·

Is This Site Secure?

31 points by tigerlily 7y ago

skeeks 7y ago
Seriously? And what about Man-in-the-middle attacks? I mean come on, there are files to download from that website? How can I know if the site I see is REALLY your site without https? Really, I don't know why you just don't obtain a Let's Encrypt certificate, it's not difficult anymore...
- moviuro 7y ago
  > How can I know if the site I see is REALLY your site without https? HTTPS has never been about non-repudiation or authenticity; it's always been about confidentiality. You get some half-assed "authenticity" if you didn't mistyped the domain, and your clock is correctly set, and the certificate authority wasn't compromised, and the web server wasn't compromised, etc. You should use GPG or signify if you need authenticity. HTTPS just prevents injection and monitoring, a bit (see SNI, sniffing downloaded sizes, etc.).
  - anderskaseorg 7y ago
    Confidentiality without authentication is not a thing. If I don't know that I'm talking to you, then I might be talking to a MITM attacker who's reading everything we're saying (and may or may not be altering it). It really is that simple.
    - Karunamon 7y ago
      Sure it is. Imagine a website with a self signed cert. You're over HTTPS and still encrypted, but it's you vs the (statistically unlikely) MITM entity holding that cert's private key, rather than you vs everyone in traceroute running wireshark. It's strictly better. Granted this meant more before the days of LE, but you get what I'm saying.
  - lvh 7y ago
    Non-repudiation and authenticity are terms of art. By redefining them well outside of what everyone else means by those terms, I don't think you're helping discourse along. HTTPS _absolutely_ guarantees non-repudiation and authenticity. Casually dismissing the most important protocol on the Internet as giving you some "half-assed authenticity" is pretty silly, especially when one of your suggested alternatives is GPG, which literally can not get a damn MAC right in any mode actually deployed anywhere and instead has some weird superstitious MDC nonsense.
    - moviuro 7y ago
      > HTTPS _absolutely_ guarantees non-repudiation and authenticity No it doesn't. Correct HTTPS (i.e. connecting to a site with no errors) guarantees: * the entity that requested the certificate at the date it did had control over either the website or the DNS for a domain (if it is domain-squatting, it's even legal) * the Certificate Authority that did deliver that certificate did not suffer a breach; and otherwise followed protocol (CAA - which might be under attack, etc.) * the client connecting did either: not check for revocation (often), not encounter errors while checking, or silently ignored the absence of reply when asking for the CRL/OCSP responder And it's precisely because HTTPS doesn't guarantee any kind of authenticity that browsers themselves are dropping visual clues for EV certificates. [0] [0] https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-are-really-really-dead/ https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-ar...
      - lvh 7y ago
        As I stated in my original comment: sure, if you arbitrarily redefine what terms mean, HTTPS doesn’t provide authenticity or non-repudiation.
      - johncolanduoni 7y ago
        And if someone palms your GPG private key, or the public key is not properly authenticated in the first place, you don't get any of the kind of absolute authenticity you're talking about either. You complain about CRL/OCSP, but a GPG keyserver has all the same flaws (with worse default configuration of clients).
bouke 7y ago
Another reminder that we should fight for encryption by default, without requiring a validated certificate. Just self-signed like most end-ro-end encryption schemes. For such sites, browsers could not display a padlock to differentiate them from validated certificates (DV/EV). Thus without any additional configuration, the data sent over those connections would be safe.
- thenewnewguy 7y ago
  No they wouldn't, because this is trivially easy to MITM. The whole reason CAs exist is to verify the identity of the domain owner, because any random MITMer can claim to be yourbank.com and you can't prove it either way. Very technically this would be slightly better because it stops passive observers, but in reality I suspect it would be worse because tons of websites would use this broken by design solution and think they were perfectly secure because encryption. What we really need is to stop making HTTPS so hard to setup. It has gotten better in the last 5-10 years, but you still have to do this whole rigamarole with Apache2/nginx to disable weak cipher suites, setup all the right TLS parameters, etc because the default configuration is so bad. Imagine a world where I just installed an HTTP server and it asks me if I wanted to get a cert from Let's Encrypt (or any other ACME provider) and just did all the setup correctly for me.
  - ChrisSD 7y ago
    That's what TLS 1.3 is all about. It has a very limited suite of ciphers instead of 1.2's "throw everything at a wall and see what happens".
  - bouke 7y ago
    There are two aspects that are currently adressed by https: identity and privacy. What I’m proposing does indeed only solve the privacy aspect. And for some use-cases, that’s fine. Not all use-cases (e.g. your bank), and we would still have CAs for that.
    - marcinzm 7y ago
      I want privacy with the site I'm trying to connect to including when I do so for the first time. I don't care about privacy with whomever is running a MITM attack on me since that's rather pointless.
omk 7y ago
While at the begining I thought I sensed a bigger argument here, the further I read I am certain the author either prefers to discount MITM or lacks the understanding of the full scope of a MITM. I agree that there are other evils of the web but that does not mean we make trade-offs. The last paragraph goes as far as to say "The ad is not from the website; rather, it is inserted into the datastream — after it has left the Web server as it streams the web page to your computer — by your own Internet Service Provider (Optimum in my case). This is called "watermarking", a variation on the classic Man-in-the-Middle attack. So far it's an infrequent occurrence and not a major problem, and in any case definitely not a security risk, just Yet Another Annoyance" You let go of your user's privacy and security the moment you make such a trade-off calling it just another annoyance. While visiting this site a MITM could possibly inject a malicius javascript or sticky cookie. How is that just an annoyance? Protecting this is the biggest selling point of HTTPS.
- phh 7y ago
  I don't agree with the article (mainly because I consider that switching to https is free enough for anyone doing web hosting), but still, the point is pretty clear. https feels like red herring. When we say "MITM" who is this man? In most cases, the only two valid responses really are "my ISP", and "the service's hosting provider". https doesn't securize against evil hosting provider. When using Chrome+https, vs Firefox+http, in one case you give your data to your ISP, in the other case to Google. Google's primary focus is using my personal data. My ISP's primary focus is giving me Internet. Google is making fuss about https, to feed noise about Google itself. Yes, I totally agree that best is to simply Firefox https. Yes, I'm totally dismissing the issue of rogue networks. But >80% of the population uses Google, I believe that less than 20% of the population is using rogue networks. What about the issue of broken WiFi security? Well, the point stands: https is so much of a red herring, that everyone forgets to fix WiFi.
  - davidmurdoch 7y ago
    The man is also the hacker on the coffee shop WiFi intercepting traffic.
  - 7y ago
deif 7y ago
Sounds like the author doesn't know about Let's Encrypt. Pretty simple and free way to secure your site with no disadvantage and it kills OPs primary argument.
Kenji 7y ago
This site serves executables and script files via HTTP. Those potentially dangerous files are thus neither encrypted nor - and that's the bad part - authenticated, meaning that any man in the middle can inject content that infects your machine. I draw the line at this point. Serve with HTTP if you just have some text. Serve with HTTPS if you have logins, sensitive information or executables and scripts.
- pixl97 7y ago
  If I mitm you, your plain txt website now serves scripts. That's what everybody seems to miss. I can change your content type headers online. In theory the only way this would work is if browsers would not do javascript at all, or any other type of executable content on http sites.
  - bulatb 7y ago
    Or modify a TIFF or JPEG or whatever to attack the parser. That ancient system with no modern crypto that can only do HTTP is fully patched, right?
girst 7y ago
Yes, the phrasing "secure/insecure" is an abbreviation that loses a lot of meaning, but to dismiss TLS based on that seems dishonest. Even if you don't care about your user's privacy, don't you at least want the authenticity and integrity TLS provides? The author doesn't only acknowledge MitM, but even show an example where they themselves are MitM'd. Those same anti-TLS arguments have been rehashed often enough by now.
thenewnewguy 7y ago
> So Internet security has become a big and ongoing business, which has to be paid for. If I want to have a secure E-commerce site so I can make money, I have buy security services on top of the basic web services: an HTTPS address instead of the original HTTP: — OK, fair enough. Has this guy not heard of Let's Encrypt? HTTPS certificates are literally free. I was astounded when I got to the end of the article and saw it was published in 2020 and not 2015.
- tooop 7y ago
  He is probably assuming that e-commerce sites must/should use EV certificates. It could be an additional trust source but how many users really care that the cert is EVed.
  - achtung82 7y ago
    But hes not arguing against EVs (that argument would be very valid).
- achtung82 7y ago
  It's even more interesting that they seem to be working with a file-transfer protocol. It seems to me like they should be experts in this field, and clearly not aware of Let's Encrypt. Im confused.
kissgyorgy 7y ago
There is a big reason left out of his argument: privacy of the user who is reading the page. Essentially non-existing on HTTP.
ChrisSD 7y ago
It surprises me how often Betteridge's law of headlines is true > Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
lvh 7y ago
This site also invites me to run a pile of code shipped from it: http://www.kermitproject.org/ckscripts.html http://www.kermitproject.org/ckscripts.html -- so yes, it matters that I'm actually talking to kermitproject, and they should go get a LE cert.
kalleboo 7y ago
My own website is on HTTP because I mainly edit it and browse it on old computers where modern encryption is not available[0]. I assumed it would be the same reasoning here, as who else is using Kermit in 2020? Is anyone here using Kermit? Would love to know what for. Website seems to suggest it's for embedded systems, but I've only seen TFTP used in those cases. [0] http://www.kalleboo.com/retrotech/screenshots/powerbook-145b/netscape-mypage.png http://www.kalleboo.com/retrotech/screenshots/powerbook-145b...
- pixl97 7y ago
  Well, if someone was bored enough they could mitm your downloads and have fun with whatever computer they were loaded on. That said your not much of a target, but are still and easy one if someone chose to do so.
IAmGraydon 7y ago
> Probably browser makers like Google get "rewards" from the security companies for adding this feature. This seems like quite a jump to me, and it underpins his entire argument. Is there any evidence of this?
- achtung82 7y ago
  Isnt it the opposite that googles policy of showing same icon for DV and EV certificates are making it a lot more difficult for security companies to make money selling expensive EV certs?
cia-killer 7y ago
I wrote a script using mitmproxy to give the true answer. https://i.imgur.com/muFLWBT.png https://i.imgur.com/muFLWBT.png

31 points by tigerlily 7y ago

Seriously? And what about Man-in-the-middle attacks? I mean come on, there are files to download from that website? How can I know if the site I see is REALLY your site without https? Really, I don't know why you just don't obtain a Let's Encrypt certificate, it's not difficult anymore...

moviuro 7y ago
> How can I know if the site I see is REALLY your site without https? HTTPS has never been about non-repudiation or authenticity; it's always been about confidentiality. You get some half-assed "authenticity" if you didn't mistyped the domain, and your clock is correctly set, and the certificate authority wasn't compromised, and the web server wasn't compromised, etc. You should use GPG or signify if you need authenticity. HTTPS just prevents injection and monitoring, a bit (see SNI, sniffing downloaded sizes, etc.).
- anderskaseorg 7y ago
  Confidentiality without authentication is not a thing. If I don't know that I'm talking to you, then I might be talking to a MITM attacker who's reading everything we're saying (and may or may not be altering it). It really is that simple.
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    Sure it is. Imagine a website with a self signed cert. You're over HTTPS and still encrypted, but it's you vs the (statistically unlikely) MITM entity holding that cert's private key, rather than you vs everyone in traceroute running wireshark. It's strictly better. Granted this meant more before the days of LE, but you get what I'm saying.
- lvh 7y ago
  Non-repudiation and authenticity are terms of art. By redefining them well outside of what everyone else means by those terms, I don't think you're helping discourse along. HTTPS _absolutely_ guarantees non-repudiation and authenticity. Casually dismissing the most important protocol on the Internet as giving you some "half-assed authenticity" is pretty silly, especially when one of your suggested alternatives is GPG, which literally can not get a damn MAC right in any mode actually deployed anywhere and instead has some weird superstitious MDC nonsense.
  - moviuro 7y ago
    > HTTPS _absolutely_ guarantees non-repudiation and authenticity No it doesn't. Correct HTTPS (i.e. connecting to a site with no errors) guarantees: * the entity that requested the certificate at the date it did had control over either the website or the DNS for a domain (if it is domain-squatting, it's even legal) * the Certificate Authority that did deliver that certificate did not suffer a breach; and otherwise followed protocol (CAA - which might be under attack, etc.) * the client connecting did either: not check for revocation (often), not encounter errors while checking, or silently ignored the absence of reply when asking for the CRL/OCSP responder And it's precisely because HTTPS doesn't guarantee any kind of authenticity that browsers themselves are dropping visual clues for EV certificates. [0] [0] https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-are-really-really-dead/ https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-ar...
    - lvh 7y ago
      As I stated in my original comment: sure, if you arbitrarily redefine what terms mean, HTTPS doesn’t provide authenticity or non-repudiation.
    - johncolanduoni 7y ago
      And if someone palms your GPG private key, or the public key is not properly authenticated in the first place, you don't get any of the kind of absolute authenticity you're talking about either. You complain about CRL/OCSP, but a GPG keyserver has all the same flaws (with worse default configuration of clients).

bouke 7y ago

Another reminder that we should fight for encryption by default, without requiring a validated certificate. Just self-signed like most end-ro-end encryption schemes. For such sites, browsers could not display a padlock to differentiate them from validated certificates (DV/EV). Thus without any additional configuration, the data sent over those connections would be safe.

thenewnewguy 7y ago
No they wouldn't, because this is trivially easy to MITM. The whole reason CAs exist is to verify the identity of the domain owner, because any random MITMer can claim to be yourbank.com and you can't prove it either way. Very technically this would be slightly better because it stops passive observers, but in reality I suspect it would be worse because tons of websites would use this broken by design solution and think they were perfectly secure because encryption. What we really need is to stop making HTTPS so hard to setup. It has gotten better in the last 5-10 years, but you still have to do this whole rigamarole with Apache2/nginx to disable weak cipher suites, setup all the right TLS parameters, etc because the default configuration is so bad. Imagine a world where I just installed an HTTP server and it asks me if I wanted to get a cert from Let's Encrypt (or any other ACME provider) and just did all the setup correctly for me.
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  That's what TLS 1.3 is all about. It has a very limited suite of ciphers instead of 1.2's "throw everything at a wall and see what happens".
- bouke 7y ago
  There are two aspects that are currently adressed by https: identity and privacy. What I’m proposing does indeed only solve the privacy aspect. And for some use-cases, that’s fine. Not all use-cases (e.g. your bank), and we would still have CAs for that.
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    I want privacy with the site I'm trying to connect to including when I do so for the first time. I don't care about privacy with whomever is running a MITM attack on me since that's rather pointless.

omk 7y ago

While at the begining I thought I sensed a bigger argument here, the further I read I am certain the author either prefers to discount MITM or lacks the understanding of the full scope of a MITM. I agree that there are other evils of the web but that does not mean we make trade-offs. The last paragraph goes as far as to say "The ad is not from the website; rather, it is inserted into the datastream — after it has left the Web server as it streams the web page to your computer — by your own Internet Service Provider (Optimum in my case). This is called "watermarking", a variation on the classic Man-in-the-Middle attack. So far it's an infrequent occurrence and not a major problem, and in any case definitely not a security risk, just Yet Another Annoyance" You let go of your user's privacy and security the moment you make such a trade-off calling it just another annoyance. While visiting this site a MITM could possibly inject a malicius javascript or sticky cookie. How is that just an annoyance? Protecting this is the biggest selling point of HTTPS.

phh 7y ago
I don't agree with the article (mainly because I consider that switching to https is free enough for anyone doing web hosting), but still, the point is pretty clear. https feels like red herring. When we say "MITM" who is this man? In most cases, the only two valid responses really are "my ISP", and "the service's hosting provider". https doesn't securize against evil hosting provider. When using Chrome+https, vs Firefox+http, in one case you give your data to your ISP, in the other case to Google. Google's primary focus is using my personal data. My ISP's primary focus is giving me Internet. Google is making fuss about https, to feed noise about Google itself. Yes, I totally agree that best is to simply Firefox https. Yes, I'm totally dismissing the issue of rogue networks. But >80% of the population uses Google, I believe that less than 20% of the population is using rogue networks. What about the issue of broken WiFi security? Well, the point stands: https is so much of a red herring, that everyone forgets to fix WiFi.
- davidmurdoch 7y ago
  The man is also the hacker on the coffee shop WiFi intercepting traffic.
- 7y ago

deif 7y ago

Sounds like the author doesn't know about Let's Encrypt. Pretty simple and free way to secure your site with no disadvantage and it kills OPs primary argument.

Kenji 7y ago

This site serves executables and script files via HTTP. Those potentially dangerous files are thus neither encrypted nor - and that's the bad part - authenticated, meaning that any man in the middle can inject content that infects your machine. I draw the line at this point. Serve with HTTP if you just have some text. Serve with HTTPS if you have logins, sensitive information or executables and scripts.

pixl97 7y ago
If I mitm you, your plain txt website now serves scripts. That's what everybody seems to miss. I can change your content type headers online. In theory the only way this would work is if browsers would not do javascript at all, or any other type of executable content on http sites.
- bulatb 7y ago
  Or modify a TIFF or JPEG or whatever to attack the parser. That ancient system with no modern crypto that can only do HTTP is fully patched, right?

girst 7y ago

Yes, the phrasing "secure/insecure" is an abbreviation that loses a lot of meaning, but to dismiss TLS based on that seems dishonest. Even if you don't care about your user's privacy, don't you at least want the authenticity and integrity TLS provides? The author doesn't only acknowledge MitM, but even show an example where they themselves are MitM'd. Those same anti-TLS arguments have been rehashed often enough by now.

thenewnewguy 7y ago

> So Internet security has become a big and ongoing business, which has to be paid for. If I want to have a secure E-commerce site so I can make money, I have buy security services on top of the basic web services: an HTTPS address instead of the original HTTP: — OK, fair enough. Has this guy not heard of Let's Encrypt? HTTPS certificates are literally free. I was astounded when I got to the end of the article and saw it was published in 2020 and not 2015.

tooop 7y ago
He is probably assuming that e-commerce sites must/should use EV certificates. It could be an additional trust source but how many users really care that the cert is EVed.
- achtung82 7y ago
  But hes not arguing against EVs (that argument would be very valid).
achtung82 7y ago
It's even more interesting that they seem to be working with a file-transfer protocol. It seems to me like they should be experts in this field, and clearly not aware of Let's Encrypt. Im confused.

kissgyorgy 7y ago

There is a big reason left out of his argument: privacy of the user who is reading the page. Essentially non-existing on HTTP.

ChrisSD 7y ago

It surprises me how often Betteridge's law of headlines is true > Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

lvh 7y ago

This site also invites me to run a pile of code shipped from it: http://www.kermitproject.org/ckscripts.html http://www.kermitproject.org/ckscripts.html -- so yes, it matters that I'm actually talking to kermitproject, and they should go get a LE cert.

kalleboo 7y ago

My own website is on HTTP because I mainly edit it and browse it on old computers where modern encryption is not available[0]. I assumed it would be the same reasoning here, as who else is using Kermit in 2020? Is anyone here using Kermit? Would love to know what for. Website seems to suggest it's for embedded systems, but I've only seen TFTP used in those cases. [0] http://www.kalleboo.com/retrotech/screenshots/powerbook-145b/netscape-mypage.png http://www.kalleboo.com/retrotech/screenshots/powerbook-145b...

pixl97 7y ago
Well, if someone was bored enough they could mitm your downloads and have fun with whatever computer they were loaded on. That said your not much of a target, but are still and easy one if someone chose to do so.

IAmGraydon 7y ago

> Probably browser makers like Google get "rewards" from the security companies for adding this feature. This seems like quite a jump to me, and it underpins his entire argument. Is there any evidence of this?

achtung82 7y ago
Isnt it the opposite that googles policy of showing same icon for DV and EV certificates are making it a lot more difficult for security companies to make money selling expensive EV certs?

cia-killer 7y ago

I wrote a script using mitmproxy to give the true answer. https://i.imgur.com/muFLWBT.png https://i.imgur.com/muFLWBT.png