2 ms·

> They're the tie breaking vote between Bank of America and the man-in-the-middle proxy pretending to be Bank of America. I'm not suggesting a new encryption s

by Udo 16y ago

> They're the tie breaking vote between Bank of America and the man-in-the-middle proxy pretending to be Bank of America. I'm not suggesting a new encryption standard for online banking, I want better default security for otherwise unprotected web traffic. > There is no such thing as meaningful encryption without authentication; it's like a car with an engine but no steering wheel. Encryption without authentication is, at best, a trivial form of obfuscation (it's trivial because everybody knows how to reverse it). In the context of my comment I was referring to the top-down cert authority structure (sorry if that wasn't clear), I didn't mean to imply that a webserver shouldn't have any certificate at all. I guess it comes down to disagreeing with you about self-signed certificates. I believe they would have been a good idea as a default mechanism for connecting to web servers and I still think they're way more secure than having nothing at all. I believe that giving people exactly two choices, between cryptographic perfection and making transfers completely public, is wrong. And asserting that self-signed certificates are worse than no protection at all seems misguided to me. But in the end, you're the competent engineer and I'm just some guy posting inane comments on a message board over an unsecured link. And in any case, it's not like we'll change the way browser-based encryption works in the foreseeable future, so I kinda regret starting this whole discussion. > If you think anchor keys aren't the right solution to SSL, the onus is on you to suggest a viable alternative. "Nothing" is not a viable alternative; I'm sorry to say this but I suspect you are, maybe inadvertently, attacking a straw man here...

tptacek 16y ago
Self-signed certificates do not solve the problem and it's fairly straightforward to see why: anybody can create them. How does a browser know to pick your real self-signed certificate from the one generated by the man-in-the-middle proxy? Every single free and commercial web security testing tool already does this on the fly. We are not talking about some complex, unlikely-to-occur threat. It's a pushbutton attack. So... what's the point of a self-signed cert?
Natsu 16y ago
> I want better default security for otherwise unprotected web traffic. The problem is that encryption without key agreement isn't better default security. It's worse because people will expect it to be secure when it cannot be. You're probably thinking that it's really hard to get between you and random web servers, but you are sadly mistaken.

by Udo 16y ago

tptacek 16y ago

Self-signed certificates do not solve the problem and it's fairly straightforward to see why: anybody can create them. How does a browser know to pick your real self-signed certificate from the one generated by the man-in-the-middle proxy? Every single free and commercial web security testing tool already does this on the fly. We are not talking about some complex, unlikely-to-occur threat. It's a pushbutton attack. So... what's the point of a self-signed cert?

Natsu 16y ago

> I want better default security for otherwise unprotected web traffic. The problem is that encryption without key agreement isn't better default security. It's worse because people will expect it to be secure when it cannot be. You're probably thinking that it's really hard to get between you and random web servers, but you are sadly mistaken.