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In the era of instant, free and stupidly easy to configure TLS certificates why not just serve it over HTTPS?

by orf 5y ago

rsj_hn 5y ago
It's definately easier nowadays to do it, but you still have the issue of services becoming unavailable because certs expired - something that routinely happens, so it adds some operational overhead that - in the examples I described -- provides no benefit. This operational complexity is there even if the certs themselves are free. More importantly, security theater is something that should be avoided as it creates bad habits and promotes irreality in a field already rife with the same. I'm not sure why cryptography struggles so much with this, but there are a lot of people who don't understand what benefits, if any, cryptography provides to their application but decide to add it in anyways. This should be considered a bad practice. Imagine if someone told you to add a function to a codebase just because other codebases had it, and what harm can it do, even if this function served no purpose and doesn't require too many CPU cycles. Most software developers would oppose the idea, they would want to add code only when it is needed, and would favor the removal of unneeded code as beneficial, given that this simplifies the codebase. The same is true for encryption, which requires a lot of CPU cycles, and adds non-trivial complexity. So the idea that it should be added everywhere even where it's not needed is something we should resist.
- orf 5y ago
  In the time it took you to write this reply you could have set up an auto-renewing certificate for your site with let’s encrypt. Or you could have pressed a button and have it served behind cloudflare. The nuance of if encryption is really required in this specific case is pointless when it is so easy and readily available. The effective direction becomes “just blanket serve everything over HTTPS” because there isn’t much downside.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    >auto-renewing my super-smart and hardworking admins just lost a dozen services over the weekend because one of the hundred "easy" certs they manage expired, was not refreshed for whatever reasons, and the node happened to be an LDAP services node. at some point, "easy" and "instant" becomes "needs constant attention"

In the era of instant, free and stupidly easy to configure TLS certificates why not just serve it over HTTPS?

by orf 5y ago

In the era of instant, free and stupidly easy to configure TLS certificates why not just serve it over HTTPS?

It's definately easier nowadays to do it, but you still have the issue of services becoming unavailable because certs expired - something that routinely happens, so it adds some operational overhead that - in the examples I described -- provides no benefit. This operational complexity is there even if the certs themselves are free. More importantly, security theater is something that should be avoided as it creates bad habits and promotes irreality in a field already rife with the same. I'm not sure why cryptography struggles so much with this, but there are a lot of people who don't understand what benefits, if any, cryptography provides to their application but decide to add it in anyways. This should be considered a bad practice. Imagine if someone told you to add a function to a codebase just because other codebases had it, and what harm can it do, even if this function served no purpose and doesn't require too many CPU cycles. Most software developers would oppose the idea, they would want to add code only when it is needed, and would favor the removal of unneeded code as beneficial, given that this simplifies the codebase. The same is true for encryption, which requires a lot of CPU cycles, and adds non-trivial complexity. So the idea that it should be added everywhere even where it's not needed is something we should resist.

orf 5y ago
In the time it took you to write this reply you could have set up an auto-renewing certificate for your site with let’s encrypt. Or you could have pressed a button and have it served behind cloudflare. The nuance of if encryption is really required in this specific case is pointless when it is so easy and readily available. The effective direction becomes “just blanket serve everything over HTTPS” because there isn’t much downside.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  >auto-renewing my super-smart and hardworking admins just lost a dozen services over the weekend because one of the hundred "easy" certs they manage expired, was not refreshed for whatever reasons, and the node happened to be an LDAP services node. at some point, "easy" and "instant" becomes "needs constant attention"