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I am soooo grateful for LetsEncrypt -- before them, getting certificates was such a hassle. Even if you didn't fall for the EV or OV or whatever certs, just get

I am soooo grateful for LetsEncrypt -- before them, getting certificates was such a hassle. Even if you didn't fall for the EV or OV or whatever certs, just getting a DV cert was annoying. Every vendor had a slightly different web interface that was really annoying to use, and to get the cheapest price you usually had to go through a reseller, and they had even worse web forms. LetsEncrypt is such a breath of fresh air. And the short 90 day validity period more or less forces you to set up an auto-renew script, so you can typically set it and forget it. And if you mess something up, they even email you to warn that your cert is about to expire!

snowwrestler 5y ago
Let’s Encrypt does a great job of enabling encrypted connections. But encryption alone is insufficient for security in financial transactions. You also need to verify that the entity you’re exchanging encrypted traffic with is the one you intended to do business with. How do you do that part today? Not via Let’s Encrypt.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Sure but this is a problem the concept of web of trust should have solved for us if we had focused on government and enterprise buy in. For finance transactions there's basically a number of well known entities who should be vouching for the data I'm sending, who have large out of band systems for identity verification. Sadly none of that has happened.
- jacobwg 5y ago
  Is the domain insufficient? As an end user, that's the only signal I get, browsers are no longer showing me an EV certificate any differently than a DV certificate. If I'm communicating with mybank.com and I receive a valid DV certificate that was maliciously acquired, I have bigger problems than could be solved by EV certificates. I suppose Certificate Transparency is the tech working behind the scenes to flag mistaken or malicious certificates should they be issued.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    The domain isn't even shown anymore in some browsers ...
- Galanwe 5y ago
  > How do you do that part today? Not via Let’s Encrypt. Not even via TLS. In all seriousness, PKI at web scale is a joke. Nobody knows which CAs are installed in their browser, who these entities are, how trustable they are, etc. I have long accepted that TLS brought encryption, but certainly not trust.
  - windexh8er 5y ago
    I wouldn't say that it's all a "joke" in the context of assurance. I know a number of vendors that implement mTLS as part of their customers onboarding. I wouldn't be surprised to see product movement in this space to better address the consumer markets (maybe financial first?) with something that better manages and abstracts this for them. This, in many ways, solves a lot of exposure issues, but at the cost of what's overly complex for most users today.
- Gormo 5y ago
  That's true, but "can I trust the party on the other end of this channel?" and "is the channel secure against third-party eavesdroppers?" are fundamentally two different questions, and trying to answer both with the same solution was never a viable approach. Making the answer to the second question dependent on also answering the first -- so it was necessary to set up a whole chain of trust via a hierarchy of CAs just to encrypt your connections -- just delayed widespread adoption of HTTPS by decades. The points that the article is making are the aftermath industry having muddled validation of identity and encryption of traffic up with each other in the first place.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    HTTPS would have been a lot better (in my opinion) if it had been more like SSH when encountering a certificate it didn't recognize. Let's Encrypt finally solved that, but at the same time effectively made SSL certs mostly worthless for identity purposes (as it just means the domain you're talking to is the domain you're talking to).
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      Yeah, it's never made sense to me why browsers show such a scary warning before visiting a site over HTTPS with an invalid certificate, when they didn't show any warning at all before visiting a site over insecure HTTP, since the latter leaves you vulnerable to a superset of attacks.
      - tetraca 5y ago
        It makes sense though? If you're browsing via HTTP there is no expectation at all that what you are doing is secure. If you have a problem in HTTPS, you are expecting to be secure, you might not be. Hence, a warning.
      - andrewaylett 5y ago
        It's only recently that it's become reasonable to add interstitials without annoying everyone. Firefox in HTTPS-Only mode does exactly that. A bad certificate is a sign that something's actively wrong while (at least historically) no certificate doesn't really give a strong signal.
- cottager2 5y ago
  You do it via let’s encrypt… let’s encrypt only issues chase.com certificates to hosts it verifies are behind chase.com domains. That’s why they’re trusted as a CA.
  - nailer 5y ago
    That’s not correct. LE will happily issue certs for chase.com.swag.ru and doesn’t claim otherwise.
    - plainnoodles 5y ago
      Really, it's the browsers' faults to conflating the variously-tangentially-related concepts of entity identity, domain ownership, and connection encryption.
    - 7steps2much 5y ago
      True, but chase.com.swag.ru is not chase.com
      - jasode 5y ago
        >True, but chase.com.swag.ru is not chase.com Your reply is missing the point and the difficulty of the topic. Yes, _you_ know "chase.com.swag.ru" is wrong but the harder computer science question is: "How does a web browser deterministically evaluate if "chase.com.swag.ru" is not the real Chase bank the web surfer intends to reach?" In other words, the FireFox/Chrome browser doesn't have a function such as: if (ask_7steps2much_if_domain_is_real_instead_of_fake("chase.com.swag.ru")) then ... The generalized way that's been attempted is Certificate Authorities being hardcoded/whitelisted inside of browsers, etc. This helps for encryption to prevent MITM attacks but has many loopholes for identity verification. LetsEncrypt dv certs are more helpful for encryption. In contrast, something like EV certificates was trying to help with trusted identity. But it looks like EV certificates were not a UI signal used by most web surfers so Chrome/Firefox dropped the visual indicators: https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+firefox+remove+ev+certificate https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+firefox+remove+ev+cer...
- sigio 5y ago
  Yeah, but also not via any of the other methods we've been using the last couple of years.
- tptacek 5y ago
  It's not just TLS's job to authenticate your transactions; your financial institution also runs its own authentication system, which should ideally break phishing and reframing attacks (for instance, with WebAuthn).
  - snowwrestler 5y ago
    Why does every discussion of “how do you trust a website on first visit” get redirected to “here’s how to trust a website you’ve already visited?” I understand it’s the larger security problem because there are far more return visits than first visits. But that doesn’t mean it is the only security problem online. What is the web equivalent of walking into a store for the first time and feeling confident I won’t get assaulted or robbed?
    - tptacek 5y ago
      The point of the authentication systems I'm talking about, which address specifically the concern of the parent comment, is that financial transactions don't generally happen on first visits to websites, and "transactions" on your first visit to chase.com.phishing.xyz should be blocked by something like WebAuthn, not the EV policies of a TLS CA.
      - snowwrestler 5y ago
        “Financial transactions don't generally happen on first visits to websites” is just a description of how things are today, it doesn’t help us think about how things could be or could have been. Any purchase is a financial transaction; not sure why you zeroed in on banking. Those happen during first visits offline all the time.
        tptacek 5y ago
        I'm responding to the specific concern raised on the thread, not presenting my unified theory of authentication. WebAuthn is a better solution to "authenticating connections to services we have long-term relationships with, regardless of our relationships to particular websites" than anything in the TLS protocol could be.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > security in financial transactions In the cryptocurrency world, it's usually a feature to be unable to tell who you're sending money to, or even whether they exist, and this does not seem to have hindered adoption.

snowwrestler 5y ago

Let’s Encrypt does a great job of enabling encrypted connections. But encryption alone is insufficient for security in financial transactions. You also need to verify that the entity you’re exchanging encrypted traffic with is the one you intended to do business with. How do you do that part today? Not via Let’s Encrypt.

XorNot 5y ago
Sure but this is a problem the concept of web of trust should have solved for us if we had focused on government and enterprise buy in. For finance transactions there's basically a number of well known entities who should be vouching for the data I'm sending, who have large out of band systems for identity verification. Sadly none of that has happened.
jacobwg 5y ago
Is the domain insufficient? As an end user, that's the only signal I get, browsers are no longer showing me an EV certificate any differently than a DV certificate. If I'm communicating with mybank.com and I receive a valid DV certificate that was maliciously acquired, I have bigger problems than could be solved by EV certificates. I suppose Certificate Transparency is the tech working behind the scenes to flag mistaken or malicious certificates should they be issued.
- bombcar 5y ago
  The domain isn't even shown anymore in some browsers ...
Galanwe 5y ago
> How do you do that part today? Not via Let’s Encrypt. Not even via TLS. In all seriousness, PKI at web scale is a joke. Nobody knows which CAs are installed in their browser, who these entities are, how trustable they are, etc. I have long accepted that TLS brought encryption, but certainly not trust.
- windexh8er 5y ago
  I wouldn't say that it's all a "joke" in the context of assurance. I know a number of vendors that implement mTLS as part of their customers onboarding. I wouldn't be surprised to see product movement in this space to better address the consumer markets (maybe financial first?) with something that better manages and abstracts this for them. This, in many ways, solves a lot of exposure issues, but at the cost of what's overly complex for most users today.
Gormo 5y ago
That's true, but "can I trust the party on the other end of this channel?" and "is the channel secure against third-party eavesdroppers?" are fundamentally two different questions, and trying to answer both with the same solution was never a viable approach. Making the answer to the second question dependent on also answering the first -- so it was necessary to set up a whole chain of trust via a hierarchy of CAs just to encrypt your connections -- just delayed widespread adoption of HTTPS by decades. The points that the article is making are the aftermath industry having muddled validation of identity and encryption of traffic up with each other in the first place.
- bombcar 5y ago
  HTTPS would have been a lot better (in my opinion) if it had been more like SSH when encountering a certificate it didn't recognize. Let's Encrypt finally solved that, but at the same time effectively made SSL certs mostly worthless for identity purposes (as it just means the domain you're talking to is the domain you're talking to).
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    Yeah, it's never made sense to me why browsers show such a scary warning before visiting a site over HTTPS with an invalid certificate, when they didn't show any warning at all before visiting a site over insecure HTTP, since the latter leaves you vulnerable to a superset of attacks.
    - tetraca 5y ago
      It makes sense though? If you're browsing via HTTP there is no expectation at all that what you are doing is secure. If you have a problem in HTTPS, you are expecting to be secure, you might not be. Hence, a warning.
    - andrewaylett 5y ago
      It's only recently that it's become reasonable to add interstitials without annoying everyone. Firefox in HTTPS-Only mode does exactly that. A bad certificate is a sign that something's actively wrong while (at least historically) no certificate doesn't really give a strong signal.
cottager2 5y ago
You do it via let’s encrypt… let’s encrypt only issues chase.com certificates to hosts it verifies are behind chase.com domains. That’s why they’re trusted as a CA.
- nailer 5y ago
  That’s not correct. LE will happily issue certs for chase.com.swag.ru and doesn’t claim otherwise.
  - plainnoodles 5y ago
    Really, it's the browsers' faults to conflating the variously-tangentially-related concepts of entity identity, domain ownership, and connection encryption.
  - 7steps2much 5y ago
    True, but chase.com.swag.ru is not chase.com
    - jasode 5y ago
      >True, but chase.com.swag.ru is not chase.com Your reply is missing the point and the difficulty of the topic. Yes, _you_ know "chase.com.swag.ru" is wrong but the harder computer science question is: "How does a web browser deterministically evaluate if "chase.com.swag.ru" is not the real Chase bank the web surfer intends to reach?" In other words, the FireFox/Chrome browser doesn't have a function such as: if (ask_7steps2much_if_domain_is_real_instead_of_fake("chase.com.swag.ru")) then ... The generalized way that's been attempted is Certificate Authorities being hardcoded/whitelisted inside of browsers, etc. This helps for encryption to prevent MITM attacks but has many loopholes for identity verification. LetsEncrypt dv certs are more helpful for encryption. In contrast, something like EV certificates was trying to help with trusted identity. But it looks like EV certificates were not a UI signal used by most web surfers so Chrome/Firefox dropped the visual indicators: https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+firefox+remove+ev+certificate https://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+firefox+remove+ev+cer...
sigio 5y ago
Yeah, but also not via any of the other methods we've been using the last couple of years.
tptacek 5y ago
It's not just TLS's job to authenticate your transactions; your financial institution also runs its own authentication system, which should ideally break phishing and reframing attacks (for instance, with WebAuthn).
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  Why does every discussion of “how do you trust a website on first visit” get redirected to “here’s how to trust a website you’ve already visited?” I understand it’s the larger security problem because there are far more return visits than first visits. But that doesn’t mean it is the only security problem online. What is the web equivalent of walking into a store for the first time and feeling confident I won’t get assaulted or robbed?
  - tptacek 5y ago
    The point of the authentication systems I'm talking about, which address specifically the concern of the parent comment, is that financial transactions don't generally happen on first visits to websites, and "transactions" on your first visit to chase.com.phishing.xyz should be blocked by something like WebAuthn, not the EV policies of a TLS CA.
    - snowwrestler 5y ago
      “Financial transactions don't generally happen on first visits to websites” is just a description of how things are today, it doesn’t help us think about how things could be or could have been. Any purchase is a financial transaction; not sure why you zeroed in on banking. Those happen during first visits offline all the time.
      - tptacek 5y ago
        I'm responding to the specific concern raised on the thread, not presenting my unified theory of authentication. WebAuthn is a better solution to "authenticating connections to services we have long-term relationships with, regardless of our relationships to particular websites" than anything in the TLS protocol could be.
pjc50 5y ago
> security in financial transactions In the cryptocurrency world, it's usually a feature to be unable to tell who you're sending money to, or even whether they exist, and this does not seem to have hindered adoption.