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Right now, if what Troy is saying is true, then self-signed certificates are basically every bit as good as a LE cert - because no one actually verifies the cha
by zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Right now, if what Troy is saying is true, then self-signed certificates are basically every bit as good as a LE cert - because no one actually verifies the chain of authority. But oh no, self-signing is a bad practice, and effectively useless because browsers will throw up warnings. So you go to LetsEncrypt and get a certificate that has a pretty green padlock.. because their `certbot` made it with 0 review of who you are or what the site does? How is this different at all?
I'm not an expert, but at high level it seems to me that the only way to get trust is to tie every digital property to a real person, do some sort of KYC on them and allow for dispute resolution. The usual bureaucratic pains of doing anything in the real world would extend to the digital world, and the usual arguments about increase in regulation entrenching existing power structures and slowing innovation apply.
- xg15 5y ago> because their `certbot` made it with 0 review of who you are or what the site does? How is this different at all? I think it only makes sense if you view the whole HTTPS everywhere initiative as a counter against MITM attacks - and only that. Everything related to identity has effectively been delegated to domain registrars. TLS certs as envisioned by browsers are really only about proving that you have genuine control of a particular domain - they give no indication at all who you are, whether your intentions are good or whether or not you're trying to imitate a different domain. In that sense, the UI redesign from "neutral/secure" to "insecure/neutral" in Chrome makes some sense: HTTPS is necessary but not sufficient to make a site trustworthy: A https site might still be a scammer, but a http site can always be intercepted and manipulated by MITM, so http sites can can never be trustworthy at all.
- zaptheimpaler 5y agoYes, SSL prevents MITM but my point was that a self-signed certificate does this just as well as an automated certificate from LetsEncrypt.
- xg15 5y agoIt doesn't though. The attacker could simply present their own self-signed certificate - and there'd be no reliable way to determine which certificate is the right one. You could mitigate this with some kind of (non-scary) trust-on-first-use UI. But even that doesn't help you if you're unlucky enough to encounter the attacker before the real site. (Which isn't even that unlikely if the attacker is e.g. an ISP proxying all connections by default) What LE gives you is a signed statement saying in effect: "we've seen that the owner of this cert can make changes to the domain which are visible from multiple different network locations - so they are very likely the real owner of the domain and not a MITM". That's valuable, even if it doesn't tell you anything about who that entity is. What I absolutely would wish for is some mechanism to include a cert hash in the URL. Then you could e.g. distribute QR codes with the cert hash embedded and circumvent the trust problem that way. Then, I agree, there would be no reason not to use self-signed certificates with that technique.
- zaptheimpaler 5y agoOh cool, that makes sense now. Thanks!
- tbrownaw 5y ago> Everything related to identity has effectively been delegated to domain registrars. TLS certs as envisioned by browsers are really only about proving that you have genuine control of a particular domain Might as well just stick the certificate hash in a DNS record and forget about keeping a public consensus on universally trusted CAs.
- minetest2048 5y agoIsn't this is what DANE is trying to do?
- tbrownaw 5y agoI'd forgotten the name, but yes it is. And I'd seen it dunked on for relying too much on the registrars being secure.