4 ms·

It's like wearing a bulky level 3 bullet proof vest while you're at home cooking dinner. Yeah, it's keeping you safer. There's no doubt about that. The real da

It's like wearing a bulky level 3 bullet proof vest while you're at home cooking dinner. Yeah, it's keeping you safer. There's no doubt about that. The real dangers on the web come from the insane behavior of running all arbitrary code sent to the browser from anywhere. Like opening every email attachment you get sent. NoScript temp whitelist only provides a lot more safety than HTTPS Everywhere and doesn't give all power to a few corporations.

DANK_YACHT 4y ago
You need HTTPS to even begin trusting remote code. For instance, you download uMatrix to setup a whitelist. Where did uMatrix come from? If you downloaded it over HTTP, then you could be running anything. Even if you have a checksum for uMatrix, you can't trust it if you got the checksum over HTTP. Now let's say you installed uMatrix and you want to trust a script. Well, how do you know that the script you downloaded came from the URL you've allowed? If you've requested this script before, then you can use a content hash, but if not, then you're basically blindly trusting that no one has tampered with the data.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Where did uMatrix come from? But is uMatrix to trust? Can you trust uMatrix developers? I have bought a pair of shoes from an HTTPS only web sites, shoes never arrived, HTTPS apparently can't fix everything. Trusting trust is a problem since computing was invented. [1] [1] WARNING! PDF! https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
  - danShumway 4y ago
    Without some kind of baseline for secure connections you can't even start approaching the problem of trusting trust. Yes, it's hard to figure out whether or not to trust uMatrix. But I'd rather not make that even harder by allowing basically anyone to intercept and modify the code that uMatrix is sending at any time.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      I send you a file over HTTP and then I send you an SMS with the sha256 hash that you can verify Even if SMS are "easy" to intercept, even if I send you an email with the SHA256, using a side channel greatly improve security, unless you're being targeted on multiple channels, which is quite uncommon. For the same reason, even an MD5 hash is good enough most of the times. Even if it's been proven not secure years ago, it's secure enough to trust that in the general case the odds of generating the same hash while also creating something that is not simply broken, but it's malicious, are very, very low and require effort. the point is: HTTPS still relies on trusting things we can't control and we will probably never control. We are forced to trust HTTPS because there is nothing more we can do. > But I'd rather not make that even harder by allowing basically anyone to intercept and modify the code that uMatrix is sending at any time. But the reality is that it is hardly "everyone" a MITM must be, by definition, in the middle. Debian survived for decades delivering their packages over HTTP
      - DANK_YACHT 4y ago
        How did we exchange phone numbers? I need to know your phone number to verify the hash I receive via text message.
        peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > How did we exchange phone numbers? I used HTTPS so our common friend at NSA knew what it was and sent a pigeon to your house. How do you know that once you verified the hash, the software is safe?
        DANK_YACHT 4y ago
        Ok, so the NSA could have replaced the phone numbers we sent each other, which means that we can't be sure that the NSA isn't intercepting our file transfer later, which is the exact same issue we would face had we using HTTPS to transfer the file, except we did a lot more work (e.g. exchanged numbers, texted file hashes, compared check sums, etc.). btw, citation needed that the NSA is able to decrypt https traffic.

DANK_YACHT 4y ago

You need HTTPS to even begin trusting remote code. For instance, you download uMatrix to setup a whitelist. Where did uMatrix come from? If you downloaded it over HTTP, then you could be running anything. Even if you have a checksum for uMatrix, you can't trust it if you got the checksum over HTTP. Now let's say you installed uMatrix and you want to trust a script. Well, how do you know that the script you downloaded came from the URL you've allowed? If you've requested this script before, then you can use a content hash, but if not, then you're basically blindly trusting that no one has tampered with the data.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> Where did uMatrix come from? But is uMatrix to trust? Can you trust uMatrix developers? I have bought a pair of shoes from an HTTPS only web sites, shoes never arrived, HTTPS apparently can't fix everything. Trusting trust is a problem since computing was invented. [1] [1] WARNING! PDF! https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
- danShumway 4y ago
  Without some kind of baseline for secure connections you can't even start approaching the problem of trusting trust. Yes, it's hard to figure out whether or not to trust uMatrix. But I'd rather not make that even harder by allowing basically anyone to intercept and modify the code that uMatrix is sending at any time.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    I send you a file over HTTP and then I send you an SMS with the sha256 hash that you can verify Even if SMS are "easy" to intercept, even if I send you an email with the SHA256, using a side channel greatly improve security, unless you're being targeted on multiple channels, which is quite uncommon. For the same reason, even an MD5 hash is good enough most of the times. Even if it's been proven not secure years ago, it's secure enough to trust that in the general case the odds of generating the same hash while also creating something that is not simply broken, but it's malicious, are very, very low and require effort. the point is: HTTPS still relies on trusting things we can't control and we will probably never control. We are forced to trust HTTPS because there is nothing more we can do. > But I'd rather not make that even harder by allowing basically anyone to intercept and modify the code that uMatrix is sending at any time. But the reality is that it is hardly "everyone" a MITM must be, by definition, in the middle. Debian survived for decades delivering their packages over HTTP
    - DANK_YACHT 4y ago
      How did we exchange phone numbers? I need to know your phone number to verify the hash I receive via text message.
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > How did we exchange phone numbers? I used HTTPS so our common friend at NSA knew what it was and sent a pigeon to your house. How do you know that once you verified the hash, the software is safe?
        DANK_YACHT 4y ago
        Ok, so the NSA could have replaced the phone numbers we sent each other, which means that we can't be sure that the NSA isn't intercepting our file transfer later, which is the exact same issue we would face had we using HTTPS to transfer the file, except we did a lot more work (e.g. exchanged numbers, texted file hashes, compared check sums, etc.). btw, citation needed that the NSA is able to decrypt https traffic.