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SSH's encryption isn't much different from TLS. The big difference is in how the authentication works. The way most people use SSH, essentially all certificates

SSH's encryption isn't much different from TLS. The big difference is in how the authentication works. The way most people use SSH, essentially all certificates are self-signed, and the only way it knows which servers to trust is by storing a list of certificates it's seen before, so you're just hoping that you don't get MITM'd the first time you connect. It's not scalable to a web browser where you're connecting to thousands of hosts you've never seen before.

BurnGpuBurn 4y ago
I personally don't visit thousands of hosts I've never seen before on a reasonably short timescale. I do visit some hosts/websites very often. Wouldn't SSH be ideal for those? See it like this: I connect to yc for the first time, hope I don't get MITM'd or have some web-thingy to verify manually, and after that, voila, forever good encryption and verification. This way I don't have to trust some random CA from a long list of CA's I know nothing about. And even for every new site you visit, sure, you must hope you don't get MITM'd. Is that worse than hoping the random CA the site uses isn't compromised and a hacker uses that to MITM you? How does it compare to risk of the site being hacked already? My point is, alternatives exist, good ones, but website security feels like a business that's captured by a bunch of CA's and browser manufacturers that don't want change for selfish reasons.
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  Why aren’t we using SSH for everything? https://medium.com/@shazow/ssh-how-does-it-even-9e43586e4ffc https://medium.com/@shazow/ssh-how-does-it-even-9e43586e4ffc
- mort96 4y ago
  What you're proposing doesn't sound that different from public key pinning (HPKP), where the web server tells the browser to distrust anyone any other certificates than the pinned one (or certificates from any other CAs). HPKP is deprecated now though.

BurnGpuBurn 4y ago

I personally don't visit thousands of hosts I've never seen before on a reasonably short timescale. I do visit some hosts/websites very often. Wouldn't SSH be ideal for those? See it like this: I connect to yc for the first time, hope I don't get MITM'd or have some web-thingy to verify manually, and after that, voila, forever good encryption and verification. This way I don't have to trust some random CA from a long list of CA's I know nothing about. And even for every new site you visit, sure, you must hope you don't get MITM'd. Is that worse than hoping the random CA the site uses isn't compromised and a hacker uses that to MITM you? How does it compare to risk of the site being hacked already? My point is, alternatives exist, good ones, but website security feels like a business that's captured by a bunch of CA's and browser manufacturers that don't want change for selfish reasons.

sgjohnson 4y ago
Why aren’t we using SSH for everything? https://medium.com/@shazow/ssh-how-does-it-even-9e43586e4ffc https://medium.com/@shazow/ssh-how-does-it-even-9e43586e4ffc
mort96 4y ago
What you're proposing doesn't sound that different from public key pinning (HPKP), where the web server tells the browser to distrust anyone any other certificates than the pinned one (or certificates from any other CAs). HPKP is deprecated now though.