4 ms·

> Why are client certificates rarely used? There are likely several reasons, but probably the most obvious one is that the UI for handling them has been truly a

> Why are client certificates rarely used? There are likely several reasons, but probably the most obvious one is that the UI for handling them has been truly abysmal. While the UI is bad, I think the main reason client cents aren’t adopted is due to its cost and specifically recurring costs. For b2c stuff, users don’t want to purchase certificates just to authenticate. And they certainly don’t want to repurchase them every year or so. Imagine if a web site had an $80 annual authentication fee that didn’t even go to the site. Way back, I wished there would be some sort of government issuance that would cover the costs and negotiate with standards people to allow perpetual client certs that never expire (good enough for bitcoin wallets). Interestingly, the US government does do this for employees through the Homeland Security Presidential Directive [0] where all federal staff have a client certificate issued and stored in a physical card for use. The UI is still bad, but you can use it to authenticate to federal websites. [0] https://www.dhs.gov/homeland-security-presidential-directive-12 https://www.dhs.gov/homeland-security-presidential-directive...

hlandau 4y ago
Author here. There needn't be any cost for client certificates, since client certificates are frequently issued by custom in-house CAs for free. A more pertinent example of what you're talking about would be the use of S/MIME email encryption - I believe you could pay to get a proper certificate from a trusted CA for your email address to use S/MIME - I have no idea if any CA still does this or how many people do so. It's not something I've ever encountered personally, at least.
- Avamander 4y ago
  > I believe you could pay to get a proper certificate from a trusted CA for your email address to use S/MIME - I have no idea if any CA still does this or how many people do so. There are a handful of CAs that offer S/MIME certificates, not that obscure of a service really. Actalis is the only one doing it for free though. It is a bit cumbersome but it's rather well-supported (gmail, apple mail, outlook, thunderbird etc.). Hopefully things get simpler now that the CA/B forum S/MIME workgroup is working on clear baseline requirements (so the ecosystem is still moving forward). Something like a mailbox-validated "Let's Encrypt" would be doable and I hope something like that would appear at some point.
- prepend 4y ago
  There needn’t be, but there is. I worked with a software system, globus, that allowed self-signed certs and trusted exchange and it was so difficult to find staff to get it set up. One of the really frustrating parts of PKI is the unnecessary cost. I, and a few friends, negotiate our own certs and have been going well for many years with the same certs (knock wood), but all the widely accepted protocols require a third party and those third parties charge quite a bit. And I don’t know any commercial CAs that issue perpetual client certs, which is what I want.
idndoxheo 4y ago
client certs (from the time the article mentions) are supposed to be used for consumers, hence no fancy chain like you mention, which was intended for b2b. for cliente using a browser, the site would provide the user once with much less overhead and costs and red tape, using it own cert/private keys, which do have the full chain. it was basically a better way to be always logged without forever plain text cookies, as we actually got. or even worse, baked in the publisher owned OS/browser as google mamaged to fool everyone into.
nailer 4y ago
The UI for client certificates these days is generally handled by web 3 wallets. It’s not mutual TLS and not perfect (unless you’re dining Brave, you will have to install an extension), but otherwise leaps and bounds compared to the client a certificate experience from 20 years ago.
tecleandor 4y ago
Several countries have CAs available that provide with certificates for citizens and companies. Also, those CAs are usually in your typical trusted CAs kiat. For example, in Spain, in every national ID you have a certificate available in hardware, accesible via its smartcard chip or NFC. If you don't want (or can) use this specific hardware, you can order for free a software certificate you can download later. This certificates can be used to log in in official sites (or any other site that enables certificate login) and/or to sign documents/files.
noirscape 4y ago
Not really. Only for government certificates, the paid stuff matters since that gives you access to client certificates from a "trusted" CA, which can alleviate some user friction. The real problem is that the support for client certificates is downright abysmal when it comes to browser and OS vendors and even worse when it comes to modern apps, combined with OpenSSLs UI being godawful to use. Both Chrome and Firefox make certificate management a complete mess to get set up "right". It works really well once everything is configured, but good luck getting it configured in the first place. The Windows certificate store does poor certificate validation, so poorly made certificates (which iirc the Serbian government gives out) can end up corrupting the whole thing. That will in turn cause many other issues and the actual interface for dealing with this stuff is a complete mess since it blatantly wasn't touched after XP. On Android, you just need to import both certificates into the system certificate store, but applications need to specifically check for the certificate store if they want to add it to requests (at least Chrome does). Since CCA is very rarely used, most apps just straight up don't support it, which adds yet more friction to actually using it. In the end I just went with tailscale because it just ended up being much easier for achieving the same effective goal (protecting access to a certain part of my VPS to only devices I personally trust) without needing to either massively abuse apktool or open a bunch of niche bugs at FOSS repositories.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> the main reason client cents aren’t adopted I agree with the UI objection, but not the cost objection. But my principal objection is the same as my objection to WoT: I want my certificate to identify me as the holder of the certificate, and nothing else. Nearly all issuers of client certs insist that you provide driving license, bank statements or whatever, to tie the certificate to me as an identifiable individual person. Most relying entities have the same expectation. That binding to a real person is quite separable from the idea of a client certificate, but in practice usage of client certs always seems to rely on that binding.

hlandau 4y ago

Author here. There needn't be any cost for client certificates, since client certificates are frequently issued by custom in-house CAs for free. A more pertinent example of what you're talking about would be the use of S/MIME email encryption - I believe you could pay to get a proper certificate from a trusted CA for your email address to use S/MIME - I have no idea if any CA still does this or how many people do so. It's not something I've ever encountered personally, at least.

Avamander 4y ago
> I believe you could pay to get a proper certificate from a trusted CA for your email address to use S/MIME - I have no idea if any CA still does this or how many people do so. There are a handful of CAs that offer S/MIME certificates, not that obscure of a service really. Actalis is the only one doing it for free though. It is a bit cumbersome but it's rather well-supported (gmail, apple mail, outlook, thunderbird etc.). Hopefully things get simpler now that the CA/B forum S/MIME workgroup is working on clear baseline requirements (so the ecosystem is still moving forward). Something like a mailbox-validated "Let's Encrypt" would be doable and I hope something like that would appear at some point.
prepend 4y ago
There needn’t be, but there is. I worked with a software system, globus, that allowed self-signed certs and trusted exchange and it was so difficult to find staff to get it set up. One of the really frustrating parts of PKI is the unnecessary cost. I, and a few friends, negotiate our own certs and have been going well for many years with the same certs (knock wood), but all the widely accepted protocols require a third party and those third parties charge quite a bit. And I don’t know any commercial CAs that issue perpetual client certs, which is what I want.

idndoxheo 4y ago

client certs (from the time the article mentions) are supposed to be used for consumers, hence no fancy chain like you mention, which was intended for b2b. for cliente using a browser, the site would provide the user once with much less overhead and costs and red tape, using it own cert/private keys, which do have the full chain. it was basically a better way to be always logged without forever plain text cookies, as we actually got. or even worse, baked in the publisher owned OS/browser as google mamaged to fool everyone into.

nailer 4y ago

The UI for client certificates these days is generally handled by web 3 wallets. It’s not mutual TLS and not perfect (unless you’re dining Brave, you will have to install an extension), but otherwise leaps and bounds compared to the client a certificate experience from 20 years ago.

tecleandor 4y ago

Several countries have CAs available that provide with certificates for citizens and companies. Also, those CAs are usually in your typical trusted CAs kiat. For example, in Spain, in every national ID you have a certificate available in hardware, accesible via its smartcard chip or NFC. If you don't want (or can) use this specific hardware, you can order for free a software certificate you can download later. This certificates can be used to log in in official sites (or any other site that enables certificate login) and/or to sign documents/files.

noirscape 4y ago

Not really. Only for government certificates, the paid stuff matters since that gives you access to client certificates from a "trusted" CA, which can alleviate some user friction. The real problem is that the support for client certificates is downright abysmal when it comes to browser and OS vendors and even worse when it comes to modern apps, combined with OpenSSLs UI being godawful to use. Both Chrome and Firefox make certificate management a complete mess to get set up "right". It works really well once everything is configured, but good luck getting it configured in the first place. The Windows certificate store does poor certificate validation, so poorly made certificates (which iirc the Serbian government gives out) can end up corrupting the whole thing. That will in turn cause many other issues and the actual interface for dealing with this stuff is a complete mess since it blatantly wasn't touched after XP. On Android, you just need to import both certificates into the system certificate store, but applications need to specifically check for the certificate store if they want to add it to requests (at least Chrome does). Since CCA is very rarely used, most apps just straight up don't support it, which adds yet more friction to actually using it. In the end I just went with tailscale because it just ended up being much easier for achieving the same effective goal (protecting access to a certain part of my VPS to only devices I personally trust) without needing to either massively abuse apktool or open a bunch of niche bugs at FOSS repositories.

denton-scratch 4y ago

> the main reason client cents aren’t adopted I agree with the UI objection, but not the cost objection. But my principal objection is the same as my objection to WoT: I want my certificate to identify me as the holder of the certificate, and nothing else. Nearly all issuers of client certs insist that you provide driving license, bank statements or whatever, to tie the certificate to me as an identifiable individual person. Most relying entities have the same expectation. That binding to a real person is quite separable from the idea of a client certificate, but in practice usage of client certs always seems to rely on that binding.