4 ms·

The digital equivalent of a local kebab shop menu does not need encryption. The lack of understanding from us as technologists for people who would have had a

by dijit 2y ago

The digital equivalent of a local kebab shop menu does not need encryption. The lack of understanding from us as technologists for people who would have had a working site and are now forced into either: an oligopoly of site hosting companies, or, for their site to break consistently as TLS standards rotate is one thing that brings me shame about our community. You can come up with all kinds of reasons to gatekeep website hosting, “they have to update anyway” even when updating means reinstallion of an OS, “its not that hard to rotate” say people with deep knowledge of computers, “just get someone else to do it” say people who have a financial interest in it being that way. Framing people with legitimate issues as weirdo’s is not as charming as you think it is.

pests 2y ago
You say that until some foreign national gets their kabab order MITM to deliver them some malicious virus that ends up getting him killed.
- account42 2y ago
  Which is of course a real concern for the average joe.
  - pests 2y ago
    I wish for all my fellow humans to be safe, just because it doesn't protect me personally doesn't mean I think it's not a concern.
johannes1234321 2y ago
TLS doesn't just hide the information transmitted, but also ensures the integrity. Thus nobody on the network tinkered with the prices on the menu. Also the Kebap Shop probably has a form for reservation or ordering, which takes personal information. True, they are all low risk things, but getting TLS is trivial (since many Webservers etc can do letsencrypt rotation fully automatically) and secure defaults are a good thing.
- dijit 2y ago
  There are plenty of websites that were just static pages used for conveying information. Most people who set them up lacked the ability to turn them into forms that connected to anything. They’ve nearly all been lost to time now though, if a shop has a web-presence it will be through a provider such as “bokabord”, doordash, ubereats (as mentioned), some of whom charge up to 30% of anything booked/ordered via the web. But, I guess no MITM can manipulate prices… except, by charging…
  - burnished 2y ago
    Huh. Never thought about it that way; replacing hypothetical MITM attacks with genuine middlemen.
  - matrss 2y ago
    > There are plenty of websites that were just static pages used for conveying information. If you care about the integrity of the conveyed information you need TLS. If you don't, you wouldn't have published a website in the first place. A while back I've seen a wordpress site for a podcast without https where people also argued it doesn't need it. They had banking information for donations on that site. Sometimes I wish every party involved in transporting packets on the internet would just mangle all unencrypted http that they see, if only to make a point...
    - dijit 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - account42 2y ago
      What ensures the integrity of conveyed information for physical mail? For flyers? For telephone conversations? The cryptography community would have you believe that the only solution to getting scammed is encryption. It isn't.
      - matrss 2y ago
        > What ensures the integrity of conveyed information for physical mail? For flyers? For telephone conversations? Nothing, really. But for physical mail the attacks against it don't scale nearly as well: you would need to insert yourself physically into the transportation chain and do physical work to mess with the content. Messing with mail is also taken much more seriously as an offense in many places, while laws are not as strict for network traffic generally. For telephone conversations, at least until somewhat recently, the fact that synthesizing convincing speech in real time was not really feasible (especially not if you tried to imitate someones speech) ensured some integrity of the conversation. That has changed, though.
taneliv 2y ago
I'm always reminded about this by being on the other side of the equation with my car. There is regulation, like mandatory yearly inspections and anyone is only allowed to sell road worthy vehicles. These rules are rather strict, likewise for the driver's license. They aren't impossible to know or understand, but there's a lot of details. However, when I take it to the shop, whether for that yearly inspection, regular maintenance, or because there's something apparently wrong with it, I never know what to expect in terms of time and money. Oh, it needs a new thingamajig? I start to mildly sweat, fearing it to cost six hundred like the flux capacitor that had to be replaced last week/month/year and took two weeks to get shipped from another country. "Ninety cents, and we put it in place for no charge, it literally takes ten seconds", like, I love to hear the news, could have saved me from the anguish by giving a hint when I asked about the price! But need a new key? Starting from three hundred fifty, plus one hundred seventy for a backup copy. Like, where do these prices come from? Actually, don't tell me, I'm a software engineer. I know, I know. I'll just wait until you want your car shop web pages up. Oh, for that you'll need PCI DSS and we can't do that other things because of GDPR. Sorry, my hands are tied here. That'll be four thousand plus tax, mister auto mechanic shop owner.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  I don't think that's a good analogy, you're comparing a mass produced product to an individualized B2B service that's going to generate profits for your customer.
  - taneliv 2y ago
    It's not an analogy. It's asymmetric warfare.
sureIy 2y ago
Irrelevant. Safe transfer should be the default. Your argument is akin to "I don't have anything to hide." You just do it and don't think about it. Modern servers and services make this completely transparent. The kebab guy doesn't need to worry about this as long as they're not fooled into buying from mala fide hosting companies who tries to upsell you on something that should be the baseline.
- clan 2y ago
  Nah ah. Not. While we might be able to find common ground in the statement that "safe transfer should be the default", we will differ on the definition of "safe". Unfortunately these discussions often end up in techno-babble. Especially here on HN were we tend to enjoy rather binary viewpoints without too many shades of gray. Try being your own devils advocate: "What if I have something to hide?". Then deal with that. Legitimately. Reasonably. Unless you are an anarkist I assume that we can agree that we need authoraties. A legal framework. Policing. So I 100% support Let's Encrypt and what they have done to destroy the certificate racket. That is a force of good! But I do not think it was a healthy thing that the browsers (and Google search results) "forced" the world defacto to TLS only. Why? Look at the list of Trusted Root Certificates in the big OS and browsers. You are telling me only good guys are listed? None here are or can be influenced by state actors? But that is the good kind of MITM? This then hinges on your definition of "safe transport". Only the anarkist can win against the government. I am not. It might sound like I am in the "I do not have anything to hide" camp. I am not that naive. But I am firmly in the "I prefer more scrutiny when I have something to hide". Because the measures the authorities needs to employ today are too draconian for my liking. I preferred the risk of MITM on an ISP level to what the authoraties need to do now to stay in control. We have not eliminated MITM. Just made it harder. And we forgot to discuss legitimate reasons for MITM because "bad". This is not a "technical" discussion on the fine details of TLS or not. But should be a discussion about the societal changes this causes. We need locks to keep the creeps out but still wants the police to gain access. The current system does not enable that in a healthy way but rather erodes trust. Us binary people can define clear simple technical solutions. But the rest of the world is quite messy. And us bit twiddlers tend to shy away from that and then ignore the push-back to our actions. We cannot have a sober conversation unless we depart from the "encrypt everything" is technically good and then that is set in stone. But here we are: Writing off arguments as irrelevant.
gotodengo 2y ago
Their site will break consistently in any case. Running a site in 2024 comes with a responsibility to update regularly for a good reason. There are more than enough forgotten kebab shop restaurant pages that are now serving malware because they never updated WordPress that an out of date certificate warning is a very good "heads up, this site hasn't been maintained in 6 years" If we're talking hosting even a static HTML file without using a site hosting company, that already requires so much technical knowledge (Domain purchasing, DNS, purchasing a static IP from your ISP, server software which again requires vuln updates) that said person will be able to update a TLS cert without any issue.
- account42 2y ago
  > There are more than enough forgotten kebab shop restaurant pages that are now serving malware [citation needed] There are plenty of organizations that actively scan the web for "malware" (aka anything that the almighty machine learning algorithms don't like) and are more than happy to harass the website owner and hosting company until their demands are met. Security is ultimately a social issue. Technical means are only one way to improve it and can never solve it 100%. You must never loose sight of the cost imposed by tecnological security solutions versus what improvement they actually offer.
serbuvlad 2y ago
I'm really curious as to what you see as the disadvantages of TLS. Sure, the advantages are minor for some services and critical for other services. However, if you already have bought a domain name, the cost of setting up TLS is basically 0. You just run certbot and give it the domains you want to license. It will set up auto-renew and even edit your Apache/NGINX configs to enable TLS. Sure, TLS standards rotate. But that just means you have to update Apache/NGINX every like 5 years. Hardly a barrier for most people imo.
- dijit 2y ago
  Its better than it was, but TLS has a lot more knobs to fail than even a basic http server does; theres a whole host of handoff thats happening and running multiple sites is fraught with minor issues. certbot is a python program, better hope it keeps working- it’s definitely not kept working for me and I’m a seasoned sysadmin. a combination of my python environment becoming outdated (making updates impossible) and a deprecation of a critical API needed for it to work. The #1 cause of issues with a hobby website: darkscience.net is that it refuses to negotiate on Chrome because the TLS suites are considered too old, yet in 2020 I was scoring A+ on Qualys SSL report. Its just time, time and effort and its wasted mostly. The letsencrypt tools are really wonderful, just pray they don’t break, and be ready to reinstall everything from scratch at some point.
  - usr1106 2y ago
    > certbot is a python program, better hope it keeps working There is also https://github.com/srvrco/getssl https://github.com/srvrco/getssl which is a bash script. I have lightly audited it years ago and it did not seem to upload your private keys anywhere... I've used it occasionally, but I don't let it run as root, so I need to copy the retrieved certs into the the server config manually.
    - dijit 2y ago
      Theres a bunch of alternative clients and I’ve tried many. Larger point is regarding the fact that its required for what amounts to a poster on a wall: yes, someone can come along with a pen an alter the poster- but its not worth the effort to secure for most people and will degrade rapidly with such security too. So, instead they turn to middlemen, or don’t bother. Theres a myriad of other issues, but, its not as easy as we claim.

by dijit 2y ago

pests 2y ago

You say that until some foreign national gets their kabab order MITM to deliver them some malicious virus that ends up getting him killed.

account42 2y ago
Which is of course a real concern for the average joe.
- pests 2y ago
  I wish for all my fellow humans to be safe, just because it doesn't protect me personally doesn't mean I think it's not a concern.

johannes1234321 2y ago

TLS doesn't just hide the information transmitted, but also ensures the integrity. Thus nobody on the network tinkered with the prices on the menu. Also the Kebap Shop probably has a form for reservation or ordering, which takes personal information. True, they are all low risk things, but getting TLS is trivial (since many Webservers etc can do letsencrypt rotation fully automatically) and secure defaults are a good thing.

dijit 2y ago
There are plenty of websites that were just static pages used for conveying information. Most people who set them up lacked the ability to turn them into forms that connected to anything. They’ve nearly all been lost to time now though, if a shop has a web-presence it will be through a provider such as “bokabord”, doordash, ubereats (as mentioned), some of whom charge up to 30% of anything booked/ordered via the web. But, I guess no MITM can manipulate prices… except, by charging…
- burnished 2y ago
  Huh. Never thought about it that way; replacing hypothetical MITM attacks with genuine middlemen.
- matrss 2y ago
  > There are plenty of websites that were just static pages used for conveying information. If you care about the integrity of the conveyed information you need TLS. If you don't, you wouldn't have published a website in the first place. A while back I've seen a wordpress site for a podcast without https where people also argued it doesn't need it. They had banking information for donations on that site. Sometimes I wish every party involved in transporting packets on the internet would just mangle all unencrypted http that they see, if only to make a point...
  - dijit 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - account42 2y ago
    What ensures the integrity of conveyed information for physical mail? For flyers? For telephone conversations? The cryptography community would have you believe that the only solution to getting scammed is encryption. It isn't.
    - matrss 2y ago
      > What ensures the integrity of conveyed information for physical mail? For flyers? For telephone conversations? Nothing, really. But for physical mail the attacks against it don't scale nearly as well: you would need to insert yourself physically into the transportation chain and do physical work to mess with the content. Messing with mail is also taken much more seriously as an offense in many places, while laws are not as strict for network traffic generally. For telephone conversations, at least until somewhat recently, the fact that synthesizing convincing speech in real time was not really feasible (especially not if you tried to imitate someones speech) ensured some integrity of the conversation. That has changed, though.

taneliv 2y ago

I'm always reminded about this by being on the other side of the equation with my car. There is regulation, like mandatory yearly inspections and anyone is only allowed to sell road worthy vehicles. These rules are rather strict, likewise for the driver's license. They aren't impossible to know or understand, but there's a lot of details. However, when I take it to the shop, whether for that yearly inspection, regular maintenance, or because there's something apparently wrong with it, I never know what to expect in terms of time and money. Oh, it needs a new thingamajig? I start to mildly sweat, fearing it to cost six hundred like the flux capacitor that had to be replaced last week/month/year and took two weeks to get shipped from another country. "Ninety cents, and we put it in place for no charge, it literally takes ten seconds", like, I love to hear the news, could have saved me from the anguish by giving a hint when I asked about the price! But need a new key? Starting from three hundred fifty, plus one hundred seventy for a backup copy. Like, where do these prices come from? Actually, don't tell me, I'm a software engineer. I know, I know. I'll just wait until you want your car shop web pages up. Oh, for that you'll need PCI DSS and we can't do that other things because of GDPR. Sorry, my hands are tied here. That'll be four thousand plus tax, mister auto mechanic shop owner.

dns_snek 2y ago
I don't think that's a good analogy, you're comparing a mass produced product to an individualized B2B service that's going to generate profits for your customer.
- taneliv 2y ago
  It's not an analogy. It's asymmetric warfare.

sureIy 2y ago

Irrelevant. Safe transfer should be the default. Your argument is akin to "I don't have anything to hide." You just do it and don't think about it. Modern servers and services make this completely transparent. The kebab guy doesn't need to worry about this as long as they're not fooled into buying from mala fide hosting companies who tries to upsell you on something that should be the baseline.

clan 2y ago
Nah ah. Not. While we might be able to find common ground in the statement that "safe transfer should be the default", we will differ on the definition of "safe". Unfortunately these discussions often end up in techno-babble. Especially here on HN were we tend to enjoy rather binary viewpoints without too many shades of gray. Try being your own devils advocate: "What if I have something to hide?". Then deal with that. Legitimately. Reasonably. Unless you are an anarkist I assume that we can agree that we need authoraties. A legal framework. Policing. So I 100% support Let's Encrypt and what they have done to destroy the certificate racket. That is a force of good! But I do not think it was a healthy thing that the browsers (and Google search results) "forced" the world defacto to TLS only. Why? Look at the list of Trusted Root Certificates in the big OS and browsers. You are telling me only good guys are listed? None here are or can be influenced by state actors? But that is the good kind of MITM? This then hinges on your definition of "safe transport". Only the anarkist can win against the government. I am not. It might sound like I am in the "I do not have anything to hide" camp. I am not that naive. But I am firmly in the "I prefer more scrutiny when I have something to hide". Because the measures the authorities needs to employ today are too draconian for my liking. I preferred the risk of MITM on an ISP level to what the authoraties need to do now to stay in control. We have not eliminated MITM. Just made it harder. And we forgot to discuss legitimate reasons for MITM because "bad". This is not a "technical" discussion on the fine details of TLS or not. But should be a discussion about the societal changes this causes. We need locks to keep the creeps out but still wants the police to gain access. The current system does not enable that in a healthy way but rather erodes trust. Us binary people can define clear simple technical solutions. But the rest of the world is quite messy. And us bit twiddlers tend to shy away from that and then ignore the push-back to our actions. We cannot have a sober conversation unless we depart from the "encrypt everything" is technically good and then that is set in stone. But here we are: Writing off arguments as irrelevant.

gotodengo 2y ago

Their site will break consistently in any case. Running a site in 2024 comes with a responsibility to update regularly for a good reason. There are more than enough forgotten kebab shop restaurant pages that are now serving malware because they never updated WordPress that an out of date certificate warning is a very good "heads up, this site hasn't been maintained in 6 years" If we're talking hosting even a static HTML file without using a site hosting company, that already requires so much technical knowledge (Domain purchasing, DNS, purchasing a static IP from your ISP, server software which again requires vuln updates) that said person will be able to update a TLS cert without any issue.

account42 2y ago
> There are more than enough forgotten kebab shop restaurant pages that are now serving malware [citation needed] There are plenty of organizations that actively scan the web for "malware" (aka anything that the almighty machine learning algorithms don't like) and are more than happy to harass the website owner and hosting company until their demands are met. Security is ultimately a social issue. Technical means are only one way to improve it and can never solve it 100%. You must never loose sight of the cost imposed by tecnological security solutions versus what improvement they actually offer.

serbuvlad 2y ago

I'm really curious as to what you see as the disadvantages of TLS. Sure, the advantages are minor for some services and critical for other services. However, if you already have bought a domain name, the cost of setting up TLS is basically 0. You just run certbot and give it the domains you want to license. It will set up auto-renew and even edit your Apache/NGINX configs to enable TLS. Sure, TLS standards rotate. But that just means you have to update Apache/NGINX every like 5 years. Hardly a barrier for most people imo.

dijit 2y ago
Its better than it was, but TLS has a lot more knobs to fail than even a basic http server does; theres a whole host of handoff thats happening and running multiple sites is fraught with minor issues. certbot is a python program, better hope it keeps working- it’s definitely not kept working for me and I’m a seasoned sysadmin. a combination of my python environment becoming outdated (making updates impossible) and a deprecation of a critical API needed for it to work. The #1 cause of issues with a hobby website: darkscience.net is that it refuses to negotiate on Chrome because the TLS suites are considered too old, yet in 2020 I was scoring A+ on Qualys SSL report. Its just time, time and effort and its wasted mostly. The letsencrypt tools are really wonderful, just pray they don’t break, and be ready to reinstall everything from scratch at some point.
- usr1106 2y ago
  > certbot is a python program, better hope it keeps working There is also https://github.com/srvrco/getssl https://github.com/srvrco/getssl which is a bash script. I have lightly audited it years ago and it did not seem to upload your private keys anywhere... I've used it occasionally, but I don't let it run as root, so I need to copy the retrieved certs into the the server config manually.
  - dijit 2y ago
    Theres a bunch of alternative clients and I’ve tried many. Larger point is regarding the fact that its required for what amounts to a poster on a wall: yes, someone can come along with a pen an alter the poster- but its not worth the effort to secure for most people and will degrade rapidly with such security too. So, instead they turn to middlemen, or don’t bother. Theres a myriad of other issues, but, its not as easy as we claim.