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Meanwhile, in the real world: - We went from the vast majority of traffic being unencrypted, allowing any passive attacker (from nation state to script kiddie

Meanwhile, in the real world: - We went from the vast majority of traffic being unencrypted, allowing any passive attacker (from nation state to script kiddie sitting in the coffee shop) to snoop and any active attacker to trivially tamper with it, to all but a vanishing minority of connections being strongly encrypted. The scare tactics used to sell VPNs in YouTube ads used to all be true, and no longer are, due to this. - We went from TLS certificates being unaffordable to hobbyists to TLS certificates being not only free, but trivial to automatically obtain. - We went from a CA ecosystem where only commercial alternatives exist to one where the main CA is a nonprofit run by a foundation consisting mostly of strong proponents of Internet freedom. - Even if you count ZeroSSL and Let's Encrypt as US-controlled, there is at least one free non-US alternative using the same protocol, i.e. suitable as a drop-in replacement (https://www.actalis.com/subscription https://www.actalis.com/subscription). - Plenty of other paid but affordable alternatives exist from countless countries, and the ecosystem seems to be getting better, not worse. - While many other paths have been used to attempt to censor web sites, I haven't seen the certificate system used for this frequently (I'm sure there are individual court orders somewhere). - If the US wanted to put its full weight behind getting a site off the Internet, it would have other levers that would be equally or more effective. - Most Internet freedom advocates recognize that the migration to HTTPS was a really, really good thing.

justsomehnguy 1y ago
Meanwhile, in the real world: - We now provide a completely free certs for a malicious web-sites - Degraded encryption value so much it's not even indicated anymore (remember the green bar for EV?) - Pavlov-trained everyone to dumb-click through 'this page is not secure' warnings - SNI exists and even without it anything not on CDN is blocked very easily
- prmoustache 1y ago
  What is stupid is not to provide free certs for malicious web sites, what was stupid is telling people for years that they would be safe and could trust a website only because there was a lock icon on the url bar.
- lukeschlather 1y ago
  The only one of those things that is the fault of ACME is the first one, and are you really suggesting between that and your second bullet point that we should charge money for encryption so that people value it more? Encryption is free so people do it more. Paying money doesn't actually make people trustworthy. (Though you can totally charge people to prove they aren't malicious, but if you want to do that, why tie it to encryption? Encrypt regardless.)
  - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
    > Paying money doesn't actually make people trustworthy. This is fundamentally a naive understanding of both security and certificates. Paying money absolutely makes people trustworthy because it's prohibitive to do it at scale. You might have one paid malicious certificate but you can have thousands of free ones. The one malicious domain gets banned, the thousands are whack-a-mole forever. Further, certificates used to indicate identity in more than a "the domain you are connected to" sense. There was a big PR campaign to wreck EV certs but EV certs generally were extremely secure. And even Google, who most loudly complained about EV, has reintroduced the Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) to replace it and use for new things like BIMI.
    - tialaramex 1y ago
      It didn't take a "big PR campaign". EV is crap. It was crap when it was created, it's still crap now. It was tolerated because the commercial CAs wanted a new shinier product and in exchange we got the BRs and from there we got here. Don't lean on EV, it's superficial not load bearing. I don't much care about BIMI. People keep trying to resuscitate that particular dead dog (email security), maybe one day they will succeed but I don't expect to be involved.
    - kelnos 1y ago
      EV certs didn't actually afford the guarantees people hoped and expected. I could simply spend a few hundred dollars to register "Stripe, LLC" or "Microsoft, Inc." in my local jurisdiction, and then get an EV cert with that name on it. Browser vendors removed the extra UI around EV certs not because certs in general are easier to get, but because the identity "guarantee" afforded to EV certs was fairly easy to spoof. EV certs still exist, and you can foolishly pay for one if you want. Free ACME-provided certs has nothing to do with this.
- nozzlegear 1y ago
  > Pavlov-trained everyone to dumb-click through 'this page is not secure' warnings Do we have any statistics for how many people are actually doing this? Such warnings are so rare in my experience that, by default, I don't trust a site that has no SSL/expired or invalid certs and won't click through if I see that warning.
- kelnos 1y ago
  > We now provide a completely free certs for a malicious web-sites Malicious websites never had a problem buying certs before. Sure, the bar is lower now, but I don't think it was a particularly meaningful bar before. Besides, the most common ways to get malicious websites shut down are to get their webhost to cut them off, or get a court order to seize their domain name. Getting their TLS cert revoked isn't common, and doesn't really do the job anyway. > Degraded encryption value so much it's not even indicated anymore (remember the green bar for EV?) No, we've degraded the identity verification afforded by EV and those former browser features. Remember that the promise of SSL/TLS was two things: 1) your traffic is private, 2) it verifies that the server you thought you were contacting is actually the one you reached. I think (2) was always going to be difficult: either you make it hard and expensive to acquire TLS certificates, and (2) has value, or you don't, and it doesn't. I think pervasive encryption is way more important than site owner identity validation. And I don't think the value of an EV cert was even all that high back when browsers called them out in their UI. There are lots of examples of people trivially managing to get an EV cert from somewhere, with their locally-registered "Stripe, LLC" or whatever in the "validated" company name field of their cert. > Pavlov-trained everyone to dumb-click through 'this page is not secure' warnings Not sure what that has to do with this. That was more of a problem back when we didn't have Let's Encrypt, so lots of people were using self-signed certs, or let their certs expire and didn't fix it, or whatever. These days I expect certificate warnings are fairly rare, and so users might actually start paying attention to them again. > SNI exists and even without it anything not on CDN is blocked very easily ESNI also exists, and while not being available everywhere, it'll get there. But this is a bizarre complaint, as it's entirely trivial to block traffic when there's no TLS at all.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Wowfunhappy 1y ago
> - We went from the vast majority of traffic being unencrypted, allowing any passive attacker (from nation state to script kiddie sitting in the coffee shop) to snoop and any active attacker to trivially tamper with it, to all but a vanishing minority of connections being strongly encrypted. I still don't understand why this is so terrible. Public wifi networks were certainly a real problem, but that's not where the majority of internet usage happens, and they could have been fixed on a different layer. If you're on a traditional home internet connection, who exactly can tamper with your traffic? Your ISP can, and that's not great, but it doesn't strike me as blaring siren levels of terrible, either. Even with HTTPS, the companies behind my OS and web browser can still see everything I do, so in exchange for all this work we've removed maybe 1 out of 3 parties from the equation. And, personally, I trust the OS and browser vendors less than I trust my ISP! Some progress is better than none, and it's still nice that my ISP can't tamper with my connection any more. Unfortunate, TLS also took away my ability to inspect my own traffic! This makes it more difficult for me to monitor what my OS and browser vendor are doing, and as I've said previously, I trust these parties comparatively less than my ISP. > - We went from TLS certificates being unaffordable to hobbyists to TLS certificates being not only free, but trivial to automatically obtain. Sure, but it's also trivial to just throw up a website on Github Pages, or forgo the website completely and use Instagram. TLS is "trivial" if you rely the infrastructure of a specific external party. Please help me understand what I'm missing because I find this really frustrating!
- VoidWhisperer 1y ago
  > Some progress is better than none, and it's still nice that my ISP can't snoop on me any more. Unfortunate, TLS also took away my ability to inspect my own traffic! This makes it more difficult for me to monitor what my OS and browser vendor are doing, and as I've said previously, i trust these parties comparatively less than my ISP. It might be more correct to say that Certificate Pinning made it so you can't inspect your own traffic - for sites with TLS but without certificate pinning, you can just as easily create your own root certificate and force the browser and OS to trust the cert by installing it at the OS level. This is (part of, atleast) how tools like Fiddler and Charles Proxy allow you to inspect HTTPS traffic, the other part being a mitm proxy that replaces the server's actual cert with one the mitm proxy generates [0] [0]: https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/proxying/ssl-proxying/ https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/proxying/ssl-prox...
LtWorf 1y ago
With centralised trust, encryption is meaningless.
- xorcist 1y ago
  Strong players in the web space are also trying to centralize DNS resolvers, using similar arguments. Moar encryption, much secure.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
  Trust isn't that centralized. Thanks to Certificate Transparency, a CA cannot issue a certificate that will be accepted by Chrome or Firefox without the site owner being able to detect that.
jjav 1y ago
> Meanwhile, in the real world: More than one thing can be true at the same time. Yes, vastly increasing the traffic that is encrypted is a great thing for many reasons. Simultaneously, it is also true that if a public CA-issued (as opposed to unknown me self signing) certificate is effectively required, that sure provides a handy hammer to shut something down. History tells us that whenever such handy hammers get built, they inevitably get abused.

justsomehnguy 1y ago

Meanwhile, in the real world: - We now provide a completely free certs for a malicious web-sites - Degraded encryption value so much it's not even indicated anymore (remember the green bar for EV?) - Pavlov-trained everyone to dumb-click through 'this page is not secure' warnings - SNI exists and even without it anything not on CDN is blocked very easily

prmoustache 1y ago
What is stupid is not to provide free certs for malicious web sites, what was stupid is telling people for years that they would be safe and could trust a website only because there was a lock icon on the url bar.
lukeschlather 1y ago
The only one of those things that is the fault of ACME is the first one, and are you really suggesting between that and your second bullet point that we should charge money for encryption so that people value it more? Encryption is free so people do it more. Paying money doesn't actually make people trustworthy. (Though you can totally charge people to prove they aren't malicious, but if you want to do that, why tie it to encryption? Encrypt regardless.)
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  > Paying money doesn't actually make people trustworthy. This is fundamentally a naive understanding of both security and certificates. Paying money absolutely makes people trustworthy because it's prohibitive to do it at scale. You might have one paid malicious certificate but you can have thousands of free ones. The one malicious domain gets banned, the thousands are whack-a-mole forever. Further, certificates used to indicate identity in more than a "the domain you are connected to" sense. There was a big PR campaign to wreck EV certs but EV certs generally were extremely secure. And even Google, who most loudly complained about EV, has reintroduced the Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) to replace it and use for new things like BIMI.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    It didn't take a "big PR campaign". EV is crap. It was crap when it was created, it's still crap now. It was tolerated because the commercial CAs wanted a new shinier product and in exchange we got the BRs and from there we got here. Don't lean on EV, it's superficial not load bearing. I don't much care about BIMI. People keep trying to resuscitate that particular dead dog (email security), maybe one day they will succeed but I don't expect to be involved.
  - kelnos 1y ago
    EV certs didn't actually afford the guarantees people hoped and expected. I could simply spend a few hundred dollars to register "Stripe, LLC" or "Microsoft, Inc." in my local jurisdiction, and then get an EV cert with that name on it. Browser vendors removed the extra UI around EV certs not because certs in general are easier to get, but because the identity "guarantee" afforded to EV certs was fairly easy to spoof. EV certs still exist, and you can foolishly pay for one if you want. Free ACME-provided certs has nothing to do with this.
nozzlegear 1y ago
> Pavlov-trained everyone to dumb-click through 'this page is not secure' warnings Do we have any statistics for how many people are actually doing this? Such warnings are so rare in my experience that, by default, I don't trust a site that has no SSL/expired or invalid certs and won't click through if I see that warning.
kelnos 1y ago
> We now provide a completely free certs for a malicious web-sites Malicious websites never had a problem buying certs before. Sure, the bar is lower now, but I don't think it was a particularly meaningful bar before. Besides, the most common ways to get malicious websites shut down are to get their webhost to cut them off, or get a court order to seize their domain name. Getting their TLS cert revoked isn't common, and doesn't really do the job anyway. > Degraded encryption value so much it's not even indicated anymore (remember the green bar for EV?) No, we've degraded the identity verification afforded by EV and those former browser features. Remember that the promise of SSL/TLS was two things: 1) your traffic is private, 2) it verifies that the server you thought you were contacting is actually the one you reached. I think (2) was always going to be difficult: either you make it hard and expensive to acquire TLS certificates, and (2) has value, or you don't, and it doesn't. I think pervasive encryption is way more important than site owner identity validation. And I don't think the value of an EV cert was even all that high back when browsers called them out in their UI. There are lots of examples of people trivially managing to get an EV cert from somewhere, with their locally-registered "Stripe, LLC" or whatever in the "validated" company name field of their cert. > Pavlov-trained everyone to dumb-click through 'this page is not secure' warnings Not sure what that has to do with this. That was more of a problem back when we didn't have Let's Encrypt, so lots of people were using self-signed certs, or let their certs expire and didn't fix it, or whatever. These days I expect certificate warnings are fairly rare, and so users might actually start paying attention to them again. > SNI exists and even without it anything not on CDN is blocked very easily ESNI also exists, and while not being available everywhere, it'll get there. But this is a bizarre complaint, as it's entirely trivial to block traffic when there's no TLS at all.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Wowfunhappy 1y ago

> - We went from the vast majority of traffic being unencrypted, allowing any passive attacker (from nation state to script kiddie sitting in the coffee shop) to snoop and any active attacker to trivially tamper with it, to all but a vanishing minority of connections being strongly encrypted. I still don't understand why this is so terrible. Public wifi networks were certainly a real problem, but that's not where the majority of internet usage happens, and they could have been fixed on a different layer. If you're on a traditional home internet connection, who exactly can tamper with your traffic? Your ISP can, and that's not great, but it doesn't strike me as blaring siren levels of terrible, either. Even with HTTPS, the companies behind my OS and web browser can still see everything I do, so in exchange for all this work we've removed maybe 1 out of 3 parties from the equation. And, personally, I trust the OS and browser vendors less than I trust my ISP! Some progress is better than none, and it's still nice that my ISP can't tamper with my connection any more. Unfortunate, TLS also took away my ability to inspect my own traffic! This makes it more difficult for me to monitor what my OS and browser vendor are doing, and as I've said previously, I trust these parties comparatively less than my ISP. > - We went from TLS certificates being unaffordable to hobbyists to TLS certificates being not only free, but trivial to automatically obtain. Sure, but it's also trivial to just throw up a website on Github Pages, or forgo the website completely and use Instagram. TLS is "trivial" if you rely the infrastructure of a specific external party. Please help me understand what I'm missing because I find this really frustrating!

VoidWhisperer 1y ago
> Some progress is better than none, and it's still nice that my ISP can't snoop on me any more. Unfortunate, TLS also took away my ability to inspect my own traffic! This makes it more difficult for me to monitor what my OS and browser vendor are doing, and as I've said previously, i trust these parties comparatively less than my ISP. It might be more correct to say that Certificate Pinning made it so you can't inspect your own traffic - for sites with TLS but without certificate pinning, you can just as easily create your own root certificate and force the browser and OS to trust the cert by installing it at the OS level. This is (part of, atleast) how tools like Fiddler and Charles Proxy allow you to inspect HTTPS traffic, the other part being a mitm proxy that replaces the server's actual cert with one the mitm proxy generates [0] [0]: https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/proxying/ssl-proxying/ https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/proxying/ssl-prox...

LtWorf 1y ago

With centralised trust, encryption is meaningless.

xorcist 1y ago
Strong players in the web space are also trying to centralize DNS resolvers, using similar arguments. Moar encryption, much secure.
tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
Trust isn't that centralized. Thanks to Certificate Transparency, a CA cannot issue a certificate that will be accepted by Chrome or Firefox without the site owner being able to detect that.

jjav 1y ago

> Meanwhile, in the real world: More than one thing can be true at the same time. Yes, vastly increasing the traffic that is encrypted is a great thing for many reasons. Simultaneously, it is also true that if a public CA-issued (as opposed to unknown me self signing) certificate is effectively required, that sure provides a handy hammer to shut something down. History tells us that whenever such handy hammers get built, they inevitably get abused.