5 ms·

I never thought about it from that angle. You are right, it makes no sense for browser vendors to display a big fat warning page because someone signed a certif

I never thought about it from that angle. You are right, it makes no sense for browser vendors to display a big fat warning page because someone signed a certificate himself while they never let you know that 90% of the websites you use are transferred in plain-text over a wholly untrusted network.

zobzu 14y ago
Not exactly. The fat warning is there so that you don't get a false sense of security by seeing a little lock. But then again, we're now moving to a "if its self signed, you can't access the site, you can't bypass the check even". I wonder how much verisign pays some of us.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Verisign did not pay Mozilla to make it harder to click through the broken certificate warning.
  - zobzu 14y ago
    Do you mean that you can't bypass the certificate warning anymore in Firefox? (or will not in the near future) If that is so, what is your reasoning behind it?
- danielweber 14y ago
  we're now moving to a "if its self signed, you can't access the site, you can't bypass the check even". wait wait wait what? I am currently in a space where we have to deal with self-signed certificates all the time. I fully accept that people like me will have to deal with more hassles from this so that people don't get their paypal accounts hijacked as easily. But I've yet to find out that I simply cannot connect to a site with a self-signed certificate.
  - zobzu 14y ago
    Have a look at http://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/07/19/hope9talk.html http://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/07/19/hope9talk.html for a glimpse of the future:)
tptacek 14y ago
Again: that big fat red warning is the only thing that happens when an attacker hijacks the DNS for Citibank.com at your ISP, redirects traffic to herself, and intercepts all the TLS online banking warnings. Without the big red warning, you might as well not have certificates at all, because nobody would ever notice MITM attacks on TLS. None of the cryptography in TLS works unless users can be assured that every single HTTPS request will generate a big red warning box if the certs don't check out. I absolutely understand how confounding the self-signed certificate warning seems when viewed solely in the context of normal sites operating under normal conditions. But that warning box doesn't mean "this site could be a whole lot safer if it was just configured better!" It means what it says: "you are probably under active attack". Yes, there's a Bayesian problem here: most of the time, you are not actually under attack, and the site operator is in fact just using a poor configuration. But the browser can't know that; it has to assume you're under attack, because there's no other signal available to it to determine otherwise.
- nowarninglabel 14y ago
  Yeah, except, since as you say, "most of the time, you are not actually under attack", that's exactly what end-users think, and learn to ignore the warning regardless. So, while you may save some tech-savvy users, all your normal users will just click through. I've seen this happen first hand on multiple college campuses with dozens of users where I've been the IT Support/Network Admin. Too many false positives and you end up with security theatre instead of actual protection.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Which is why the warnings are getting steadily more annoying. What's the alternative? There is no difference on the wire between a self-signed certificate for a site that simply doesn't care about certificates, and a self-signed certificate that is the sole marker of an attacker having hijacked the TLS connection of a site that very much does care about its security. A MITM attack looks identical on the wire to a self-signed cert.
    - 14y ago

zobzu 14y ago

Not exactly. The fat warning is there so that you don't get a false sense of security by seeing a little lock. But then again, we're now moving to a "if its self signed, you can't access the site, you can't bypass the check even". I wonder how much verisign pays some of us.

tptacek 14y ago
Verisign did not pay Mozilla to make it harder to click through the broken certificate warning.
- zobzu 14y ago
  Do you mean that you can't bypass the certificate warning anymore in Firefox? (or will not in the near future) If that is so, what is your reasoning behind it?
danielweber 14y ago
we're now moving to a "if its self signed, you can't access the site, you can't bypass the check even". wait wait wait what? I am currently in a space where we have to deal with self-signed certificates all the time. I fully accept that people like me will have to deal with more hassles from this so that people don't get their paypal accounts hijacked as easily. But I've yet to find out that I simply cannot connect to a site with a self-signed certificate.
- zobzu 14y ago
  Have a look at http://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/07/19/hope9talk.html http://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/07/19/hope9talk.html for a glimpse of the future:)

tptacek 14y ago

Again: that big fat red warning is the only thing that happens when an attacker hijacks the DNS for Citibank.com at your ISP, redirects traffic to herself, and intercepts all the TLS online banking warnings. Without the big red warning, you might as well not have certificates at all, because nobody would ever notice MITM attacks on TLS. None of the cryptography in TLS works unless users can be assured that every single HTTPS request will generate a big red warning box if the certs don't check out. I absolutely understand how confounding the self-signed certificate warning seems when viewed solely in the context of normal sites operating under normal conditions. But that warning box doesn't mean "this site could be a whole lot safer if it was just configured better!" It means what it says: "you are probably under active attack". Yes, there's a Bayesian problem here: most of the time, you are not actually under attack, and the site operator is in fact just using a poor configuration. But the browser can't know that; it has to assume you're under attack, because there's no other signal available to it to determine otherwise.

nowarninglabel 14y ago
Yeah, except, since as you say, "most of the time, you are not actually under attack", that's exactly what end-users think, and learn to ignore the warning regardless. So, while you may save some tech-savvy users, all your normal users will just click through. I've seen this happen first hand on multiple college campuses with dozens of users where I've been the IT Support/Network Admin. Too many false positives and you end up with security theatre instead of actual protection.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Which is why the warnings are getting steadily more annoying. What's the alternative? There is no difference on the wire between a self-signed certificate for a site that simply doesn't care about certificates, and a self-signed certificate that is the sole marker of an attacker having hijacked the TLS connection of a site that very much does care about its security. A MITM attack looks identical on the wire to a self-signed cert.
  - 14y ago