13 ms·
After NSA's XKeyscore, Wikipedia Switches to HTTPS
- EGreg 13y agoWell, considering that the vast majority of its users have already signed up, and that information is already stored, their accounts can already be researched. Same goes for most sites which implement a "new" security scheme.
- jlgreco 13y ago> Well, considering that the vast majority of its users have already signed up Do you have any data for that? I highly doubt it.
- EGreg 13y agoLet's see, the data is that all the users that have signed up before they changed their security, have signed up before they changed their security. Since they changed it very recently, but have been around for years, I think it's a safe bet that my statement is correct.
- na85 13y agoI highly doubt the number of users with accounts constitutes a majority of wikipedia users
- EGreg 13y agoFine, what I really meant to say was "accounts", not "users". In my framework, I only consider "users" those who signed up, so I usually refer to accounts as "users", but technically this may be incorrect.
- rhizome 13y agoI wouldn't be surprised if 99% of the people who have ever used WP never created an account.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoThere are 20 million accounts, 125 thousand active accounts [1]. The number of people who refer to Wikipedia is probably over a billion, since it's often the first hit in Google (speculation). Roughly 25% of edits are anonymous (no account), and anonymous edits are significantly longer than non-anonymous ones [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_edits https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_edits
- diminoten 13y agoCan they afford to? What was stopping them before?
- eksith 13y agoIt's not exactly a basement operation. I mean WikiMedia is basically one of the busiest destinations on the web running on donations alone, so even if the majority of sites aren't affected that much by switching to HTTPS, at the volumes they're serving, it must have a pretty significant impact.
- diminoten 13y agoYeah that's what I'm thinking as well, this isn't a switch-flip, I hope this doesn't impact their operating cost too much. :(
- eksith 13y agoThey may very well see a significant spike though. This is why people should donate as much as possible before the "drive banners" come up. It doesn't have to be a whole lot; if most of the people who use it give even a small sum, considering the volume of visitors, they could still keep up with operations costs pretty well.
- cpeterso 13y agoI posted a patch to change Firefox's Wikipedia search bar from HTTP to HTTPS, but Wikipedia developers said their infrastructure was not ready for load. Maybe they will be more receptive now. I'll ping them again. :) "We're still waiting on some core changes in MediaWiki to switch logged-in users to HTTPS. I'd prefer to have that happen first." https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=758857 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=758857 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45765 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45765
- mpyne 13y ago> What was stopping them before? That's the question we should all be asking. Mallory has always been out there. NSA is certainly a member of Mallory, but is not the only member. So while it's nice that NSA is bringing attention to the idea of securing your communications, it shouldn't have had to come to this. It's been recommend practice for years now to use TLS for everything unless there were good reasons not to, to the point that it's baked-in to SPDY.
- Hello71 13y ago> secure HTTPS sigh
- greenyoda 13y agoI noticed that if DuckDuckGo returns a link to a Wikipedia article, it always seems to be an https URL. With Google, Wikipedia links seems to vary between http and https.
- chebucto 13y agoDDG defaults to HTTPS links wherever possible; its like having HTTPS-everywhere in your search engine.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago+1 to DDG for this.
- teeja 13y agoNot yet for en.m.wikipedia.org.
- Skalman 13y agoI sent them a proposal to change that. :-)
- dmytrish 13y agoThat's one of important virtues of DDG for me, I think knowing this will help me switch.
- chakalakasp 13y agoIs TLS really secure from the NSA?
- hannibal5 13y agoAgainst mass surveillance, yes. But if you become person of interest, there is strong possibility that they can do man-in-the-middle attack very easily (with certificates that don't give any alarms). They probably have stuff in major network hubs that can divert traffic trough their servers. Remember how easily Nokia, Opera and Amazon are able to do MITM attack against phone users by running it trough SSL proxy (I think Nokia has stopped doing this). https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/man-in-the-midd_6.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/man-in-the-mi...
- nandhp 13y agoBut that's when using the Nokia, Opera, or Amazon browser. If you're worried about Nokia, Opera, and Amazon facilitating MITM attacks, they could also just program the browser with a secret NSA certificate authority.
- hannibal5 13y ago>they could also just program the browser with a secret NSA certificate authority. I strongly suspect that NSA don't have to do that kind of stuff that can be easily noticed. They just ask nicely from Symantec/Verisign to give them valid certificate. Or they already have common root certificates.
- bdamm 13y agoAnd if MITM attack isn't sufficient, they have the tools to simply penetrate your machine and/or the server. I agree with your main point.
- MisterWebz 13y agohttps://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere Switches to https automatically when visiting Wikipedia, even if you're not logged in.
- cma 13y agoSeems like the NSA could still easily fingerprint some users: 1) Find the first edit made by a user 2) Search for IP sockets with a spike in outbound traffic to Wikipedia at around the same time (editing a large section submits a large POST). 3) Follow the users' further edits, and do the same as above to keep narrowing the candidate IPs down.
- ISL 13y agoI don't think they're so worried about edits. Wikipedia is a go-to source for quick lookups of information. I work in a nuclear physics lab; if the NSA is watching, I'm sure that some of my searches have triggered flags. Doesn't help that the physics community is small, and everyone is only a few degrees of separation apart.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- MisterWebz 13y agoThe NSA could probably identify anyone on the internet given enough time and resources. I think the point of this is to make mass surveillance difficult, so they'll only target people flagged as suspicious instead of everyone.
- readme 13y agoIIRC, I read elsewhere that they can only store data for the last 24 hours. Simply, because so much data comes through the pipes. So, unless they already had decided to keep an eye on you, your traffic would probably have gone unnoticed. Switching to a VPN now or something would keep you relatively anonymous.
- mpyne 13y agoOn the other hand, switching to a VPN would make them flag your data (encrypted) and retain it longer (though you'd probably still be fine).
- jahabrewer 13y agoI'm not a security guy, but it seems to me that it would also be useful to mask the URL. It's my understanding that a snooper could still see that you accessed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1... , but not the content of the page. Maybe offer a search on the site that returns links that are generated just for you, so instead of going to the above url, you'd access something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/onetime/45sdf3sd8re2dfa7w7erasdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/onetime/45sdf3sd8re2dfa7w7eras... (and throw away the key after the access).
- 13throwaway 13y agoA snooper could only see you accessed en.wikipedia.org
- burke 13y agoAt a really rough approximation, this is how an SSL pageview works: 1. DNS query in plaintext for en.wikipedia.org. 2. Open a connection to the resultant IP (the fact that you connect to this IP is trace-able). 3. Do an SSL handshake. 4. HTTP protocol stuff, including transmission of PATH_INFO, happens on the encrypted channel. 5. Server responds on encrypted channel.
- jahabrewer 13y agoGotcha, thanks for the explanation.
- gsnedders 13y agoAlso worthwhile pointing out that if you have a local DNS cache (you almost certainly do), and if there are several hosts sharing a IP, given a cache hit, the adversary will only know the connection is to one of a set of hostnames (those you have previously requested and for whom the cache is still valid) or the IP itself.
- teddyh 13y agoNot with a modern browser with SNI. This transmits the host name in the initial unencrypted portion of the SSL connection.
- jasonkolb 13y agoThings like this are going to force a confrontation at some point. Either the existing programs for monitoring people are going to become progressively more useless as people switch to HTTPS for example, or the government will insist very forcefully to get access--getting private keys from certificate authorities, for example.
- mpyne 13y agoWell we effectively 'won' the last major confrontation (crypto code) so a confrontation is not bad per se. However this does mean that systems like PRISM and phone metadata will simply become more important as 'upstream wiretaps' go away, and the NSA will surely have other tricks up their sleeves as well. Of course, anything we can do to make their surveillance efforts require manual intervention (e.g. having to attack an ownCloud installation from within a rented system in the same datacenter) makes those efforts less of a threat to each of us than a completely automated tracking of anyone they wish.
- gsnedders 13y agoAnd more worrying than even that, with the top four browser vendors all US-based, would pressure be put on them to not remove the root certificates? That, IMO, is more worrying than government interference in CAs: the system is designed to work around government interference in CAs (by removing the CA root as trusted), but isn't so capable at dealing with government interference of trusted roots.
- tjohns 13y agoThis is why HTTPS certificate pinning exists. Having a standardized way of requesting a pin would be a very good thing right now. (See: HPKP and TACK)
- Zikes 13y agoDue to Firefox and Chromium both being open source, this won't be an issue. If the browser companies remove the ability to remove root certs, we can just fork and add it back.
- codex 13y agoThis is ridiculous. Wikipedia is headquartered in San Francisco. If the NSA wanted to snoop Wikipedia lookups it would force Wikipedia to install PRISM-like access devices to the site itself, secretly. Switching to HTTPS consumes more resources all around, increases latency, increases site operation costs, and emits more climate changing CO2, with no net change in the NSA's capabilities to snoop Wikipedia lookups.
- vidarh 13y agoThe symbol effect is still valuable.
- Strom 13y agoNSA isn't the only party interested in wikipedia habbits. Other adversaries in other countries also like to listen.
- travisp 13y agoIt's not ridiculous. First, it requires the NSA to actually do what you propose, as opposed to just reading broadly all traffic going through. That is a big difference because it gives the possibility of Wikipedia fighting back. Jimmy Wales has suggested that if he's ever given a FISA gag order, he might disobey it: https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/362596285469044737 https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/362596285469044737)
- codex 13y agoHe might disobey a personal gag order, but I can assure you that as long as PRISM exists, U.S. companies will comply if targeted. There are also plenty of other attack vectors for the NSA even with HTTPS; obtaining the private keys of the common certification authorities is perhaps the most straightforward.
- freehunter 13y agoWhy would HTTPS necessarily cause more CO2 emissions? Wikipedia might be headquartered in San Francisco, but their data centers are not. For example, their European data center is CO2-neutral. [1] [1] http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/evoswitch-hosts-the-wikimedia-foundation http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/evoswitch-hosts-the-...
- jonknee 13y agoWhy just for logged-in users?
- sehrope 13y agoThey should switch to a better cipher suite to enable PFS[1] (ex: ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256). Right now they're using RC4-SHA: $ echo | openssl s_client -debug -connect en.wikipedia.org:443 | grep "Cipher is" -A 4 depth=1 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, OU = www.digicert.com, CN = DigiCert High Assurance CA-3 verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate verify return:0 DONE New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is RC4-SHA Server public key is 2048 bit Secure Renegotiation IS supported Compression: NONE Expansion: NONE [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_forward_secrecy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_forward_secrecy
- semenko 13y agoThey clearly mention this goal in their blog post: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-projects/ http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-...
- kudu 13y agoWikimedia seems to make a habit out of "considering" things for a long time before actually enabling them. Enabling forward secrecy is relatively straightforward.
- Skalman 13y agoYes. However, if you do that, perhaps you're less motivated to find solutions to other, equally important problems with HTTPS. Enabling perfect forward secrecy is only useful if we also eliminate the threat of traffic analysis of HTTPS, which can be used to detect a user’s browsing activity, even when using HTTPS.
- mpyne 13y agoTraffic analysis is certainly an orthogonal problem to decryption of the ciphertext here. There's no reason to wait on one for the other.
- 13y ago
- znowi 13y agoBitcoin concept disrupts the banking industry and effectively deprecates it. I'd like to see a similar decentralized system in application to SSL certificates, where anyone can establish secure connection without paying fees to 3rd party CAs.
- ihsw 13y agoDon't be ridiculous. Bitcoin is little else than a reliable and decentralized transaction network, and a currency. Banks are connections between customers that have deficits and customers that have surpluses, ie: credit and lending. There are also investment structures that people use, ie: stocks and bonds. In addition to consumer banking and investment banking, there is also insurance functions. There are companies that meet individual needs (ie: companies that do only insurance) but many consumers still prefer to utilize "one-stop shop" banking institutions that accommodate a variety of needs.
- GigabyteCoin 13y ago*Will be switching to HTTPS... I just went to wikipedia and the implementation is not live yet.
- yuvipanda 13y agoyou can just go to https://en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org and it works. We just do not have automatic redirection yet.
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoYou could always do that..
- wlj 13y agoLink to actual announcement: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-projects/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia...
- adolph 13y agoHow helpful would this actually be? If some semi-omnipotent entity were to observe the https traffic, could deductions be made about the series of web pages visited/information sought by comparing the sizes of traffic to the known sizes of wikipedia pages?
- planetsherbet 13y agoCould Wikipedia serve pages with a random number of dummy bytes inserted (like within a comment) to prevent this?
- teeja 13y agoJust in time for the BREACH exploit. http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/08/gone-in-30-seconds-new-attack-plucks-secrets-from-https-protected-pages/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/08/gone-in-30-seconds-n... Time to get the TLS hangups sorted and upgrade to 1.2 ?!
- jingo 13y agoI've been using HTTPS Wikipedia for years. It's great to see them make it the default. But considering what Wikipedia is, users wanting increased privacy could just download a copy of the encyclopedia and do their searches offline. Wikimedia makes data dumps of their user-generated content (UGC) available to the public. (Don't you wish all mega-websites relying on UGC did that?) There was a time before the internet when we used volumes of paper bound encyclopedias. These were not written by laypeople and they were not free. Few people owned their own set of volumes of Brittanica's encyclopedia. They used someone else's copy, e.g., a library's. But imagine if Brittanica offered _free_ copies of their encyclopedia that could somehow fit in your pocket (as is possible now through digitization and Wikipedia). Would you continue to use a copy belonging to someone else everytime you had to look something up? Why wouldn't you obtain a copy for yourself? What if... Wikipedia's data dumps were small enough. Wikipedia content was, overall, static enough. Storage was cheap enough. Download speeds were fast enough. And you could get your very own copy of the encyclopedia. Compared to the speed, reliability and privacy of offline reading, grabbing specific articles piecemeal via HTTPS simply cannot compare. See OpenMoko's WikiReader as an example implementation. It's on Github.
- generj 13y agoThe only possible disadvantage is information about rapidly changing world events (for which Wikipedia isn't the best resource, but still). English Wikipedia dumps are only run on a monthly basis. Images are much more resource intensive, but if text only is sufficient then the average user can download the compressed Wikipedia dumps in less than 2 days. Please use torrents to reduce the load on Wikimedia's servers and to increase download speed: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#enwiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#enwiki I keep a backup on an external hard-drive, in case of apocalypse or censorship (same thing). Nobody can take away my list of Scrubs episodes.
- indrax 13y agohttp://kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page http://kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixmobile https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwi...
- teeja 13y agoConsidering how much I use WP, they're gonna need a terabyte just for me.
- samhamilton 13y agoWatch for a drop in China traffic, HTTPS Wikipedia is blocked but HTTP is not.