4 ms·
This might be intended. Supporting SSL is better than not supporting it (well, except in situations where an OpenSSL bug could leak your server's memory, but th
by a3_nm 13y ago
This might be intended. Supporting SSL is better than not supporting it (well, except in situations where an OpenSSL bug could leak your server's memory, but that's a bit of a stretch <http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/#www.peereboom.us> http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/#www.peereboom.us> -- but put this aside), because it's always better to encrypt traffic even in a way vulnerable to passive attacks; and some people may reasonably opt-out of the SSL CA business because they do not like the way it is structured, doubt the security it offers, or feel that they do not need it.
(I use a free StartSSL signed certificate, but only because it's free and not very hard to get. If there were no free provider with widespread support, I would be very happy to use a self-signed cert and think of it as a protest against the stupidity of browsers which present SSL+self-signed as less secure than plain HTTP).
- nknighthb 13y agoIf someone has passive access to snoop, the odds they can perpetrate an active attack are so close to 100% as to make the distinction immaterial. Encryption without authentication accomplishes nothing. Worse, self-signed certificates train users to freely click through certificate warnings. People running servers with self-signed certificates are actively reducing what security we have available for the web. If we ever do get anything better than the existing CA structure, it won't do us any good if users have been trained to ignore browser security warnings anyway.
- devinj 13y agoCan you MITM public wifi? Real question, but I thought the answer was "no", which would make public wifi a compelling counter-example.
- antientropic 13y agoI guess you don't agree with Poul-Henning Kamp in his FOSDEM keynote this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk (around 15:00) His claim is that browsers treating websites with self-signed certificates as less secure than non-encrypted websites by displaying big fat warnings is just about the greatest gift we can give to organisations like the NSA. It's not true that there is no material distinction between an active attack and passive eavesdropping. For the NSA to do active MITM attacks on all self-signed https traffic (in a world where all unencrypted http is replaced with self-signed https) would take massively more resources than passively monitoring unencrypted traffic. Plus the odds of them getting caught would be very high (since some people are going to notice that the certificate that shows up on the client is not what the server sent).
- nknighthb 13y agoPHK says many things I disagree with. You can't make browsers simply treat self-signed certificates the same as plain HTTP. You still have to warn the user that their desire for a secure connection (conveyed by their request to retrieve an https URL) cannot be fulfilled, and do so in a way that assures all users will notice before they do something like, say, type in their password. There is very little self-signed HTTPS traffic out there. The NSA assuredly has the resources to MITM all of it. Yes, someone at some point would notice if it were all attacked, but the key thing is that, almost all of the time, nobody would, and you yourself have no assurance that your connection has not been MITM'd unless you have done some other out-of-band verification on that specific certificate. That is almost never done, especially by the general public. You might be willing to gamble your own security, but you should not gamble everyone's security.
- antientropic 13y agoThere is very little self-signed https traffic out there because browsers have chosen to treat it as somehow less secure than unencrypted http. (I do realise it's rather problematic to mess with the security expectations of https at this point, but you could imagine an http variant that allows encryption without authentication, without giving dire warnings to users.) If all http traffic instead used self-signed https, then the NSA assuredly would not have the resources to MITM all of it. So because of the reflexive "self-signed certificates are worse than no encryption!" dogma, we have an Internet where most traffic is unencrypted and therefore trivial for governments and criminals to intercept. Regarding certificate warnings: even if self-signed certificates were accepted, browsers could still put up a warning if the certificate changes between visits, similar to ssh's treatment of host keys (being relatively unsuspicious of unknown hosts, but putting up a big fat warning if the host key has changed).
- rodgerd 13y agoI'd trusts self-signed certs ahead of most CAs, frankly.
- cortesoft 13y agoThat doesn't make any sense.... even if you don't trust a CA at all, it is impossible for a self-signed cert to be MORE trustworthy, since it provides absolutely ZERO authentication. It could be created by anyone at all, including on the fly by a MITM.
- arg01 13y agoMaybe he is saying by removing trusted root certificates he will trade the possibility of receiving a fraudulent certificate the first time he uses a site for the possibility of not being warned if a certificate changes because the trusted roots are compromised. If he needs to worry about state actors there is an argument to be made for this trade-off, but really if he was worried about that he would be delivering certificates out of band and not visiting any unknown websites on the machine he needed that level of security on. (Maybe justifiable against mass surveillance where you're a general target rather than a specific one).
- cortesoft 13y agoYes, verifying certs out-of-band is most likely more secure than a CA. I was not counting that in the self-signed cert vs CA signed cert comparison, since that is not what most people mean when they talk about a self-signed cert.
- arg01 13y agoYou ignored my first point. You can trust the self signed certificate to be used by the same entity(A or C) after the first connection, admittedly you may have been MITM (by C) for that first time(and renewal times) and because of that you may be screwed. Alternatively if you are trusting other entities(B) to verify the certificate of A while B are not trustworthy then after that first communication (even if that first communication was legitimate) another entity (C) can pretend to be A and so long as B verifies C then you are in trouble. I am pointing out that they are different risks and I agree that in nearly all use cases it is better to use verified certificates than self-signed for general internet use, that doesn't mean that there isn't a reason to do otherwise though.
- lawl 13y agoI use(d) free StartSSL for my hobby projects too. So I wanted to revoke my certificates today, post heartbleed and stuff. They charge $25 to do the right thing and revoke your cert. So I will not use them again. Edit: Btw. That's per fucking subdomain, as you don't get wildcard certs for free. Going back to self signed I guess...
- amatix 13y agoI put the CVE id in my "reason" and it went through with no charge.
- lawl 13y agoGotta try that after i catched some sleep. Got no reply from them on twitter. I'd expect them to an annouce this officialy though.
- hrrsn 13y agoThey've been tweeting saying they aren't revoking them for free.
- pritambaral 13y agoI just tried it. They mailed me asking for credit card / paypal details. Are you sure they didn't just bill a payment method you previously added?