4 ms·

> It's terrible, because Man-In-The-Middle attacks are trivial and automatable. It's actually both terrible and the best security you can get. - Terrible beca

> It's terrible, because Man-In-The-Middle attacks are trivial and automatable. It's actually both terrible and the best security you can get. - Terrible because today's browsers participate in a pay-for-insecurity model, where any CA certificate can be used to compromise any website on the internet (except for the tiny number of hard-coded/"pinned" certs that some browsers ship for their company's websites). Certificate Transparency only makes the problem worse [1]. Browsers currently have no way to securely verify either self-signed OR CA-signed certificates. - It's the best security you can get because unlike certificates based on the aforementioned pay-for-insecurity "X.509 PKI" (public-key infrastructure), the security of a self-signed certificate depends on NO ONE except the issuer (i.e. _you_). Plus, they are 100% free. I like to refer to today's X.509 PKI as "the internet's oldest backdoor" (about two decades old now [2]), because browser vendors have been aware of this problem for quite some time now and haven so far chosen to either do nothing, or make the problem worse (like with Certificate Transparency [1]). Aaron Swartz wrote in 2011 that the solution to this problem is to use the blockchain [3]. I spoke with him about this at the time [4] and today am working on a project to bring that vision to life [5]. [1] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/trans/current/msg00233.html http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/trans/current/msg00233.... [2] http://lists.randombit.net/pipermail/cryptography/2014-April/006482.html http://lists.randombit.net/pipermail/cryptography/2014-April... [3] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko [4] http://okturtles.com/img/Aaron_Swartz_Email.jpg http://okturtles.com/img/Aaron_Swartz_Email.jpg [5] https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain

zmanian 12y ago
Ever mobile phone carrier makes themselves a root CA on devices they sell and routinely Man-In-The-Middle sites like Youtube.
MyDogHasFleas 12y ago
Aw come on, all you have to do is let your users choose an icon of their favorite animal or sport, save that as an account preference, and show it to them while they enter their password. We don't need better certificate verification!
- hollerith 12y ago
  Yahoo did something very much like that about 5 or 6 years ago: inviting me to upload an image file, then telling me to make sure the image is present every time I log in. I upload an image file; the next time I found myself at Yahoo's login prompt, the image file was there; the time after that, it was absent. It has not re-appeared since. Just offering a data point: I don't know enough to have an opinion about the technique.
  - itistoday2 12y ago
    I think he was making a joke. Those pictures do nothing to prevent TLS MITM attacks.
    - gburt 12y ago
      I thought about this for a second, and what it does do is take an "offline" phishing attack and make it an "online" phishing attack that presumably has logs and can be throttled.

zmanian 12y ago

Ever mobile phone carrier makes themselves a root CA on devices they sell and routinely Man-In-The-Middle sites like Youtube.

MyDogHasFleas 12y ago

Aw come on, all you have to do is let your users choose an icon of their favorite animal or sport, save that as an account preference, and show it to them while they enter their password. We don't need better certificate verification!

hollerith 12y ago
Yahoo did something very much like that about 5 or 6 years ago: inviting me to upload an image file, then telling me to make sure the image is present every time I log in. I upload an image file; the next time I found myself at Yahoo's login prompt, the image file was there; the time after that, it was absent. It has not re-appeared since. Just offering a data point: I don't know enough to have an opinion about the technique.
- itistoday2 12y ago
  I think he was making a joke. Those pictures do nothing to prevent TLS MITM attacks.
  - gburt 12y ago
    I thought about this for a second, and what it does do is take an "offline" phishing attack and make it an "online" phishing attack that presumably has logs and can be throttled.